I will look with favor on the faithful in the land, that they may dwell with me; he who walks in the way that is blameless shall minister to me. Psalm 101:6

Rev. 2:7 – He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.’

Rev. 2:17 – To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.’

Rev. 3:5-6 – The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. 6 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’

Rev. 3:12 – The one who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God. Never shall he go out of it, and I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name.

We hear stories in the news of mass baptisms and people coming to Christ. This is fantastic news. Then we must asked, will they be equipped? Will they be told that they must be in God’s word every day for the rest of their life? Taught how powerful prayer is, and challenged to make prayer a top priority? Hear that they must not isolate themselves as 80% of modern Christians are doing today, and that they must live connected to a tribe of committed believers on an ongoing basis for support, accountability and prayer? Be encouraged and challenged to participate in prayer meetings consistently? Receive effective help for their struggles with sin, especially, sexual sin? With 70% of Christian men and 40% of Christian women viewing porn and masturbating while half of Christians seeing no problem with promiscuity, the chances that many new converts are struggling with sexual sin is high. Will they receive guidance, support, and effective answers in this area? Will they be taught about spiritual warfare, the intense battles they will face, and how to overcome? We are commanded to make disciples, not mere converts. During a time when many are falling away, it’s critical that we ask these questions.

“Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” James 1:2-4

* 75% percent of Christian men and 40% of Christian women are viewing pornography. From a Barna 2024 survey; Porn Use Among Christians Reaches All Time High

* 2022: A pastor of a church of 1,000 in Arizona reported that 80% of the men who attended their men’s retreat confessed to a current struggle with pornography.

* 2023: When a youth group of teenage girls were asked to raise their hands if they struggled with porn, every hand went up.

* After the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020, Pornhub, the largest porn site in the world, reported that their worldwide traffic increased by 25%.

* A counseling pastor of a Colorado church of 5,000 reported that every marriage that came to him for help had pornography involved.

Shannon shared that from her perspective pastors aren’t trained to help people in these areas and are making the situation worse. She also shared a story of when she was at church event and the women were broken up to share at tables. After Shannon shared her struggles with sexual sin in her marriage, every woman around the table shared they had the same issues with their husband.

This should be another warning of how prevalent sexual sin has become in the church and the urgent need to talk openly about these issues from the pulpit.

“By speaking up about Saeed’s (her ex-husband’s) abuse I was damaging the cause of Christ giving the church a bad reputation to the world… I was judged to be a liar, an adulteress, and a Jezebel, who was trying to take the lead in the family by drawing boundaries regarding the abuse. Many people were upset because they hadn’t gotten the happy ending they had hoped for. Becoming an outcast of the church was devastating. I was left bare and bleeding by the side of the road, untouchable by religious leaders. I was advised by several prominent Christian leaders to backtrack my statements and cover up the abuse or I would no longer be useful for ministry. Covering it up meant moving forward with a book deal and a movie deal, continuing to receive invitations to speak and receiving the praise of the Christian community. Not covering it up meant losing everything.”

In this broadcast Mike and Naghmeh discuss the Great Coverup of sexual sin and abuse in the church.

* The average settlement in recent sexual abuse cases against the Catholic Church is around $300,000 – $400,000. To date, Catholic dioceses in the U.S. have paid over $3 billion in compensation to sexual abuse victims.

* The Bible Belt is the largest consumer of pornography

* Youth pastor sentenced to 45 years for exploiting children

* “Let’s ignore all of the cheating on spouses that goes on that explicitly tells you not to in the Bible.”

* May 27, 2022 — The Southern Baptist Convention released a long-secret list tracking sex abuse allegations against hundreds of pastors and others. Southern Baptist Convention abuse list includes dozens of… Greenville Online

The outside world sees that we’re proclaiming Christ while we’re immersed in sexual sin. Are we ready to face the porn epidemic in the church? Are will we continue to play ostrich in 2024?

Rudy, a former pastor of 5 churches, spent 4 years in prison due to sexual sin prior to God’s calling to him to his current position. In this broadcast Rudy calls in from a prison in Alaska to share his story.

With legalized prostitution, Germany is also sometimes referred to as the bordello of Europe. Germany has an estimated 400,000 prostitutes that are visited by 1.2 million men a day. There are more than 3000 brothels across the country, 500 in Berlin alone.

Jennifer talks of the need to cut off the demand for prostitution, pornography, and sex trafficking by getting to the root problem – those who purchase and use them. She shares how some prostitutes are nervous about going to church for fear of meeting their customers, and the need for the church to address these issues boldly.

Jennifer Fesefeldt, originally from California, has been living in Stuttgart Germany the last 15 years. She works for Kainos E.V., a Christian non-profit whose goal is to bring freedom and new life to victims of prostitution, sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. Jennifer is the Program Lead supporting each ministry area in prevention, Intervention and the restorative program New Beginnings. In this first of two shows, Jennifer calls in from Germany to discuss the trauma that prostitutes go through and Kainos’ ministry to them.

Episode Transcript

SPONSOR:

This program is sponsored by Blazing Grace Ministries.

ANNOUNCER:

This radio program is PG13. Parents strongly cautioned – some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Jesus’s mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the broken hearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound. For those who want more than status quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung.

MIKE GENUNG, HOST, BLAZING GRACE RADIO:

Hey, Mike Genung here. And welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. Coming to you from Studio 2, with Ramon keeping everything together here in Phoenix, AZ, where we’re having a record-setting run of days that… 115 degrees or more, and I think it hit 118 in Phoenix recently. So, wow! You really get used to the heat going through that. [LAUGHS]

So before I get going here, I have an announcement: September 16th, I’m holding a From Porn to Grace conference in Cibolo Valley Baptist Church in Cibolo, TX. This is near San Antonio, so it’s just a little bit north. And I’m already hearing from people they’re going to be coming in from other states to come to this conference. And so, if you’re in Texas or if you just want to come and you’re out in another state, then hey, I’d love to meet you.

And then the very next morning, Sunday, September 17th, I’ll be giving their Sunday morning message at that church, at Cibolo Valley Baptist. And you can see the event schedule on the home page at blazinggrace.org for more.

And then… I’m scheduled to be in Finland and the UK towards the end of October and early November – maybe the first two weeks of November, even – speaking in churches in Finland. We have a show… trade show in England around Manchester, I believe, and… but also if you’re in the UK, in Great Britain, I would love to come speak at your church.

One thing I saw the last time we were there, back in June and May, is I just kept seeing and hearing repeatedly in the United Kingdom that, “our churches will not touch this topic.” And I mean… but we see this all over the place in the US, as well as the UK, I mean… One guy who was 70 years old told him – told me he had never heard a message from the pulpit on sex in his life, and this guy is an elder of a church. Another guy in his 70s told me he had heard a message on sex ONCE, and that was 30 years ago.

Both these guys I’m referring to are in Great Britain, and it just really staggers my mind how you can go there. I mean… meaning not touching that topic, when sex is all over the Bible. Beginning from, you know, when Adam knew Eve, all the way through Jacob’s family, which was a disaster, and… Reuben had sex with Jacob’s concubine, and then Judah had sex with one of his son’s daughters. And rape, and prostitution… and these things are all through the Bible. And how can you, how can you not talk about sex? It’s just like there’s just no justification for it. And then when so many people are in bondage to this stuff, it tears me up. [SCOFFS]

And so I’ve been spending more time praying, because I realize, “God, I can’t open this door, these doors in the churches. You have to… you have to break these strongholds at the top,” where Church leadership doesn’t want to touch this, for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter if you’re a verse-by-verse teacher and you know, you don’t… you’re not touching sex for another three years because it’s not in your schedule. I mean, these issues are TODAY, here, right in our face, and the Church is corrupt with this stuff, so we cannot run away from it.

So these days, the Sound of Freedom, the movie on sex trafficking, is the hot topic in Christian circles right now. It’s all over social media. People are talking about the movie, how it touched their heart. And I’ve read… and Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in The Passion back in 2003, I think it was, is the lead character and he’s a fantastic actor.

I have not seen the movie, but I’m just sharing with you what I’ve seen that a lot of people are saying, “OK, we’ve seen this movie, it got to us. Our children are not for sale.” That’s all… that’s all over the place right now. Now what do we do?

So that’s what I’m going to talk about this show, is, “OK, you’ve watched this movie, now what do we do?” And we have to begin with the Church, because the Church is funding and involved with sex trafficking itself. And the problem is, right now people are asking, “what do we do about sex trafficking outside of the Church, people that are doing these things outside of the Church?” But you have to start with the Church that is supposed to be the salt that preserves the nation and the country. And when you have a Church that is corrupted with pornography and other types of sexual sin, all this is connected together.

So I’m going to read from – read for you several headlines of news articles. These are all recent. Just to give you an example:

Petersburg man, part of a church and school, faces federal child pornography charges. Pornography, for many, takes you – and takes some people – that far into a dark place on the Internet, into child pornography. And child pornography is pure sex trafficking. So once you start with porn, you don’t know where that’s going to take you. And so when when we ignore porn in the church, when we ignore sexual issues in the church, we’re actually facilitating sex trafficking.

Next article, Fresno County youth pastor sentenced to prison for having a relationship with a 16 year old church member.

Next, youth pastor arrested for filming a woman in the shower and hit with new charges for spying on a bridesmaids changing room. It’s just a couple weeks ago.

And another, a woman who was sexually abused as a child by a Texas pastor by a Texas pastor sues him and his ex-wife.

Then at the same time, a couple weeks ago, Texas pastor stuns community with confessing the BDSM and bestiality child porn downloaded on his church computer.

So child porn is always a result of sex trafficking. Somebody kidnapping or taking kids against their will to do these horrible acts.

And then a child porn suspect was a pastor of a Geneva area, Illinois, church.

So when you ignore pornography in the church, when you ignore the fact that 70 to 80% of your men are viewing pornography – along with a third of your women – you’re really saying, “We don’t care. We don’t want to deal with this in our church. We don’t have a problem with sex trafficking.” And oh yes, we do. We are funding the porn industry. We are facilitating it. And by our denial of the issue, we’re actually approving it.

And when I thought about the movie and what I see people all of a sudden saying on social media and elsewhere that I thought, “Man, we’re just way too engaged with entertainment. We’re way too entranced with movies,” because this stuff been going on for 20 years! This is not new! So why is it we’ve been – and these articles I just read you, these things have these are coming out every single week, often every single day. So porn and sex trafficking in the Church, sex trafficking in the church are not new. It’s exploding and gaining more and more momentum.

So the movie’s great! That’s fine. But where have we been the last 20 years, When we’ve allowed this corruption of sexual sin to get a hold of so many people and destroy so many lives? We don’t need to wait for a movie, we just need to wake up to what is destroying everything in the Church.

Porn is a sex trafficking product. We’ve had… and I’ve talked to ex-porn actresses, and they talk about how they get manipulated and coerced into doing acts that they were not told they were going to do by the director or the producer right before they headed into a scene. And the thing that we all have to realize is, “How can a church have any moral authority talking about sex trafficking, when when we’re not dealing with this problem in our own midst?” And we’re actually feeding the problem.

And the Christian Post, just this week I saw an article “Nick – I don’t know, I’m going to mess his name up – Vujicic – this is the headline – Challenges the Delusional American Church to Repent.” And he says, “Demons are laughing in your face.” This is the guy who wrote “Life without Limbs”. He has no arms, no legs, came from Australia, I believe. And he’s spoken all over the world, to crowds as big as 800,000. 40 years old, four kids. And I’m going to read from his interview on The Christian Post:

He says, “We have 100,000 churches and half a trillion dollars in debt for buildings that are half empty. I think most churches are delusional. I don’t pray for revival, I pray for repentance. I don’t think America deserves a single more blessing from God. Not one. We need to repent. And not only do we need to turn away from these things, we also need to equip and encourage the church to go towards this, to move towards repentance. How do you stay out of your porno – your addiction to porn?”

I love it that he says… that finally somebody out there with a big platform is bringing this up!

He stressed the importance of pastors tackling sensitive topics like porn addiction in the church and sex trafficking from the pulpit. “One out of three girls in America have been sexually abused. One out of five boys have been sexually abused,” – and I’m in that number – “Think about that. It’s unbelievable. Kids are dying at parties, getting high, getting drunk like never before.”

So, my friends, have you ever had how or how often, if ever, have you had these topics brought up from the pulpit? It is extremely rare. And why is that? What are we so afraid of?

And Vujicic continues, he says, “We got to grow a strong spine and tell them the truth.” And he continues, “I think the American Church isn’t healing saved people.” Amen, brother, because if you’re too afraid to talk about these issues, you can’t. There’s no way you can help them. And, “when you’re healed, now you’re complete and strength comes out of the overflow to then go help someone else in need.”

I think it’s important. I think we need to go back to the basics. And do you remember Peter’s first sermon in the book of Acts? There – he didn’t say a single word about the love of God or grace. Everything was geared towards repentance. And he said, I think it was twice, “You crucified Christ.” There is no, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

Jesus’s first words recorded in one of the gospels was, “Repent”. John the Baptist’s first words recorded – in I think one of the Gospels at least – was, “Repent while turning from sin.” If you don’t have that as a part of what we’re telling people about salvation, we’re missing the boat.

And then he writes, “When is the last time you heard an equipping sermon on how to break free from porn addiction, heal from sexual abuse, or the occult so many are playing with?”

