Why you keep going back to what you hate.

Greetings,

It’s late. The house is quiet. Your wife is asleep. The kids are asleep.

And something in you — you already know what it is — reaches for the phone.

What happens next you’ve lived before. The tab closes. The shame arrives. You tell God you’re sorry and you mean it, just like you did the last time. And the time before that. And you lie there wondering — why can I not stop wanting this? Why do I always end up back here?

I want to tell you something that may be the most important thing you hear about this struggle.

It’s not because you’re broken beyond repair. It’s because you were made for a pleasure that nothing in this world can actually deliver.

Stay with me.

Picture a man standing at the edge of a mountain. He has seen more of God than almost any man who ever lived. He watched the Red Sea part. He saw the plagues. He spoke with God face to face. He has miracles in his history that most men could only dream of. And from that mountain, with all of that behind him, he makes one request.

Show me your glory.

That’s Moses. Exodus 33:18.

Fast forward a thousand years. A king. He has wealth, power, armies, and every earthly pleasure available to him. And he sits down and writes this — one thing have I desired, that will I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon his beauty.

That’s David. Psalm 27.

Two men. A thousand years apart. The same hunger.

Pornography is not evidence that your desires are too strong. It is evidence that your desires are aimed at the wrong thing.

David again in Psalm 63 — my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. That is not poetic language. That is a man in physical withdrawal from the presence of God. Every man who has struggled with pornography knows what a desperate physical longing feels like. The hunger is the same. The address is different.

We were made for pleasure. Psalm 16:11 says it plainly — in your presence there is fullness of joy, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Not a little satisfaction. Not occasional comfort. Fullness of joy. Pleasures forevermore. That is the original pleasure. The one we were made for.

The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.

The glory Moses asked to see. The beauty David longed to behold. It has a face — the face of Jesus Christ. And it is available to you right now. Which is exactly why the enemy works so hard to keep you from seeing it.

Satan is not primarily interested in making your life miserable. He is interested in making Christ look small. Every time you open that tab, he has won a debate — not just about your purity, but about the glory of Christ. The battle for your purity is a battle over the reputation of Christ. Is he more glorious? More satisfying? More inexhaustible than what the world offers?

Pornography promises novelty. But novelty requires more and more and delivers less and less.

Christ never bottoms out.

What would change in your fight if you stopped asking how to stop — and started asking what you were made to behold?