And I have to – I made a mess up there. I read that from my notes. I said that, not him. But he’s, he’s… he’s singing my song there. He’s saying, “Hey, delusional Church, you think the sex trafficking problem is outside of the Church? No, it is big time inside of the Church.”

I’m going to read 1st Corinthians 5, the chapter:

“It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and sexual immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, namely, that someone has his father’s wife. (So dad’s second wife, I suppose, or something like that.) You have become arrogant, and have not mourned instead, so that the one who has done this deed will be removed from your midst.

For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present. In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to turn such a person over to Satan for the destruction of his body, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.”

Man, if that doesn’t cause fear and trembling, tell me what does! And Paul is challenging, confronting, the Corinthian Church over the sexual sin of one man and what it – what do you think he would say to, as Nick Vujicic called it, “a delusional Church” that doesn’t think it has any problems in those issues?

And then in 1 Corinthians 5, Paul continues:

“Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Therefore let’s celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity of truth.”

And then he says:

“I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with the sexually immoral people. I did not at all mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the greedy and swindlers, or with adulterers. for then you would have to leave the world. But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is a sexually immoral person, or a greedy person, or an idolater, or is verbally abusive, or habitually drunk, or a swindler – not even to eat with such a person.”

And my whole thrust is always for restoration, so… in the beginning of this chapter, Paul turned this guy over who had been having sex with his dad’s wife over to Satan! That’s way out of my league, and I’m not touching that one. I’ll let other people go there if they want to. But all this should point to… with power and authority, how incredibly critical it is that we talk about sexual issues and some of these other issues in the Church, open full throttle, without holding back. Because there’s a lot at stake here.

I mean, we’re talking about people’s eternity, where they’re going to head up eternity. And as I know from working with the sexually broken, if you let this go long enough, eventually your heart will turn into a rock, into a stone. And then at one point it’s going to start becoming very dangerous where your heart gets so rock-hard that you start drifting away from God at an accelerated rate. And then anything can happen, meaning that you could be one of those who drifts so far away, you fall away. And that is so dangerous.

That’s what’s so grieving about this whole ignoring talking about sex thing, and porn thing in church. It is so dangerous to people. It destroys their faith, it destroys their life, It destroys their families and their marriages. It shreds the wife apart. It tears her self esteem apart, and they have their own… the wives have their own intense battle with spiritual warfare and fear and torn up self esteem and all that comes along with that.

So what do we need to do? We need industrial strength, no holds barred, equipping messages on sexual issues in the Church, Sunday morning, to all age groups. And when I say all, I mean from youth all the way to age 80. Because people don’t usually get hooked when they’re 75 years old. They get hooked when they’re 8, 9, 10.

Most first exposures to pornography happen at home. So that whole, “safe for the whole family” thing, that’s a delusion, too. The Enemy knows how to get into your home, and he knows how to place pornography, whether on the Internet, or in a videotape or whatever, in the right spot for your kid to stumble onto it.

Just recently I interviewed a woman who said she got her first exposure to porn when she was five years old – at her parents house – when a videotape was mixed in with their Disney collection of movies. So, mom and dad, you are delusional if you think your kids cannot stumble on pornography at home. I don’t care what you do. You have to be extremely careful.

So you have to have your guard up. And we have to start talking to kids as early as age 8. We have to give them the sex talk, and sometimes even earlier! Because kids are getting phones, smartphones, that kind of stuff as early as age 3 nowadays. And you… it’s not uncommon to walk into a store and some moms got her kid, toddler, and they got an iPad in front of them and they’re, you know, they’re tapping away on it. I think a lot of parents are – to use Nick Vujicic’s word – “delusional”, too. Thinking that “Ah, my kid’s not going to get hooked,” and you’re wrong if that’s what you think.

We have to get… reach our youth. We have to tell them what pornography is in an age appropriate way. And when they hit the teens, they really need industrial strength message. They need to be broken up into small groups, safe groups. We need to show them what safe sharing is about, which is focusing on listening, and let them share. “Hey, where are you with lust today?”

Break them up into groups of two or three or four boys with boys, girls with girls. You don’t do – mix up the genders, and you make it safe to them and to share. And that’s where healing begins to come. And then you have them all pray for each other. And that’s how this works.

I had a woman on our radio station several months ago say she went to a youth group, and split the girls up from the boys, and asked the girls how many – these are teen girls – were struggling with porn. And she said every single hand went up. Every single hand. I want to burn that into your brain that the chances are really high.

And in your church and in your youth group, 95 to 100% of your youth are somewhere along the line engaged with pornography or sexting or something like this. And some of them are online flirting with somebody who they don’t know who they’re talking to. And you know, it could be somebody from the law, or it could be somebody who’s a sex trafficker. You don’t know this. So we have to start warning people. We have to give them the answers on how to overcome this stuff.

So if you go to blazinggrace.org – our website – we have tons of material on there that’ll give you plenty of information that you can give to your youth and your adults Sunday morning. And I’m available to come speak at your church, or to lead one of our “From Porn to Grace” conferences. So information on that is available on blazinggrace.org.

But I really want to… confront this head on. You know, we cannot sit here and watch our movies and say, “Mmm, that’s really nice. What should I do?” Because what’s going to happen is eventually the Sound of Freedom… all the chatter is going to fade out – probably in another month, maybe two months – and then everybody’s going to go on to the next thing and nothing will change. And the porn epidemic and the epidemic of sexual sin in the Church will continue to blow up. And that’s what really concerns me about this whole movie thing, is people are so fickle when it comes to entertainment and social media. We have fragmented attention spans that lasts about 20 seconds, and then we’re on to the next thing. We need to – I need to really bore on in this with all of you, that we cannot sit there and let this thing go.

Go to your pastor, tell them, “hey, we need to do something.” You can send them the link to our website. We have plenty statistics on there, and surveys, and if you’re struggling go to our website at blazinggrace.org.

We have support groups, some don’t cost a penny that you can get in right now, this – I’m talking about for men and for wives. Simple support groups where you share and then you pray for each other by zoom call.

And then we have our eight week course for men and our ten week course for wives. And these are far more structured. And you’re paired off with another man or woman and you’re working assignments every week and make… reaching out to your prayer and support partner every week. So if you’re struggling, don’t just sit there and lay back in the weeds and expect this thing to go away on its own. It ain’t going to happen.

So I started talking about the Sound of Freedom. Let’s start focusing on bringing the Sound of Freedom into the Church and equipping and ministering God’s – to God’s people on how to break free from the sexual sin that so many of them are in bondage to. So thank you for joining us, and we’ll talk to you next time.

ANNOUNCER:

Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung’s books, groups, counseling or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org or call our office in Chandler, AZ at (719) 888-5144.

Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org, or call the office at (719) 888-5144.

SPONSOR:

This program was sponsored by Blazing Grace Ministries.

This isn’t far from our church of today that may look good on the outside yet ignores the sexual sin it’s corrupt with.

Episode Transcript

SPONSOR:

This program is sponsored by Blazing Grace Ministries.

ANNOUNCER:

This radio program is PG13. Parents strongly cautioned – some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Jesus’s mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the broken-hearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound. For those who want more than status quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung.

MIKE GENUNG, HOST, BLAZING GRACE RADIO:

Hey, Mike Genung here. Welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. Thank you for joining us.

This is our second week talking to Naghmeh Panahi. She made national news when she publicly advocated for the release of her then-husband, Saeed Abedini, who was in prison Iran for his Christian faith. And through Saeed’s imprisonment, Naghmeh was able to bring worldwide attention to the plight of persecuted Christians. And she was able to proclaim the Gospel to millions across the globe by speaking at human rights groups, major news outlets, the United Nations at Geneva, European Parliament Congress, and she had personal meetings with both Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. When it came to light in 2015 that Naghmeh had been abused throughout her marriage by her husband, the Christian community suddenly turned on her.

And so we’re picking up this conversation from last week. And Naghmeh, welcome back to the program.

NAGHMEH ABEDINI PANAHI, GUEST:

Thank you.

MIKE:

So let’s pick your story up from where you left off.

NAGHMEH:

Yeah, so I… through my advocacy for my husband, God was setting me free. He was building my confidence. And Saeed had gotten a phone, from inside of the prison… and, about a year before he got out, and he was calling me names, I didn’t know at that time why. Later I realized he’d seen my… that I was not the girl that I… that he had, I guess, was able to control. I was becoming more confident. I was becoming more outspoken. And he didn’t like that. And so, he was calling me all sorts of names like Jezebel like, “You’re not submitting to me fully anymore, you’re a Jezebel who wants to have pull over men,” and so… and I was very… and he would say that, because, you know how Israel, the Israelites disobeyed God, that was spiritual adultery, which was worse than human sexual adultery. He would say, “you are committing – because you’re not fully submitting to me – you’re committing spiritual adultery.” So he would call me a whore and just all sorts of names. And I couldn’t understand it why he was attacking me so much when I was trying so hard to get him out. So finally I broke down. I had a meltdown.

I told… I was invited to get a mega church in North Carolina whose pastor was Pastor… Doctor David Chadwick, and after the Sunday service, and after we had a prayer meeting for the person in the church, after that I… we were out in a restaurant and I finally told this pastor and his wife everything, including Saeed’s messages from prison. And this pastor looked at me and he said, “Naghmeh, you know that I’m not just a pastor. I have a doctorate degree in psychology,” and I was shocked that God would have me confess all of this to a pastor who was an expert in this. Just God’s perfect timing and provision. And so he said, from what I understand, he said, “I can’t wrap my mind around it because Saeed is my hero.” But he said, “you are an abused wife,”

And… the pastor was so confused. He just, he’s like, “I got radio tomorrow. I got stuff tomorrow. I’m just going to drop you off at your hotel – we’re going to drop you off at your hotel.” And, you know, “I have an early radio program,” and I had an early flight. So they dropped me off and I Googled abuse, and everything that Saeed had done with the isolation, with… even the silent treatment, with everything, the financial, the emotional, the physical, all of it. It was like someone had looked into my marriage and had written a book. So I was shocked that all the symptoms in my marriage, it was not just a hard marriage. It was actually… abuse. And that’s when I realized, like, “This is not something… that this is like cancer, this can’t be dressed with like Tylenol, this, this needs chemo. This is, like, serious stuff.” And that’s when I stopped all advocacy.

I actually wrote a letter to a group of supporters about what was going on, and it got leaked to media. And by the time I actually landed in Boise, all the media wanted to talk to me because it was leaked that I had written to supporters that Saeed was an abusive husband, and including porn addiction, all of that. So yeah, it became very… a frenzy, media frenzy, and the Christian world went after me. They said I had done it for the fame and the money, which is interesting because when I advocated for Saeed, I had no idea it was going to become such a big story. And, of course, my one of my first phone calls was with Franklin Graham, who… he actually recently confirmed it in a Washington Post report that he, as soon as I picked up the phone, he called, he said, “Are you cheating on Saeed?” Because that’s the only thing he could think of of why I was throwing Saeed under the bus. Although I didn’t ever want it, want this information about Saeed to come out publicly.

So, I just got attacked by everyone including big names, like Franklin Graham, calling me basically an adulterer and just questioning my motive of why I would even call Saeed an abuser. Because at that time Saeed has had become a Christian hero. So the trauma is just the trauma of having realized I had been in an 8 year abusive marriage and I’d known this man at that time for much longer than eight years. More than 10 years. And realizing that, in addition to the response of the Church of shutting me down, and all my followers, everyone, millions and millions of people who have supported me, either stayed silent, or they attacked me and called me all sorts of… questioned my motives of even advocating for Saeed or why I was coming out about the abuse. Basically saying I was cheating on my husband, that’s why I was coming out about the abuse. So that was also pretty devastating.

MIKE:

And this all blew up a year before he was released?

NAGHMEH:

A few months. Which I didn’t know when he would be released. So a lot of people think Saeed got out of prison and then I came out with the information, which would make sense, even though it was like people trying to make up the story of he came out and then I said the information because I was with someone. That’s there in their mind, that’s their story. But no, this information came out a few months before Saeed got out of prison, which I actually didn’t expect Saeed to come out of prison a few months later.

But I have – I had stopped playing the game where… I realized the phone that Saeed had had inside the prison was highly… like even though it was a smuggled phone, it had internet. Like, the Iranian government was using it to get me all riled up. And they would, like, beat up Saeed and I would go to the media, “he got beaten up.” Because Saeed would then call me, “I do – I just came out of solitary consignment. They just hurt me,” and then I would go to the media. And then, in a way, Iran was upping the price for the… for their hostages, including my husband.

And, so, once I stopped playing that game, once I the abuse stuff came out, my really my connection with Saeed was completely cut, I was no longer going to media. I stopped all advocacy in the hopes that our family would come from that world of fame and we would just… hopefully, if we went back to normal. And it was, our family could heal, because a lot of Saeed’s insanity had come from him thinking he was so famous, he’d gotten way worse in prison, and he was all about fame and money now. And, so, I stopped all advocacy and shut everything down. And at that time, Barack Obama was President, and I was promised by Trump and Ben Carson and every… pretty much every candidate that was running for the GOP, I was promised, “If we become president…” like Ted Cruz, all of them told me, like, “we’ll get your husband out.”

So my thinking was end of 20- like end of 2016 – or actually 2017 – when the new president was sworn, it was when maybe Saeed would be released, because that had happened in the Iran hostage crisis in the 70s, is when a new President became… when there was a new President, that’s when they released the American hostages. So I thought he would be released a year later, but he was released a couple months after the abuse stuff came out… like 3 months later, yeah.

MIKE:

So you had intense years, long sexual abuse and physical abuse with your husband, and then you had this incredible weight of what I’m going to define as “spiritual abuse” from the Church community. And how… how did all that affect you?

NAGHMEH:

I think it was like the Peter moment, like, “I’m done, but I can’t be done with Christ, because I have nowhere else to go.” I was saved out of Islam since I was 9 and even though God’s word was so twisted, abused me, by both my husband, and, as you said, by the Christian leaders, I knew I had nowhere else to go by Jesus. And so I clung to God, His word and God gave me Josiah 2:14-16 says, where he talks about setting Israel free, and through His word I discovered that abuse was not okay with him. Submitting to abuse or corruption was not okay with him. That, the putting institution of marriage over the well-being of a person, was not okay with God. That… you know, the same way the religious leaders of Christ’s time cared more about Sabbath than the person wasting away in Sabbath, the religious leaders of our time care more about keeping the marriage statistics thing. “We don’t have as much divorce,” than actually helping the woman and children that are wasting away. They’d rather not touch marriage where, or be part of having to fall away fall apart.

So, either they stayed away from trying to help me, or they forced – like Franklin Graham – tried to force my reconciliation. And so I reading through God the world, I realized that’s not who God is. God cares about my well-being. Not the physical, but when I was under so much abuse, like my mental, I was a dead person. I couldn’t even think for myself. I was… my body was going through a lot of trauma. I developed an autoimmune disease. I just… all this stuff. And through His word I realized that’s not who God is. What my husband has portrayed Him to be or what the church leaders have portrayed Him to be is not Christ himself, and actually my relationship with God grew closer and closer.

MIKE:

So it’s your perspective that what happened was the Christian community made Saeed out to be a hero, and then he got knocked off of that pedestal when the truth came out, and then people were taking that out on you?

NAGHMEH:

Yeah, and you know, they still do that. I think… when, like, when I say about what Franklin Graham did to me, a lot of people get upset and the big thing is, well, “this person is a hero. This person has done so much good for the Kingdom of God.” Well, people focus on the good and that they have done, but they don’t actually realize that the Bible… God doesn’t actually care about the great good we do. It’s obedience to His word, which is how we love others. How we love him and how we love others. So someone can do amazing good work for Christ but abuse his flock or abuse his wife. That, for God, that’s not the priority, is the great work.

But, yeah. The Christian community just attacked me because Saeed had become a hero in their eyes. And, you know, and I was told by Franklin Graham that if if this stuff about my marriage came out, that cause of Christ would be damaged. And that’s what everyone kept saying. If the secrets come out, then you’re damaging the cause of Christ, you’re embarrassing Christianity and all of that. So that’s was… that, that was a way that I was… I guess people try to silence me, saying, “You’re damaging the cause of Christ.”

MIKE:

Well, what we see is that 70 to 80% of Christian men are viewing pornography and involved in other forms of sexual sin, and abuse is a part of a lot of those marriages. And 1/3 of women are falling into the trap of porn, too. And –

NAGHMEH:

Mhmm.

MIKE:

– unfortunately, a lot of churches dodge these issues, which is keeping people in bondage and keeping people in marriages that are being destroyed. And so this is… what you’re talking about, is a wide-ranging problem. That we hide. We pretend that we got it all together, and we don’t.

NAGHMEH:

Yeah, the Church is very sick. Because we’ve had a structure of celebrity pastors and preachers with little… shepherding of the flock. Because we’ve become so big, wolves come in. We’ve moved, the Church moved from the house church structure where everyone knew each other and you can catch someone’s bad behavior, to big buildings where all sorts of people walk in and abuse the flock, and it’s become an epidemic of abuse. It’s like you said, it’s not… it’s not just clergy abusing the flock, sexually and other ways, but also majority of the Church having porn addictions.

It’s we’re… we’re at a church age where the Church is so sick, and so… I would say bedridden. We’ve lost our effectiveness in society. We’re very sick. And that grieves my heart. That breaks my heart because I am – I have been and I still am – I still work with the underground church in Iran and Afghanistan and… and they are how – it’s looking at that and how the Church in Iran is in one of the darkest places in the world. And then looking at that American Church, how we’re strangled up with so much pornography and abuse and it… it really breaks my heart. And I think it’s time for reformation, for change in the way we’ve been doing church.

MIKE:

Well, as you’ve been speaking, Ravi Zacharias comes to mind, where it came out right after his death, where he was manipulating women into giving him massages and even having sex with him. And this was really close to the time he died, this was going on. And then first people getting mad and saying, “why is this coming out now?” But then as more, as the evidence came out, I mean, the guy had more brain power on his pinky than most of us have in our whole body, but it is not about the theology or the doctrine. It’s about, “where’s your heart?”

NAGHMEH:

Exactly. I know I met Lori Ann Thompson, which was the first woman that came out actually, before Robbie died, and he shut her down. He had her sign an NDA. She became very suicidal, the way he shut her down, and tried to prevent her from speaking out, the way he went after her family. And then when he died, I guess some of these women watched his funeral, that he had been sexually abusing, and realized there was another woman named Lori Anne Thompson had come out about it, and they started coming out about it and they realized it was an epidemic. But when he was alive, Robbie was able to silence this victim, and the whole Christian community turned on her. And again, why? Because Robbie did some quote and unquote “amazing work for Christ”.

But he was abusing the flock. But, you know, that people don’t care about that. I think our focus has been so much on you know, Robbie has done so much work for God, and Franklin Graham, and we focus on the great work which God is actually doesn’t. In the last, these men will say to Jesus, like I did these miracles in your name, I did prophesize prophesied me in your name. I cast out demons like and Jesus says, “Get away from me. I never knew you.”

It’s not about those great work that is, we’re so focused on, it’s about obedience to God’s word. And as you said, it’s how are we treating the flock? How are we loving each other? And if that’s not there, then you don’t… “Get away from me. If you you are abusing my sheep, I don’t care how theologically amazing you are, and you’re able to like, talk to Imola or whoever like that means nothing to me. You’re abusing my sheep. You’re using your position of power to abuse my sheep.”

And, so, but we – I think as the Church we’re so used to celebrity pastors, and so used to focusing on great work that, you know, we attack the victim because we don’t want the work to be… you know, damaged because the victims coming out. We were trying to protect an institution with… whether it was the Robbie Zacharias institution, whether it’s the Billy Graham institution, whether it’s the Church institution. We care more of – whether it’s the marriage institution – we care more about saving the institution that seems to be doing some good than actually saving the person that’s wasting away in it.

MIKE:

Well, in First Corinthians 5, first two verses, Paul basically rips the Corinthian church over the sexual sin of one man. And then he says the reason that you don’t do this is because you’re arrogant and you don’t mourn. And I mean, do we really sob over sin anymore? But how can you sob over sin when you won’t even touch it?

NAGHMEH:

Mmm. Exactly. I don’t think we sob over sin anymore. We’ve minimized even porn addiction. Jesus said – I was reading in my devotional space – if your eyes cause sin, gouge it out. Like, God is very serious about even… like, pornography, watching something, and he says take drastic steps. But we don’t really grieve over that. We don’t grieve, because I think we’ve lost sight of the holiness of God. We’re just living. We’re playing Christianity without understanding what a mighty holy God we serve.

MIKE:

Well, and part of what WE do is we have a… as big as an emphasis on helping the wife heal as we do the husband recover. And the wives get left out of this equation a lot, even when the porn epidemic in the Church is mentioned. And the wife is, as you’ve experienced, her heart is shredded, torn apart, it’s very traumatic. And then, I mean, for your husband – or ex-husband – to say it was Godly to watch porn, I mean that’s… a combination of sexual and spiritual abuse right there.

NAGHMEH:

Mmm.

MIKE:

So speak to the wife who is hurting right now.

NAGHMEH:

[sighs] Yeah, for me, the healing came from… I think Josiah 2:14-16 was really big. Where God has, like, called you into the wilderness. There’s a time where you’re you set free from a bondage, whether you stay in the marriage or not, you’re shattered. And the marriage, as you’ve known it, has been shattered. And you are walking into an unknown wilderness that you don’t know where you’re going to get your water, your food, your protection, anything from. But God is calling you to that wilderness, because he wants to be your everything.

And for me, that’s what it was. He became my husband, He became my provider. He became my everything, emotional provider, helping me raise the kids. But I clung to God and I just, my message is “God will not abandon you.” God sees. He’s on your side. And it might seem like the wilderness, but in the wilderness is when you’re going to discover an intimacy with God that is going to carry you through to the Promised Land. So… just keep going. You’re going to have to depend on Him for food, and water, and protection, and guidance, and fire, and cloud, and where to go, the next step, how long to stay, when to move. But He’s – He wants you in that place where He is you’re everything, and He’s the one that’s guiding your life. And He will make something beautiful out of it.

Whether you stay in the marriage or not, that’s, you know, God will guide you of steps that are – that you will take. But I think my message is this “cling to Jesus.” He will get you through. He will bring you out whole. He is our healing. He is our law. And that was, that was my… that’s what when I felt lost and my marriage was falling apart. The marriage, I tried so hard to please, I sought to get my husband out of prison, thinking it’s going to heal our marriage, he’s going to appreciate me. And when it fell to pieces and my husband divorced me and moved on with another woman, I was shattered, because… but through Christ, He’s made me whole. He restored things in my life that I would have never imagined.

MIKE:

Naghmeh, I really appreciate your honesty and all that you’ve shared, and we got a minute left. Anything you want to say?

NAGHMEH:

I guess. How… I don’t know. I don’t think… I think the wilderness is just… and clinging to Jesus. We have Him, no one else does. I minister to Muslim women and they don’t have that relationship. We have it, but sometimes we forget we have that relationship, and we don’t go to God in prayer. We don’t cling to His word. We don’t cling to Him. And I just, my encouragement is we have that we have the King of Kings, President of all Presidents, that we can access anytime we want to. And my encouragement is to do that, for us to spend more time accessing, and just focusing on that relationship that is… that will restore.

MIKE:

Mmm. I want to thank you for coming on board with us and sharing your story. And I just want to encourage you to keep doing what you’re doing, because the truth does need to come out. So…

NAGHMEH:

Amen! And thank you for what you’re doing. God bless.

MIKE:

Thanks! And thank you for joining us. And we’ll talk to you next time.

ANNOUNCER:

Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung’s books, groups, counseling, or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org or call our office in Chandler, AZ at (719) 888-5144. Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org, or call the office at (719) 888-5144.

SPONSOR:

This program was sponsored by Blazing Grace Ministries.

Saeed’s former wife, Naghmeh, worked tirelessly for Saeed’s release, which took place in 2016. Shortly before Saeed was released, Naghmeh revealed that Saeed had been addicted to pornography and physically, emotionally, and verbally abused her throughout their marriage. In this first of two episodes, Naghmeh shares her story.

Episode Transcript

SPONSOR:

This program is sponsored by Blazing Grace Ministries.

ANNOUNCER:

This radio program is PG13. Parents strongly cautioned – some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Jesus’s mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the broken-hearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound. For those who want more than status quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung.

MIKE GENUNG, HOST, BLAZING GRACE RADIO:

Hey, Mike Genung here, and welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. I’m coming to you from another 115 degree day here in Phoenix, AZ. I think this is like #21 in a row, with more to come!

So in September 2012, a news story broke about Pastor Saeed Abedini. He was an ordained minister with dual American-Iranian citizenship and he was arrested in Iran. He had been involved in the past, with setting up house churches there, and was working on setting up an orphanage. Then in 2013, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison. And the stories coming out of that prison were pretty dark, where he was beaten, and denied medical care, and it was pretty rough treatment. And I remember watching that story back at that time and praying for his release.

And his wife Naghmeh was… she seemed to be everywhere, petitioning for his release, and getting involved with the US government, and some big name Christian ministries got involved, and… and then Sabadini – or Abedini – was released from prison on January 16th, 2016. And then shortly afterward there were started… stories were starting to surface where he had been abusing his wife, and he was – he had some porn problems. And as we know in our ministry, those two can often go hand in hand, with porn and abuse. It could be physical, emotional or verbal abuse.

So, today I have Saeed’s former wife Naghmeh with me to tell her side of the story. She made national news when she publicly advocated for the release of her then-husband, Saeed Abedini. Through Saeed’s imprisonment, Naghmeh was able to bring worldwide attention to the plight of persecuted Christians, and able to proclaim the Gospel to millions across the globe by speaking at human rights groups, major news outlets, the United Nations at Geneva, the European Parliament Congress, and she had personal meetings with both President Barack Obama and [President] Donald Trump. When it came to light that she had been abused throughout her marriage by her husband, the Christian community suddenly changed on her. So, Naghmeh, welcome to the program.

NAGHMEH ABEDINI PANAHI, GUEST:

Thank you for having me.

MIKE:

So let’s get started, and have you share your story.

NAGHMEH:

Yeah, I, since I can… I became a Christian from Islam when I was nine years old. My passion had always been to missions and preaching Muslims for Christ. It wasn’t until my husband, who was very abusive, went to prison in Iran, that God started building me up. Because up to that point I have been so abused, so controlled, that I wouldn’t then rely on my own thinking. I was completely controlled by my husband, and his imprisonment is actually what set me free, where I was able to… I guess I drew close to the Lord, reading His word, and praying more. And through that time is when God revealed to me the abuse I was under and set me free. And, as you mentioned, porn was a big part of our marriage, and it was considered as “godly” to watch and to try to please my husband in a way that would… in a way, it was twisted to show that it was not sin, and that it was… you know, a way that I could serve my husband.

MIKE:

You talked about abuse. What did that look like?

NAGHMEH:

Well, it was very subtle. I didn’t even… when I met Saeed in 2002, I had no idea what narcissism was, or even any clue about emotional or psychological abuse. I knew about physical abuse, but even then I thought it’s someone that gets beaten up all the time and…. it started with, just when I was meeting him, it started with a lot of verbal putting me down, my looks, wanting me to change certain things about myself, where I had entered the relationship, I was very confident. I was becoming more and more… not confident and believing lies about myself and that I wasn’t desirable.

Also, around that time, it was the isolation. I didn’t realize that’s what it was, but just criticizing all my friends… At that time I was a missionary in Iran when I met Saeed, so I didn’t have a whole bunch of friends, but I had made some friends. I had come to Iran about a year early before I met Saeed, so some friends. And then my family would visit, and he was undermining them as not being spiritual, as Saeed was… Saeed was very Pentecostal, casting out demons, and a lot of signs and wonders, and he was basically… really, because I did see a lot of signs and wonders, I guess, he made me really trust in him and not to go to my family members or friends that I used to go for council. So he… Saeed became the only source of truth in my life.

And there was… there was a few physical… it was some pushing and shoving and… but it wasn’t a full-on beating until about a year into our marriage. About a year and a half into our marriage is when the first physical abuse happened. But before then, there was a lot of pushing me away, isolating me. The silent treatment, which is abusive as well, not speaking to me for weeks or months, and or… days, weeks, or months, depending on how much he wanted to punish me, and me begging to talk to him. And yeah, just some, I guess some physical, but at that time I wouldn’t have considered it abuse. Some pushing and shoving and yeah, that’s how it was.

Until about a year, we were so busy with the house church movement, pretty much when I met my husband, we… focused on, we were leading one of the largest house church movements in Iran, so we were busy building disciples. I was actually really busy with that, and traveling, and starting churches, and so our relationship was not so much the focus, even though I knew something was off. But we were so busy, until… November of 2005, we had to flee Iran. So three years. If I met Saeed in 2002, I didn’t… I met Saeed in 2002, I didn’t marry him until 2004. So about three years after we met and about a year after marriage, we had to flee Iran. We were getting arrested a lot, and… I personally had guns pointed to me and told to deny my faith, and it was just getting so intense that we believed that it would actually endanger the house churches if we stayed longer.

And, so, we went to Dubai, and a missionary family… it was around Thanksgiving, and a missionary family had gone to America for sabbatical for six months. So they told us we could use their apartment in Dubai until Saeed could get a visa to America. And the first night that we landed there I was pregnant with my daughter, and I was so tired, I was throwing out… I was searching through the suitcase for my pajamas and Saeed got upset and said “You’re making a mess,” and I said “Who cares?” and that’s when my first full-on beating happened was…

MIKE:

Oh.

NAGHMEH:

He just beat me, kicked me, punched me; head, stomach, everywhere, I was bruised, and I thought I was going to die. I crawled into the bathroom, and I mean I had bumps coming out of my head. I crawled into the bathroom and called his parents. I called my mom. They were, of course, his parents were back in Iran, and my parents were in America. And he never said sorry, I mean… he ended up saying it was just the demonic forces in Dubai that had made him do it, but never true repentance. And at that time I was pregnant with our first… child, our daughter.

So, having come from the Middle East culture, and also the American culture, church culture of purity movement, where if a girl kisses a guy, she’s lost her purity and you’re not supposed to, you know… you’re supposed to keep yourself for your husband, I felt like I was damaged goods. So I didn’t see a way out, in terms of walking away from that marriage. I thought, you know, “I’m stuck and I’m also pregnant, I don’t want to be a single mom.” So I… from that moment on, I guess I learned my lesson? I was walking on eggshells and did everything not to upset him again. And we ended up coming to America and we had our daughter in 2006, and our son in 2008.

So that’s… that’s my… that’s before his imprisonment. And I ended up, I was working until… he, yeah, I was working and we were raising the kids until he… he was traveling back and forth to Iran starting in 2009, when my son was about a year old. And in 2012, he was arrested. And that’s when my whole life changed, I guess, from what I thought was the worst thing that could have happened to me, ended up being… actually, God rescued me.

MIKE:

You met him in 2002. So in the two years that you courted, was there any clue of the physical abuse, or any type of abuse, or the pornography?

NAGHMEH:

No, he was so deceptive. No, because I, well now looking back, of course there was emotional abuse. There was spiritual abuse, he would use Bible verses, but not something… It was very subtle. And even with his porn addiction, he was very deceptive. We had satellite so we could watch TV shows that were outside of Iran, which sometimes they had kissing, and so when the scene would come up with people kissing, he would look away and I thought, “Wow, this is a really pure man that can’t even watch… like, he doesn’t want to watch that.” So no, I… the porn stuff I had no idea. I actually thought, “Wow, this is a very pure person.”

I knew of… of his past that was not very… was… yeah, his past was not good. I didn’t know about the… he didn’t talk about any porn addiction, but I knew he had relationships, there was even an incident of… gang rape, and his behaviors towards women. But all of that, he would say, was before he became a Christian, and he’d become a different person. And so, yeah. I just thought he’s a Paul. I would call him a Paul, because he has such a radical background, where he was trained by Hezbollah terrorist group to attack Israel, and then he was about to murder a pastor, and he got saved. And so… I just thought that’s the past. He’s… when I met him he was a baby Christian, probably two years in the Lord, and he seemed on fire. And so I didn’t… his past didn’t bother me.

It wasn’t til we came to America and I was pregnant with my daughter, and I would look next to my bed and he was gone. And, of course, I’m usually a sound sleeper, but when you’re pregnant, you go to the bathroom a lot [laughs] So it was towards the end of my pregnancy, and when I would wake up, and then I’d catch him in our living room, which was, you know, a good walk from the bedroom. It was, it was… I would search for him, where could he be? And I would find him in the living room and… he was watching porn. And he would turn it off and pretend it didn’t happen. And so that was my first wake up call of what’s going on.

And then when I had my daughter, when she was about 10 months old, I was pregnant again with my son, Jacob, and we… he was again, there was some abuse, physical abuse, where he had grabbed me and I called the police. He ended up being charged for domestic abuse. It was in 2007, because, yeah, because my son was born in 2008. So my pastor at that time suggested that we move in with my – or I move in with my parents. He said, “Get away, it’s not a safe place,” you know, “go somewhere away from him.” And so that’s when I moved in with my parents. And then just over time he left… you know, I don’t want to go into the details. There was a season where he left that then he came back, and ended up actually weaselling himself back into my parents house, coming back. And again, that’s when it came up.

It was… my parents now would walk in, and he had the TV on and he was watching porn, and he’d get so embarrassed and turn it off. And then it became to a point where he would just, if I walked in… he ended up watching it in the playroom, which was not an area my parents would normally come up at, because it was like the second floor. But then I would walk in, he was watching it, and it became to a point where he was no longer ashamed. He was just like, “Uh huh. I’m watching it. It’s not sin.” And so I didn’t know, I guess, what to say to that. He had good arguments that when he was going to… Bible school, I guess they talked about sexually learning to do things, and it was okay to do things in marriage, and they had, he had taken a class on Song of Solomon. And so he was basically justifying it.

And then soon… well, yeah, after my son was born, then he was demanding it. He was saying, “We need to watch it, and you need to do things like I tell you to do.” And I was resisting watching it. I watched it a few times, but I couldn’t stomach it. I just… the Holy Spirit within me was just so much against it. So I refused to watch it, but then he was watching it without shame. And but… and then he was, because of his porn addiction, sexually abusing me. He’s just like wanting to do certain things that I didn’t want to do. He wanted, you know, certain positions, and forceful, and aggressive, and… which again, at that time I wouldn’t have labeled as sexual abuse. But it was. It was… very forceful, and demanding, and not listening to my… I guess my… I’m not wanting, you know, certain things and… so, but at that time I didn’t see any of that as abuse, I just thought I have a hard marriage, and I didn’t know what to do with it. So yeah.

MIKE:

You mentioned something about a rape in his past?

NAGHMEH:

Yeah, he had mentioned… he had mentioned that as a young boy in Iran, they had… it was rape. That he had a relationship with older women and younger women, but he mentioned a specific situation where there was a street girl. I don’t know if she was a prostitute or if she was… she was being…. she was sex slavery or whatever her situation was, but she was pretty young, probably a teenager, and he was 18-20, because he got saved at 20. So he was… she was definitely much younger, and they kind of gang raped her. It was him and a group of friends, and… at that time when he told me I was, we were still dating, and so I couldn’t even, I had to have no sexual relationship, I couldn’t even fathom what he was saying, and… I… I didn’t realize the red flag of… a person, basically raping, what that, another human being, what that would mean.

MIKE:

Mhmm.

NAGHMEH:

And then years later, I… other women approached me and talked to me, and I realized he’s done that to many, many people, even in our house churches. He would pray for people, he would turn off the light, and he would pray for people and they would fall. Like Benny Hin. He was… Benny Hin was Saeed’s hero. And later, so many girls at my church said he was fondling with them, and he was sexually molesting them. And when they were on the ground and everyone else’s eyes were shut, Saeed was the only one praying and moving around, and praying for people. And years later, people start coming forward and saying that he was sexually abusing them and had used that opportunity to molest them, and things like that.

MIKE:

Mhmm [sighs]

NAGHMEH:

But it wasn’t until after I came out with the abuse that all these other people started coming to me about things that they had seen. I’d even had other pastors, house church pastors, come forward to me and said, “Now that you say it, like I’d noticed this and this and this, and I didn’t know if I was seeing it correctly, but Saeed was doing all this stuff with these girls,” and… so until the abuse and his sexual addiction became known to me, and I even understood how damaging, like you said, a porn addiction is, and how it goes hand in hand with abuse, because a woman is no longer viewed as a human being, that they’re objectified so… so usually porn addiction and abuse usually go hand in hand… I didn’t know any of that until my eyes were opened up to abuse.

And, so yeah, and the way they were opened up was when Saeed was in prison. So in 2012, as you said, Saeed was arrested. And at that time, right before his arrest, I remember crying out to the Lord because I could barely read my Bible. I could barely pray. The Bible was used to manipulate me, to control me –

MIKE:

Mmm.

NAGHMEH:

– to call me a bad wife. So I couldn’t even read God’s word because anytime I opened it, it was condemning. It was oppressive. And so when Saeed was arrested, I start opening up the word of God and I start praying. But before his arrest, I remember crying out and asking God to help with the marriage. I thought, “this is going to be my life for the rest of my life. This is going to be my marriage for the rest of my life.” Saeed had been in a hotel room, before his arrest, with another woman. And I had called and she had picked up, and I became hysterical. And instead of apologizing, he said I’m crazy and I need to go see a doctor because I was hysterical that another woman –

MIKE:

Mmm.

NAGHMEH:

– answered the phone in his hotel. And so at that time, I remember thinking, “Wow, like he’s saying I’m crazy for thinking that he cheated on me? They’re just sleeping in the same room?” And I thought, this is my… I didn’t even see a way out. I never thought divorce would be an option. So I remember crying out to the Lord, like, what’s going on? Lord is, you know, and for the first time, just pouring my heart out to the Lord. And then a few hours later, both this girl and my husband were arrested and put in the prison, or actually put under house arrest first, and then put in prison. And from that moment on, I just start praying and reading my Bible. And in the effort of trying to get my husband out, God was building my confidence in Him and growing my walk with Him.

And in 2015, I was speaking at a mega church in North Carolina, and the pastor’s name was David Chadwick, Pastor David Chadwick. And he… I just… Saeed had a smartphone inside of the prison, and he had gotten a smartphone about a year before his release and he was messaging me, he was seeing how famous he was getting –

MIKE:

Mmm.

NAGHMEH:

– and I noticed he was getting access to my Amazon account, and he was watching things like “50 Shades of Gay”, which I clicked on and it was just… it was making me like sick to my stomach, the sexual content. And so I noticed he’s definitely watching porn again, so I mean, from Iranian prison, and then and it was seemed like there was a lot of more gay porn which made me wonder about what’s happening in prison. And then I finally, I didn’t share that part of the sexual stuff, because I was so ashamed. I didn’t share it with the pastor, but I shared with him, like, “I don’t understand. Saeed has a phone inside of the prison and he’s sending me really rude messages saying me I’m a whore, I’m a… I’m a Jezebel,” and so this pastor looked at me, and I shared everything of what has happened in our marriage, and I couldn’t make sense of why Saeed was putting me down when I was trying so hard to get him out. Later it made sense that Saeed was noticing that I was becoming confident, I wasn’t the same girl as I was before, where I would just shrivel up and submit to him.

So this pastor, after I mentioned everything, and I showed him some of the text messages, he looked at me. He said “Naghmeh, you know, I’m not just a pastor.” And I said, “No, I didn’t know that.” He said. “I’m a doctor.” I –

MIKE:

Naghmeh, Naghmeh I need you to, I need to interrupt for a moment because we’re out of time for this first show. But your story is very powerful, and we’re going to continue this interview with Nagmeh next week, so I encourage you to join us. And then we’ll talk to you next week.

ANNOUNCER:

Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung’s books, groups, counseling, or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org or call our office in Chandler, AZ at 719-888-5144. Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org, or call the office at 719-888-5144.

SPONSOR:

This program was sponsored by Blazing Grace Ministries.

Tim Peterson, leader of the men’s ministry at Blazing Grace, returns to answer the question, “What’s wrong with pornography?” and discuss other issues.

We live in a similar time today where there are many unsaved Christians sitting in churches every Sunday. This is a serious issue with eternal ramifications that must be brought out into the open. Wayne Goransen, a pastor and missionary, shares his experiences as a pastor and Bible teacher with the unsaved Christians he’s seen over the years.

Overcoming Masturbation – Transcript

ANNOUNCER:

This radio program is PG13. Parents strongly cautioned: some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Jesus’s mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the broken hearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound. For those who want more than status quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung.

MIKE GENUNG, HOST, BLAZING GRACE RADIO:

Hey, Mike Genung here and welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. And you heard that PG13 warning, so if you have four and five year olds in the car, then you might want to take that to heart a little bit, because we’re going to be delving into a topic that a lot of people are struggling with, but there is very few voices talking about this openly. And that topic is masturbation. And you hear me talking about pornography and masturbation all the time, but I’ve never done a show focused solely on masturbation before.

There are a lot of people who are – men and women – who are struggling with this issue. Have you ever been to church and, I don’t know, heard the word mentioned? Or had a sermon on it? But it is something we need, because there are a lot of people who are in bondage to this stuff. And yeah, I know the outside world would say something like… you know, “There’s nothing wrong with it,” and “It’s good“, but I’ll tell you from the decades I’ve had experience helping people with this and being around others, I’ve never heard a person say “I had a great time having sex with myself last night”. But I’ve heard many – and we get emails from many every day – saying, “I struggle with masturbation. I hate it. I want to get over it. How do I break free from it?”

So a couple… There’s not a lot of surveys out on this, but when you know that 70-80% of men are viewing pornography, masturbation is always connected and coupled with it. And it’s not just a man’s problem. Not by a long shot. And the gen – the female gender – women are struggling with that more and more. Porn and masturbation. So those numbers continue to go up. I saw one survey recently that said that among 18-30 year old females, 70% are now struggling with viewing with pornography. So you can attach masturbation to that.

So this is a survey that came out in the Daily Mail in the UK, January of 2022. And the UK is the world’s 2nd largest consumer of porn. And to our shame, the US is #1. So the numbers are going to be similar with both countries. And what they said is this. There were two universities that took part in this survey. And men in the UK normally masturbate an average of 2-3 times per week. Researchers said people were more likely to attribute the increases in porn use and masturbation to boredom and more free time. So, “Got nothing else to do, so I think I’ll have sex with myself.” Men in the UK normally masturbate an average of 2-3 times a week, while women do so once a week.

And then this was from a 2009 survey in the US. Both for both boys and girls – we’re talking youth now – engaging in masturbation was associated with greater odds of engaging in sexual relations with a partner, compared to adolescents who did not masturbate. So masturbation is a doorway to promiscuity and other types of sexual issues including oral sex, they said, partnered masturbation, and other types of intercourse.

So this is a big deal that a lot of people are struggling with. This is not just a one or two person thing, and it’s the same thing with pornography. This is a big deal that a lot of people are struggling with, and so… you know, if this is just like 5%, maybe I wouldn’t even be on the radio, but when you have 3/4 of the men in your church and mine viewing pornography and masturbating, and a substantial amount of women with the same struggle – especially youth – we cannot back off from this. We have to dive in and equip people on how to break it.

So a couple of… let’s look at a little bit on masturbation. The act itself. I mean, it’s having sex with self. And so, from the chemical standpoint alone, there’s a hormone in the brain called oxytocin. Oxytocin acts as a chemical messenger. It has an important role in many human behaviors, including sexual arousal, recognition, trust, romantic attachment and bonding. Bonding being the keyword. One study found that some hormones are released in 400% higher concentrations during sex than masturbation, including oxytocin.

So basically what happens is during sex, oxytocin shoots through the roof. So does dopamine. In masturbation, oxytocin stays flat line. It does not go off. So it’s wired into our brain chemistry that masturbation does not work. So you’re literally malforming your brain every time you have sex with yourself.

But let’s talk a little bit more about it. I mean what is masturbation about? It’s about self. Sex with self. And what people don’t realize is when you get caught up in this, is you get caught up in “me”. I want an orgasm today. I want an orgasm right now. If I’m married, “Oh well, my spouse isn’t there. I think I’ll take matters into my own hands and go do that”. But it is very damaging, because what happens with sex is we bond with what we have sex with. So if we’re having sex with self, there’s an emotional misfire that occurs. And we’re literally bonding with ourselves. The self becomes supreme, and what the self wants. And this is all so subtle, we don’t understand this.

So what we’re doing is and then physically what we’re doing, we’re training ourselves to have an orgasm quickly. To finish quickly. So what do you do? How do you think that affects the marriage bed? Now all of a sudden I go to have sex with you know, we go to have sex with the spouse and we’re a short story in bed. And then the wife can be left behind. And we train ourselves that sex is just about a physical act when it is far from it. It is about physical, emotional and spiritual connection. There is no connection in masturbation.

What happens after we have sex with ourselves?

There’s always a sense of emptiness, loneliness, and often shame. Tell me, what’s good about those things? It robs the wife, emotionally and physically. You’re basically stealing from your wife – or your husband, because again, this is not a man thing – when you’re doing that. Because sex is supposed to be something devoted to the spouse and the spouse only. It promotes the instant gratification mentality, that I have to have what I want, when I want, when I want it. And it promotes all about “me”. Sex is about, you know, “me”, fulfilling my desires and my needs.

It also fires up the flesh. And as believers, that is the last thing we want, is the flesh having more control and more ground in our lives. I haven’t masturbated since 1998, and I can tell you what I used to – it used to make me so ashamed – was that, you know, I would read these stories about these awesome Christian believers, men and women, and I look at myself and, “My gosh, I don’t even have the strength to say no to my basic urges.” It was… It was… I felt like a hypocrite all the time, so it really rots the character. And then it only feels good for a few seconds. We work ourselves up to that, and then, you know, what are you left with?

And then some people will say, “Well, masturbation ain’t in the Bible, so it must be okay, right?” Well, if you use that logic, then snorting cocaine or smoking marijuana isn’t a problem because those things are not in the Bible, either. But you’d say, “Wait a minute!” There is a clear principle of a prohibition of drunkenness.” And so we have to look at the principles in God’s word, not just the specific areas that may or may not be there.

And so, principle #1: The only time sex is ever sanctioned in scriptures in the context of a marriage between one man and his wife. That is it. There is never, ever a time when masturbation is offered as a viable means for dealing with sexual desire. So in 1 Cor. 7, Paul is encouraging believers to be single. And I’ll read from 1 Cor. 7:9, where he says,

“But if they do not have self-control, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”

Remember, he’s talking to single men. And if you read the context of the chapter he’s encouraging them to stay single. So if masturbation was an option he would have said, “But if they do not have self-control, let them masturbate or let them marry. Because that’s better than to burn with passion.” That option is not there ever in scripture.

And then masturbation – another principle – masturbation is never offered as a way to deal with stress, depression, discouragement, or other emotional problems. So you’re basically using a physical issue to deal with an emotional or even a spiritual problem. And so masturbation will not fix or resolve those issues. It’s a counterfeit Band-Aid. And then when it comes to comfort, we are to receive our comfort from Christ and others, the connection of other believers.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort which we ourselves are comforted by God.” That’s 2 Cor. 1:4.

So we get our comfort from the Lord first. Learning how to have a solid connection, a true relationship with Him that goes way beyond head knowledge, and that’s part of it. And also comfort from people, the body of Christ, the comfort they provide and the comfort of our spouse.

And then another principle: we are commanded in scripture to master our bodies and their urges, not to be enslaved to them. So this is from 1 Cor. 9:27, where Paul writes

“I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that after I have preached to others I myself will not be disqualified”.

I control my urges. They do not run my life. And the problem with letting your flesh run your life is it’ll run you off a cliff eventually. And then when you let masturbation run your life, you’re opening that door for the flesh to have more ground in your life. God’s vision for men and women is to be strong men and women of character, who love their spouse, serve others, and stand for the truth, and they’re spiritual warriors and fighters. It’s really hard to be a spiritual warrior and a fighter when you don’t have enough character strength to stand up against the urges.

So how do we overcome this?

On the chemical side, what they have found is to rewire the brain, what is effective is first: exercise. Consistent, vigorous exercise. So I like to hit the weights 3-4 times a week. And the thing about exercise is it replaces the use of masturbation, or sex in any form, as stress relief. Exercise is a fantastic stress relief, and it also plays a part in rewiring the brain. Abstinence rewires the brain. And then they found that meditation, which to us Christians – prayer. Prayer has a powerful effect on rewiring the body chemistry.

Also to overcome this you must be part of a tribe. A lot of people have tried to overcome lust, porn, masturbation, whatever it is. You can’t do that in isolation. James 5:16,

“Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.”

That’s not an option. That’s a command. That’s something every believer should be engaging in, so… And that’s the great tragedy of the Church today. And what I see when I travel and I ask believers to put up their hands if they’re meeting with another believer once a week, usually only 15% at the most put their hands up. And I’ve seen numbers lower than that, around the 10% mark. So if you’re isolated and trying to go this alone, it’s not going to work. I’ve been helping people for years with this, and I tried to break out of it in isolation myself. It doesn’t work, because isolation breeds lust and sins of all sorts.

And then, part of it is having a perception and awareness of those sexual urges and desires. They don’t last forever. And part of what we do is say, “Oh my gosh. This is so powerful right now, this is overwhelming me, I’ve got to give up.” Well, it’ll be tough for maybe, you know, whatever, several minutes. But as you resist and stand up and turn and connect with God, or connect with others and pray, it will go away. It does go away. And you will overcome.

I have… in my books I’ve written about turn and connect. Which, when we are hit with any type of temptation, what I do is I turn away from the temptation. I don’t try and fight it. I don’t try and wrestle with it. I don’t try and wrestle with those thoughts. Lust thoughts, when they come, I just look to God, I say, “God, would you strengthen me right now? Would you give me what I need? I don’t want to have sex with myself.” Or if I’m struggling with the temptation to look at women, I’ll just say something like, “God, help me to want only my wife,” or, “Lord, I’m hungry for you. Fill me with your Holy Spirit. Fill me with your strength.” And in doing that, it cuts the temptation down to size.

So turn and connect is very powerful. And prayer is very powerful. And let’s be honest, this battle’s not going to be easy. If you’ve spent years, if not decades, which most men have – and women – who have before they finally decided to get help with this. So if you spent decades training your mind, your emotions, and even spiritually to turn to self sex, there’s going to be a battle involved. The Enemy knows how to push your buttons. There’s spiritual warfare involved, so you have to learn how to be a spiritual warrior, a prayer warrior. And you’ll be on your knees a lot and in God’s words a lot. But there are breakthroughs available to you, and to every believer. He’s given us the tools and the weapons we need.

And again, I want to keep going back to you, got to be a part of a tribe. You got to be a part of a community, I mean, with at least one other man, every Friday. When I say at least, I mean, that’s a meeting with one guy every Friday. And then sometimes I meet with other brothers during the week. And we’ll be accountable with each other and support each other, what we’re going through, and praying with each other. That’s what the body of Christ is supposed to look like and how it’s supposed to function. Not a bunch of isolated believers showing up on Sunday morning, checking out the performance and going home. There’s supposed to be connection and community.

Acts 2:42, you’ve probably heard me say this before. And they were devoted to what? Teaching. Fellowship. Prayer. Community and prayer, big ones, along with the teaching. When sexual desire hits, remember that sex is about connection with another. Remember that it is about connection with the spouse. You are one Spirit with the Lord and he dwells in your temple. Instead of misfiring and masturbation, boldly approach Abba, who – he calls himself that in Scripture – “Daddy”, at the Throne of Grace and ask for his strength and comfort.

You can go to Hebrews 4:16.

“God, I want to connect with you right now. I’m hungry for you right now. Would you fill me with what I’m looking for right now?”

Hungry for comfort. Or stress, “God, I’m going through a real rough time right now with stress, anxiety, fear,” Whatever it is, you go running to God. You learn to have an ongoing prayer life. As we’re told in scripture, pray without ceasing. So you want to keep that channel of spiritual communication open to the throne room of Heaven.

And the first few minutes of the pull or the urge, are always the toughest. It’ll feel – it may feel intense, like you’re going to be overwhelmed. And that’s part of what the Enemy wants to do, is to come at you and say, “Oh, you just might as well give up, because this is just too much for you to deal with, so you might as well just give in.” And maybe you glanced at porn or whatever, and I remember that those words would go up through my mind, you might as… “You’ve gone this far, you might as well just finish the act.” And no, you can always hold the line and say no, I’m not going any further. Turn off the computer, walk out of the room. You can start praying and praising God, or shoot off a text to a brother and ask for prayer or whatever it is. But no, you never have to keep giving more ground. You can stand firm. We read that several times in the great chapter where we’re given the armor of God in Ephesians 6. Stand firm, hold the line, you don’t have to do anything.

Sometimes I get hit with temptations and I just remember all I have to do is nothing, as long as I don’t turn on the computer and start looking at junk, as long as I don’t do anything, or touch myself, I’m fine. It’s a matter of standing firm and standing your ground and, “God, strengthen me right now.” And, “God, fight the battle and shut this down.” And, “God, you know, I’m going to be honest with you, Lord, I’m burning right now and I don’t want to go there, so Lord, help me to stand firm.” Sometimes you win battles just by standing your ground and not looking over the cliff, but backing away from it.

So you also want to be discerning about what’s going on in your life. Are you going through depression, disappointment, grief, loss, are you having a hard time with a lot of stress? All those things can build up the pressure to medicate with the wrong thing, with porn or masturbation, or food. A lot of people these days are using food. We live in a country where half the population are overweight. So I would call that food porn, you know? If you go hit a bag of cookies or Oreos or something, that’s using something else for false comfort or false love. And then, I know I’m talking about masturbation, but it’s a similar thing where you’re getting physical pleasure to deal with a legitimate problem. So you’re using an illegitimate means to deal with a legitimate need.

So what is the legitimate need? “Well, I’m dealing with a lot of stress.” OK. How’s your exercise life? How’s your prayer life? Are you connected with others? What is the thing you’re stressed about? Can you work through that with somebody else? Talk it over with somebody else, but don’t let it sit there and fester and build up and blow up and get a hold of you.

Depression, and disappointment, discouragement… and the Enemy uses lies a lot, such as, “God doesn’t love you as you are. This is as good as it gets for you, so you might as well act out. There’s no hope for you.” So if you let that junk run through your head without standing firm against it, then the battle to medicate with something like masturbation or food porn is going to increase and multiply. You got to learn to watch the thoughts that are running through your mind, and if you’re seeing a lot of the same lies going through your head, that’s an indicator that something needs to be… those are red lights saying, “I got an issue here, that I need healing from. I got lies here that I’ve been buying into, and agreeing with the Enemy on.”

So, “God doesn’t love you as you are.” That’s a stone cold lie from the pit of hell. And if you… what did Jesus die for? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” He died for you. He loves you. That’s the truth. So you have to stand against the lies and realize there’s a spiritual battle and the Enemy will use those lies to try and take you down. And, “You’ve gone too far,” is another one of those lies.

Remember that sex is not life. Sex is meant to be an expression of love between husband and wife, and that’s it. But sex is not life. You don’t need sex. You won’t die without it. Some men would… I’d hear them say, “I’m going to… I feel like I’m going to die without sex!” No, you’re not going to die without sex. And I didn’t die without sex either the times I’ve had to be celibate… and I’ll say that my wife has had six pregnancies. And usually during those pregnancies she doesn’t want to be touched. So I’ve had some pretty long stretches of time celibate in marriage, but masturbation is not an option. It will only make you more miserable, more empty, and more lonely than you were before.

So the more you say no to it, the stronger your character will become. You’ll begin to take back ground in your life. You’ll get stronger inside. You’ll become an overcomer. And everyone of you who are believers in Jesus Christ, you are meant and born to be overcomers and fighters.

So, thank you for joining us, my friends. I think this is an issue that needs to come out in the Church, because a lot of people are struggling with it. So thank you for joining me. We’ll talk to you next time.

ANNOUNCER:

Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung’s books, groups, counseling or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org, or call our office in Chandler, AZ at (719) 888-5144. Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org, or call the office at (719) 888-5144.

Laura Graber, Part 2 – Overcoming Fear, Anxiety, and Panic Attacks – Transcript

ANNOUNCER:

This radio program is PG-13. Parents strongly cautioned: some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Jesus’s mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the broken hearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound. For those who want more than status quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung.

MIKE GENUNG, HOST, BLAZING GRACE RADIO:

Hey, Mike Genung here. And welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. Glad to have you along. Last week we talked with Mrs. Laura Graber from James Port, Missouri, and she shared how she grew up with a father who was basically sexually abusing her, and did a lot of horrible, traumatic things growing up. There was fear, and hyper vigilance, and if you’ve missed that show I’d encourage you to go online and listen to that first one.

And before I start talking with Laura again, I want to introduce a question that many believers have when they’re suffering. And we can go back to the book of Job for this because God allowed Satan to sift Job like few people in history have been sifted. Where Job lost ten kids in one day – I think it was seven sons and three daughters – killed in one day. He lost his business, and then he was left with the wife saying, “Curse God, and die.”

And then if you read through the book of Job, a lot of his questions are “God, why? What are you doing? Why’d you allow all this?” And that is a key question in life. So Laura, my friend, welcome back to the program.

LAURA GRABER:

Thank you, Mike.

MIKE:

And where we left off last week, as you had said, that you were bitter towards God for the things you grew up with, with your dad, and you mocked Christians. And how did you resolve the why question? “Why, God, did you allow this to happen to me?”

LAURA:

It took several years of, I mean… okay, so I should back up a bit. Like most of my preteens and teenage years, I was… I was very angry and bitter at God. And I remember, you know, hearing my siblings or different people talk about God. And in my mind, I made fun of them. I viewed Christians as weak. And I always told myself, you know, the moment I can get away from my dad and move out of this house, you know, I would… I would never let anyone hurt me like that again. I would never, you know, live like this again.

So it was at the age of 20. I went with my cousin to church… haphazardly. And that day the sermon was on how much God loves us, the love of God, that he gave his son, and just, you know, all the aspects of that. And I remember walking out of church that day and I looked up at this guy and I was like, “I’m going to give you one chance, and you’d better not screw this up.” I… it was, yeah. I’m [laughs] not your typical conversion story.

MIKE:

[chuckles]

LAURA:

Over the next several years I… my relationship with God grew. I mean, I’d be reading my Bible, I’d be praying, I started going to church. My life started changing. My physical aspects of it. But there was still a part of me that always in the back of my mind, like, I couldn’t completely trust God. Because I didn’t have an answer to explain the first 17 years of my life. I didn’t know how to come to grips with that, like, how… what was in that.

So I thought I was a Christian, you know. I thought I was a believer. Life was relatively well. I got married and then we had our struggles in our marriage, and it wasn’t until probably, well, the wives retreat 2018 was pivotal. You shared, you spent some time in prayer and you shared a Bible verse with each of us women to take home with us. And this verse, I know it was the Lord, but it’s in Deuteronomy 31 where it’s,

“Be strong and courageous, Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will never leave you or forsake you.”

And I remember that last night at the retreat, just being in my bed and just sobbing. Because I just had this picture that God was with me all those moments as a little girl. He saw what was happening. And over the next year, like, things kept on coming back to my mind just here or there of, like, “Wow, like, God was there in that.” I remember, you know, someone showed up maybe in the middle of one of my dad’s angry rants, like a neighbor to visit, or, you know, like, I got away from my dad here, or, you know, this happened that interrupted this from happening. And I just, like… slowly, like, God kept on bringing them to my mind.

And even today, sometimes I… it’s not as much today but definitely in that next year or two of just like realizing, like, God was there. He hadn’t left me. And as an adult, I can see more and more where He did call my dad to repent him, He did send things in my dad’s life. You know, my dad faced a close call with death, and different things like that. That should have woke him up, but he kept on choosing to live a life of sin, and be a slave to Satan, through all of that.

But God was actually there in those moments. And I had just… I was blaming God for not changing my circumstances, instead of realizing that it was my dad’s free will choice to be living in that sin and to rebel against God. And he was the one that… yeah. My anger need to be directed toward him more so than God, because God was there. So that was extremely healing for me to recognize, you know, of all the times that maybe horrible things did happen, but then all the times that God intervened at just the right times, and also sent help and relief, and protected me. He protected me profusely in different areas and instances that there’s no way to explain except it was the Hand of God protecting me.

MIKE:

Mmm. So it sounds like he didn’t answer the why, but he said, “I was there and I’ve always been with you.”

LAURA:

Yeah, yeah. And that to me was like, you know, I… today now, I know that there’s been a work done in my heart. And I have giftings, like, through the Holy Spirit working in me that I probably wouldn’t have if I wouldn’t have lived through all those things. But for me, the biggest thing was understanding that God is sovereign, and He actually has good for me, you know?

After so many years of just thinking there’s nothing good in this life, much less than God being good, like, understanding today at a much deeper level, like He has good for me and He didn’t just, he’s not going to let all those years of pain just go to waste. It’s not going to just be a, “Oops!” like, “My bad! That shouldn’t have happened.” He’s going to use it somehow. It’s going to glorify Him. And I’ve already seen it glorify him, you know, in different areas in the life of being able to relate with people, or understanding maybe what someone else is going through that I wouldn’t be able to if I wouldn’t have walked through that.

So he has already used it. I still don’t know why fully, but I can fully trust that God is good and that He’s sovereign and there’s going to be good in it. And when I ever, if that day ever comes, that I do understand why completely… yeah, that would be great to know. But I don’t battle with it anymore, because it doesn’t matter. Because… I mean, it does matter, but it doesn’t because God’s sovereign.

MIKE:

Well, a couple pieces there. First off, you’re glorifying Him right now by sharing your story in public. So when we share brokenness that’s when God shines through the cracks. And so I love what you’re doing, and being able to willing to share And so and I also believe that he takes every drop of suffering if we’re willing to cooperate with him and he redeems it for his purposes.

LAURA:

Amen. Amen.

MIKE:

So it’s wonderful to see you come to that place, and you’re not even 30 years old, is that right?

LAURA:

I’m not. I’m 27 [laughs]

MIKE:

So you figured a lot out at a young age. That’s great.

LAURA:

[laughs] I’m not sure if I figured it out, or have had to learn lessons the hard way, but God has been faithful to just continue to show me His truth.

MIKE:

Wow.

LAURA:

Very faithful.

MIKE:

And I know from my own personal experience we all have our days where we run into a concrete wall and say, “Oops, wasn’t supposed to do that!”

LAURA:

Amen.

MIKE:

So you talked about transferring your bitterness to your dad. Did you come to a place of being able to forgive him?

LAURA:

I did. It was… I thought I had forgiven him. I could be around him. I still had this, like, big pit in my stomach when I’d see him at the gas station and, you know, I’d just wait in my car till he was gone, then I’d go inside. But I kept telling myself, “I’ve forgiven him, and I’ve read books and forgiveness, and I’ve talked with counselors about forgiveness,” and, you know… like, all of that seemed so… I had done everything I’d been told to do, I guess. And I thought that I had forgiven him. But what really… I don’t know, brought it to a deeper forgiveness – if that’s the correct way to say it – was when things in my marriage… we started struggling, and the pornography, and the anger and stuff started happening in my marriage. And it was, like, I had to face the very fears of, “What if my life will always be like this?” You know, “What if it’s like when I was a child?” Seeing aspects of that become my reality as a wife, as an adult, and having, like, through that God in his great mercy… like I can’t even express His great mercy and all of that, to just gently be able to help me relive some of the things as a child and like, fully grieve those things, and being able to say, like…

I wrote a letter to my dad. It took me couple months and I just wrote everything that he’d ever done toward me, or had hurt me, or let me down, or betrayed me, or just anything I could possibly think about. All the things I would say to him today if I could. And I remember just I had that letter in my drawer for a long time, and finally, one day – through something that had happened in my marriage – being able to just, like, sit and read that letter out loud. I was alone in my house, and I just read it out loud, and I pretended like I was reading to my dad. And I just sobbed. It was really, extremely painful. But after that, I can honestly say I can meet up with my dad somewhere. I can hear his name and I don’t just instantly recoil in my stomach. I… what happens with him is between him and God. I don’t need payment for what he did. I don’t. He’s never even said, “I’m sorry.” And that used to be a big thing for me. And today it’s like, that’s not okay, but it is okay, you know? I don’t even need an “I’m sorry,” from him. Like, God will deal with him and will take care of him. And I pray for his salvation. I pray for God to have mercy on him because I don’t want to see him being punished for the sins that he did commit. But I can genuinely say, yeah, he’s free as far as I’m concerned. He doesn’t need to pay for what he did and that’s huge for me, to be at that place.

MIKE:

Yeah, we can… we have a choice between, “I’m going to hold on to forgiveness,” or, “I’m going to choose to grab on the bitterness again.”

LAURA:

Yeah.

MIKE:

So let’s let’s talk about fear, and anxiety, and spiritual warfare. Because those three are bound together often, and the enemy knows how to piggyback on fear or anxiety and attack with fear darts. And you grew up with a lot of hyper vigilance, and fear, and looking over your shoulder. And so what does that journey look like? And what have you been through? What has worked? What has not worked?

LAURA:

I honestly didn’t realize how much fear and hyper vigilance that I lived with till a couple years ago. It was so normal for me. I was a highly active person, I worked a lot, was just busy all the time. And, like, that fear would… I mean, I was… I didn’t go outside alone after dark, even as an adult. Like, I didn’t even sleep alone in my house as an adult. Like, I just had… I was trapped with a lot of fears and anxieties. Anxieties about things that, you know, like, something as simple as taking a trip to Walmart to buy groceries, you know? I’d be watching people around me, someone watching me as someone following me to my car. Like, just, like, living in constant panic and fear. Showering. You know, there was a week when I had to force myself to shower because… just frozen in fear. Like, I lock all the doors leading back to the bathroom, the front door, the back door. And you know, just I had to shower when I was home alone, and just lots of fears and a lot of different areas. And I always just told myself, you know, “I’m healing, I’m overcoming it.” You know, “There’s going to be a day when this gets better,” you know, “This is going to get better.” And it did. And I think I had to walk through that journey of, you know, I did find healing a little bit here, and a little bit there, and all of that. But I did a lot of different counselings and also, like, you know, prayers and rebuke Satan, and then just – and I think all those things were helpful. They were helpful.

But it all came to screeching halt in 2022. Or it was ’21. It was ’21, yeah. My husband left for a nine month program for sexual addicts and I was left alone in my house. So with there was a lot of trauma and things happening before he left. But after he left I completely lost my mind. The next two to three months I had panic attacks all day long throughout the night. I never knew what would trigger them. I couldn’t even really work. I had a part-time job at that point. I spent a large part of my days, like hiding at my mom’s house or a sister’s house and just like my insides just shaking. I had anxiety that was… it was so intense I can’t even put it to words. I got a medication, I got on a lot of different pills, I tried everything. I was finally taking like 11 to 12 pills a day, like, morning and evening, and sometimes at noon. Drinking, you know, a lot of, like taking a lot of, like, magnesium. Just things to calm me down. I take a bath before I went to bed at night. For several weeks on the end, I couldn’t sleep for more than 20 minutes –

MIKE:

Mmm.

LAURA:

– during the night, and I’d wake up – be awake for several hours of panic attacks, and finally be able to sleep again for a little bit. It was, it was horrible. I cried out to God just over and over, like, “Just let me wake up from this nightmare!” Because it was… it was the most horrible thing I think, that I’ve ever had to walk through my life. And it’s, like, somehow in those two to three months does all that fear and anxiety came tumbling out. And there was a pill that helped. I mean, it would help somewhat, but it didn’t. There was… I tried to lean on people. I tried to lean on, you know, distracting myself, trying to busy myself. I tried every avenue possible. And once again, in God’s grace, he didn’t let anything work well. I mean, it worked maybe for an hour or whatever. I mean, I was getting massages. I was doing whatever I could just like calm my body down. Like just calm down.

And finally, in all of that, there was only one place that I could go finally at the way end. And that was to trust God completely. And I remember, like, the week that me and God just hashed it out all week it felt like, when things slowly started changing. And I’m not saying that anxiety, and fear, and those things, “Oh, just trust God more.” I’m not saying that in a flippant way. I think I had to have that, you know, 15 year journey, 20 year journey, 25 years, whatever number you want to put on it. I was 26 at the time when it happened, to finally… I’d be in my house by myself after dark. Like, being able to sleep peacefully, and just completely trusting that God was the only thing that was keeping me safe. And whatever he desired for me, for my life, I would accept. Whatever glorified him, I would accept.

I started showering with all the doors unlocked, and I remember one day I was like, “What?” Like, “This is crazy!” But I was just like, “Whatever happens is in God’s hands,” like He’s here and He’s going to be here no matter what happens. And just being able to, like, lay in my bed at night, start having a panic attack, hyperventilating and all that, and just being able to just like… just over and over tell my brain like, “It’s okay, you’re having anxiety, but God’s here. He’s going to get you through it. You’re going to breathe.” Like, you know, all this time thinking I couldn’t breathe and I’m going to die because I can’t breathe. And just, you know, well, “Even if you die, you’re still going to be okay,” like just… there was like just this profound knowledge of that God is sovereign that He’s here and He’s going to take care of me and whatever He desires for my life is good. And is okay with me. Even if it was painful and excruciating and hard.

And that, I mean, a year and a half later, I still – don’t get me wrong, I still struggle with anxiety and fears coming. But I have never had a panic attack since then. I have not had the amount of fear I’m… the fear in me subsides so much quicker by going to prayer and just, like, spending time with the Lord. And I used to do all of those things before, but it’s like somehow the depth of my heart, it needed to be settled that God was in control and nothing and no one could help me but Him.

MIKE:

Hmm.

LAURA:

And He was all that I needed.

MIKE:

I love it. So it sounds like in a way, and this is just kind of a general way of saying it, you went from… maybe a little deeper – and I’m not saying you didn’t have a relationship with Him before – but He became more real and more powerful.

LAURA:

Yeah.

MIKE:

Is that true?

LAURA:

Yes, absolutely. He, for the first time in my life, like the past year and a half. But I honestly am completely confident that the Lord is with me, helping me, and is good, and I’m going to be OK. And that’s huge. Huge for me to say.

MIKE:

And it sounds like surrender was a part of that, too.

LAURA:

It was, it was simply saying, you know, like, “God, even if my worst nightmare were to come true, you would still be God. You would still be here. You would still, you know, I just… I just give you my life, my rights, my… whatever I want, whatever I desire is yours.” Like, “Have your way.”

MIKE:

Mmm.

LAURA:

Yeah.

MIKE:

Spiritual warfare. What does that look like, and how do you deal with that? Because I know the enemy attacks those pressure points.

LAURA:

Amen.

Today it’s still hard for me to recognize sometimes when it’s happening. All of a sudden I find myself, I’m doubting my husband, or I find myself doubting the goodness of God, or I find myself, you know, just struggling with, like, being able to relax at night. And then I start recognizing just the attack that Satan has been having on my mind, and my emotions, or my circumstances, and how he’s just like trying to get in whatever door that he can. And I think the biggest thing for me, like in the spiritual warfare, is recognizing it is spiritual warfare and fighting it through prayer, and scripture. You know, it may not leave. It may not get better. But still choosing to have faith that God’s here with me, He’s hearing my prayers and reaching out to other people, it is incredibly powerful to be able to to call other Christians and reach out and say “Hey, I need prayer.” Like, “I’m struggling. I’m drowning over here. I need some help with this.” But this is bigger than me. Like can you be praying? I have a number of friends that I can call, and just right then and there, like, they’ll pray with me and they’ll check in and keep praying or, you know, send me messages of a prayer. And just like being covered in prayer has been one of the biggest weapons that I use in fighting spiritual warfare.

MIKE:

The surveys show that somewhere between 80-90% of US Christians are isolated. Meaning they don’t have another believer to turn to. And Laura, we have two minutes left –

LAURA:

Wow.

MIKE:

– so take a minute. What goes through your mind when you when you hear that?

LAURA:

I feel incredibly sad for them. That sounds lonely, and hard, and devastating. Honestly. Because it weren’t for other believers in my life, I wouldn’t know the Lord as I do today. I mean, obviously God calls us personally. He speaks to us personally. He’s personal with us. But having other believers around you to just walk along beside you, holding your arms up, you know, when you’re weak. I often think of that battle in the Old Testament.

When they hold up – was it Moses or Joshua’s arms? – in the battle. And every time his arms would go back down, the Israelites would start losing the battle. So a few people stood on either side of him and held up his arms during the day so the Israelites would win the battle. And I often think of that as a physical form of having believers around you to hold up your arms when your your faith is low. Have, like, lean on other people’s faith that their faith can stand in that gap for you and they can fight for you while you can’t.

MIKE:

Amen. Laura, 30 seconds. Anything you want to say?

LAURA:

Definitely. Anyone who’s struggling or, you know, just wondering how they will ever heal or get to the other side of something, there’s so much hope. There’s so much help for you, and God cares, and He’s faithful, and He will get you through this, and get you – not to the other side, because I don’t know if there is the other side – but He will continue to help you, and to trust in that.

MIKE:

I love it. And Laura, thank you for sharing your heart and your struggles the last two shows. I love it. I really appreciate your transparency.

LAURA:

Well, thank you Mike for what you do. You are appreciated.

MIKE:

Well, thank you my friends, and we’ll see you next time.

ANNOUNCER:

Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung’s books, groups, counseling, or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can email us at e-mail@blazinggrace.org or call our office in Chandler, AZ at (719) 888-5144, Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, email us at email@blazinggrace.org or call the office at (719) 888-5144.

Laura Graber on Sexual Abuse – Part 1 – Transcript

ANNOUNCER:

This radio program is PG-13. Parents strongly cautioned: some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Jesus’s mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound for those who want more than status quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung:

MIKE GENUNG, HOST, BLAZING GRACE RADIO:

Hey, Mike Genung here, and welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. Glad to have you along. It’s a beautiful sunshiny day here in Phoenix, AZ. And before I introduce our guest, a couple of quick announcements.

• May 5th – 7th I’ll be in Italy, the north side, leading a men’s retreat there.
• May 13th I’ll be in Vienna, Austria leading an all day conference.
• On that Saturday, May 20th, we’ll be in Finland for several speaking engagements.
• And then, May 27th, I’ll be back to the UK in Frimley Green, which is a little southeast of London, holding an all day conference on that Saturday.
• And then June 3rd holding another conference – all day conference – in North Wales.

So for our listeners there in the UK and Europe, I’d love to see you. Go to the website at blazinggrace.org, there’s an events calendar on the homepage.

And so today I have back with me at the program, Mrs. Laura Graber from James Port, Missouri, Laura my friend and welcome back to the program.

LAURA GRABER:

Thanks for having me, Mike. It’s an honor.

MIKE:

Thanks for coming on. And so, Laura’s going to be with us the next two weeks, and today we’ll be talking about some sexual abuse issues she encountered growing up in her family. And then next week, what she’s been through with porn addiction in her marriage. And a common thread that can run through both of those scenarios, is anxiety and fears. So along the way, we’ll be picking that conversation up and looking at what recovery looks like.

So let’s begin, Laura, and go and begin by sharing what you went through growing up.

LAURA:

Sure, absolutely. So I grew up in a in a Baptist Amish home. So, you know, a lot of people have their opinion of how they think the Amish are [laughs] who they are and how they live their lives. Granted, my home that I grew up in was was an exception. Thankfully there’s not many of them in the culture, but my father was an alcoholic. And with that came lots of anger and rage, and, you know, all the aspects of that. And as I grew up there became more and more sexual impurities in his life, became more evident, until it got to the point where he definitely was sexually abusing us through a lot of different forms. For a long time in my life I was able to ignore it, and not, you know, call it for what it was because it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Which is, a lot of times, what sexual impurities and sexual sin… you can lie to yourself for a while, believing that it’s not as bad as you perceive it to be.

But… so, obviously, growing up with a father that you know was an alcoholic, and angry, there was lots of tension in our home. My parents would fight a lot, and argue a lot, and just always being tense, never knowing when something would tip them off. And he would spank you, per se, but it was much more than disciplining you. It was a way for him to unleash his anger, you know, using a whip or, you know, whatever he had close to his hands to use. So a large part of my childhood was spent, like, just living in constant fear. I remember bumping his chair one Sunday afternoon as a little kid, when he was taking a nap, and getting a beating because I bumped his chair.

MIKE:

Mmm.

LAURA:

You know, just instances that were completely crazy, you know? Yeah. Sometimes he would come to the table and I’d have to sit beside him and… because that’s how we sat at the table, in that row. And he would be angry because he’s looking for an excuse, you know? Someone to take his anger out on. And it was so nerve wracking trying to eat, you know, just fear, just complete fear. So obviously as I got older, you know, in the age of eight, nine, ten years old, I started becoming aware that… I can’t necessarily pinpoint, like what happened, that I knew to never be alone with him. But I was always very aware at a young age, you know, if he was in the house and there’s no one else in the house, like, don’t be in the house with him. Yeah, I just… I spent a large part of my life just not being in the same place as him, alone. So by the age of 8-9 years old, he would make me uncomfortable with staring at me. And that led to, you know, occasionally he would, you know, try to touch me as I walk past him, or depending on where you sat or what you were wearing, he would be staring at you. He would write vulgar things on, you know, papers and leave them laying around where… you know, if I was, if he was out in the shop and I was out there too, he’d be sitting there, you know, looking at, like, magazines that were full of, you know, porn, literally.

MIKE:

Right in front of his daughter?

LAURA:

Yes, yes.

MIKE:

Mhmm.

LAURA:

I mean, he would sometimes try to hide the cover, but I knew they came in the mail. And, you know, we knew that’s what he had in his hands. You know, we walked behind him, you’d see what he had. There was just like… slowly but surely it kept getting worse. And I was very naive, like no one… like, my mom would have never talked to me about sexual things, you know, growing up. So for me it was, it was all foreign. It was disturbing to me, like, disgusting to me. Like, I knew it wasn’t right, and yet I had no one to explain to me, like, that this is wrong. So it’s kind of, yeah, a lot of confusion mixed in with that.

But it kept on going throughout my teenage years. You know, like, if in the morning, if he would hear that you’re awake then he would all of a sudden, you know, open the bedroom door in hopes to catch us changing. Or if you were showering, the the lock on the door didn’t work very well. Which I’d say it was probably done on purpose. And he would, you know, open the door and pretend he didn’t know you were in there. It got to the point where us young little girls would, you know, if one of us were showering, the other one would be hanging around the bathroom door or be inside the bathroom just so he didn’t try those things. He would, by the time I was like 13-14 years old, he would, like, in the living room evenings, he would sit on his recliner in front of everyone and be masturbating or something. You just… yeah, lots of very disturbing things.

MIKE:

In front of the whole family?

LAURA:

A lot of disturbing things. Yes. Yes. I mean, obviously I had older brothers, and if they were around he never acted out in front of them as much. He definitely hid it from them, because there was a time when some of us younger girls started speaking up a bit, and my brothers were just kind of like “What?”, you know? Like they didn’t know this stuff was happening. So I think he hid it more from them than what I realized, you know, at the time.

But yeah, like, my mom would be sitting there sometimes, so us girls would just, I spent… I remember spending quite a bit of evenings in the bedroom until he went to bed. He’d go to bed fairly early. You know, 8:30, 8:00, something like that. And then coming out in the living room and hanging out with mom after he went to the bedroom. So yeah, that was just reality. And I somewhat knew that other dads maybe weren’t like that, but it just felt too much for your brain to even process that, that this isn’t completely normal. Because then I would have had to admit that this is wrong and there’s something wrong. And that felt terrifying to me. Yeah. I would have much rather just had to live in an alternative reality and not face the actual effect that all of that was having on me at the time.

MIKE:

Mhmm.

LAURA:

So yeah, he was very… a vulgar person. I mean he would tell me that I was made to satisfy the other half of the population. Oh, that would that would make me very, very angry. [laughs] Obviously. Yeah. Those things kind of all continued until my parents separated when I was 16 years old. And yeah, so obviously that released me from having to live in the same house as him. The last year before they separated I would be home a lot alone with him and my mom. And that last year was… it was awful. It was completely awful. I know there was other people around on the weekends, a lot to distract him. And yeah, it was just a lot that happened that, sometimes I wonder if I even gathered, you know, mentally, today – years later – you know, what all took place. But yeah, so that obviously left me with a lot of, like, the mindset of, like, anything sexual is disturbing and disgusting. And even viewing men in general, in a very… ungodly way. Just, like, being disgusted by males in general, which in a sense, like, God used for good. Because I didn’t have a lot of boy drama in my life [laughs] as a teenager. So that was… that was a little positive in the whole aspect. Yeah. Kind of a small glimpse of of my childhood growing up.

MIKE:

How many kids in your family?

LAURA:

There was nine of us, and I was the youngest.

MIKE:

How many boys? How many girls?

LAURA:

There was five boys and four girls. Actually, I said that exactly opposite, four girls… five girls and four boys.

MIKE:

And your brothers had no idea that a chunk of this was going on.

LAURA:

There was things that they did know. I mean, they were aware of, like the magazines he got in the mail. They were aware of different things because, you know, after he was done with the magazines, he would lay them in on my older brother’s bed, you know, gave them to the boys. So he was very, like… entitled, you know, as a male. That was just what males did. This is who they were. So my brothers, you know, he… he tremendously impacted their purity at a young age. And they knew some of the things, but a lot of the things that he did toward us younger girls, we just didn’t talk about, not even really that much to each other, nor to my mom. It was kind of something that you just didn’t want to talk about because it was hard. And subjects like that in the Amish culture, you don’t hear anyone talking about sexual things. They’re just like a, yeah, a silent subject. Especially in the community that I grew up in that era… you didn’t get taught any of that in school, you know, there was no sex ed classes in school. So there was just a lot of silence on the subject.

So I remember, you know, several years after my parents had separated, I was talking to one of my brothers and sharing about the showering and he was just horrified. He was like, you know, he remembers me asking him if he could hang out in the hallway while I’m showering. And he remember just like being like, “Okay, what’s wrong with her?” you know, “She’s acting strange,” you know? But he did and he would do that for me if I asked him. But I guess I always just assumed he knew why I was asking him, and he didn’t. That’s just how less we talked about it at the time. Now, today, and even, like, you know, by the time I was 17-18 years old, all of that stuff was definitely discussed and very openly talked about. At the time it was just a silent subject, yeah.

MIKE:

Well, a lot of people, myself included, have or had a perception of the Amish community, of being peaceful. They’re living life the way it should be. There’s wonderful families and communities. And so our listeners know, I’ve been to James Port where Laura lives, and you guys have kind of educated me that that’s not quite the situation. So is there a lot of sexual abuse… immorality in the Amish community?

LAURA:

There is, there definitely is. And it greatly saddens me because of how that subject is not discussed. It’s not taught. It’s not addressed. There’s, you know, a lot of young kids, you know, things happen between kids, and adults view it as, “Oh, it’s just kids doing things.” And that’s not just kids doing things, you know? I don’t know as far as, like the ratio of, you know, the difference between the Amish culture and the so-called English culture – [laughs]

MIKE:

[laughs]

LAURA:

– you know, that if you do statistically the difference between the two. But I would say in the Amish culture there is more, from my personal opinion. For the mere fact that A: it is hidden. Few people bring it to the light, talk about it, actually find healing. And it’s, like… the Amish community is a really close knit community. So if one person finds it out, like everyone knows, a large part of the time. So it’s something that a lot of shame and fear and just complete terror is associated with, so you don’t want anyone to know about it. So it’s better just stay silent and shove it to the back of your mind and forget that it exists.

MIKE:

Mmm.

LAURA:

So that’s definitely, like, a lot of times when, like, instances do come up that you catch, you know, little snippets here or there, that you know something may not be quite right. Or something may have happened, but you never know, like, full details, or people don’t just openly talk about it or share, you know, that “Hey, I was sexually abused, and this happened, and this is how I found healing.” Those conversations would not be a part of the life and Amish community in James Port where I lived. It’s more of a yeah, definitely a very shameful thing that hidden scraped under the rug, you know, covered it up.

MIKE:

Well, the official numbers are that one out of every four women have been abused or molested and one out of every six men have been abused. But those, those are the official numbers. That doesn’t even include all those that had even reported it. So the real numbers are –

LAURA:

Exactly.

MIKE:

– probably much higher. So was your family going to church when all this was going on?

LAURA:

Oh yes, yes. We were in church every Sunday that there was church. My dad was actually looked up as a respected person of the community, at one point, a lot. I think as the years went by, more people… he might have happened to show his anger at the wrong time, and more people got to know that there was definitely, maybe some issues, you know, happening in the background. But there was… like, when we left, when my mom and dad separated, we actually – my dad left for work, and my mom and my brother, me and my sister, we just loaded up in the car and left and left him a note. That’s how we separated because that’s… we just left. And at that point, you know, I think a lot of people were shocked. And still today there’s people in the community that they don’t know the full story, you know, they don’t know what all happened and they would still view us as being wrong. For having just left because my dad was, I mean, in public, he was a jolly person, he was funny, you know. Still today I hear a comment, you know, oh, you know, his laugh or they so enjoyed talking with my dad or something my dad said or, you know, whatever. And there’s still a lot of people today that would not, yeah, would not know the real Jake as I knew him growing up.

MIKE:

And part of the reason on this program I have people who come on and share stories of being molested, like you’ve been willing to do, Laura, is because a lot of this gets repressed in the family system, and then people grow up thinking, “I’m the only one that’s gone through this,” and it’s far from the truth.

LAURA:

Yeah.

MIKE:

So how did you unwind the idea that men are basically scumbag pervs? [laughs]

LAURA:

Umm… [laughs] That’s a big question, Mike. Do you have a couple hours? [laughs] First of all, my brothers were pivotal in that. I mean, obviously God was in the background, you know, orchestrating all of this, but my brothers played a huge part because they treated me differently than from what my dad did. They cared about me. They were, you know, never sexually… toward me in any form. They advocated for me, did things for me, they loved me, they looked out for me. They, you know, were there. They were vibrant in my life and I could trust them completely. So that was huge. And, like, to hear they might be hanging out with guy friends or they might be hanging out with people. Like, if they were comfortable with them, I was comfortable with them a lot of times. Like, who they liked, I liked because I knew that they they had grown up with the same dad as I did. So that that was huge for me. Definitely my brother’s impacting me. And also you know, as I became a Christian in later years, recognizing that there are a lot of men out there who have a heart for God. And, you know, as I started sharing my story, little bits here and there, you know, I barely wouldn’t say much, you know, because I’d still be scared. But people’s reaction, like men’s reaction, the same like, “Wow!” like, “That is so wrong!” Or, you know, like, “That’s awful!” And recognizing like, “Oh, they would think it’s wrong to do this?” You know, “They wouldn’t think that’s okay?” You know, “That’s not just how males are?” So those are probably the two biggest aspects of, yeah, my brothers, and then, like, hearing other males react to parts of my story –

MIKE:

Mmm.

LAURA:

– was huge.

MIKE:

So when I first met you was in 2018 when I led a wive’s retreat in Colorado. So, you and seven or eight other women. So I’m wondering what was going through your mind when you’re going to a wive’s retreat that a man is leading [chuckles] with your background.

LAURA:

[laughs] Well, I definitely… I was… most of the reason why I went to the retreat was because I needed to get away from my husband. I was losing my mind, it felt like, and I was just desperate to get away. And my friend invited me and I was like, “Hey, let’s go. Who cares?” But when I showed up there and I met you and I realized like, “Whoa, like I’m spending the weekend at a retreat that’s being led by this male.” And it was… yeah, there was thoughts in my mind, definitely, of like “Who are you?” Like, “Why would you do this?” You know, yeah. “What type of person are you?” And then that first evening we were broke up in groups to share a story, and you just happened to be in my group. And you shared your story, and that… yeah. That instantly, I… through hearing your perception and seeing your love for purity and calling things out for what they were to be wrong. You know, speaking the truth over subjects, not just brushing them under the rug, or making them sound better than what they were. Yeah, you gained a lot of respect for me that first evening and I continued to go on that.

MIKE:

Well, we’ve got several minutes left, and so I’m wondering what your healing journey… Can you give us a point or two on what that has looked like? Because that was a lot of damage to recover from.

LAURA:

That was a lot. In a lot of different areas, you know. A lot of small things that I even today, sometimes something strikes me and I’m like, “Wow,” like, yeah, “I didn’t recognize that until today.” Probably the biggest, obviously the biggest thing was becoming a Christian and having God, like, the Holy Spirit, to walk me through those things. And I did a lot of counseling… have done a lot of counseling. And my siblings. My siblings have been pivotal in my life. And, like, we can sit together and we can talk openly and honestly about our childhood and connect and, like, just talk about the hard stuff. You know, the disturbing stuff that’s really hard to talk to other people about openly. We do that with each other. We’re not afraid to go there and to talk. We can talk about anything. And that has been majorly healing to have people who understand what it was like, and being able to just share and talk and not people freaking out about what all happened. Yeah.

MIKE:

And at what age did you become a believer?

LAURA:

I was 20 years old when I first… Yeah. I happened to go to church, which is kind of a crazy thing because I hadn’t been in church for a long time, because all of this, really, I was really bitter toward God.

MIKE:

Mmm.

LAURA:

I was. I just had the mindset of “If there is a God and he would allow me to live like this, you know, for close to 17 years, then I don’t want anything to do with him,” you know. If he… yeah.

MIKE:

Hmm.

LAURA:

You know, people would tell me, you know, “God’s good,” or, you know, I would hear things like that and I’d be like,”Yeah, whatever.” I would mock Christians and mock people who believed in Him because to me it was like, “How could he turn a blind eye while we suffered all those years?” I mean, just day after day of complete agony and darkness and just horribleness. I mean, just complete terror and fear, and… yeah. It was awful.

MIKE:

My friends [clears throat] we’re going to continue this conversation with Laura next week, so I would encourage you to join us. And Laura, thank you so much for your honesty and transparency, and I look forward to seeing you next time.

ANNOUNCER:

Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung’s books, groups, counseling, or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can email us at e-mail@blazinggrace.org, or call our office in Chandler, AZ at (719) 888-5144. Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, email us at email@blazinggrace.org or call the office at (719) 888-5144.

If you missed the first part with Sarah, click here to catch up: https://www.blazinggrace.org/podcast/interview-with-ex-witch-sarah-part-1/

Don’t miss the second part of this discussion – Click here: https://www.blazinggrace.org/podcast/interview-with-ex-witch-sarah-part-2/

Episode Transcript

SPONSOR:

This program is sponsored by Blazing Grace Ministries.

ANNOUNCER:

This radio program is PG-13. Parents strongly cautioned – some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Jesus’s mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the broken-hearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound. For those who want more than status quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung:

MIKE GENUNG, HOST, BLAZING GRACE RADIO:

Hey. Mike Genung here, and welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. Glad to have you along.

And at a show, in a ministry like this, which talks about… areas where a lot of people are in bondage, particularly with the things we talk about, with pornography, and the sexual arena, and we bring up the occult, and we bring up the things that people are struggling with, spiritual warfare is a part of this. Not just me, but also our team. And the last couple days have been rather intense, and got even more intense this morning and… [chuckles] some strife. [sighs] Sometimes that strife can be with loved ones, and… it can be a wild ride sometimes. And, so this is not something that we’re getting into lightly, and we know that, you know… when you engage in the battle for people’s hearts, people who are hurting, people who are in bondage, you’re gonna take some hits and some shots. So… working with the ministry like this isn’t gonna work if you’re not really ready to go into spiritual battle. [chuckles] Sometimes quite often. And, sometimes the Enemy can make us… when He really… with some intense attacks, sometimes He can make us feel like we’re losing our mind. And I had some of that this morning, like, “Am I going crazy? What, what’s… what is this? Oh, yeah. Okay.”

And I’m recording today, and here we are. And so… the next several shows over the next weeks, I think will peg the intense-o-mometer a little higher. But for today, for today’s show, it’s gonna be about how to overcome temptation and lustful thoughts. And the things that I’m gonna give you aren’t just for overcoming lust–sexual lust–but across the board.

So, fear. The Enemy gets, grabs a hold of us by fear. And He tempts us to fear, and to doubt, so He can back us into a corner and then we become… basically worthless, because once you’ve allowed fear to grab hold, He’ll… He uses that to make us paralyzed in terror if it goes on long enough. And then some people can go into hyper-vigilance and get so bad. So, it’s very important to deal with fear right up front. And we see a lot of wives, in particular, dealing with fear, when they go through… what happens with their husband, who is involved with sexual sin, it’s very traumatic for the wife and they end up, a lot of them end up struggling with fear. And so it’s very important to know how, what do we do when we get attacked with this stuff? How do we differentiate between our own flesh, and our body chemistry, our brain chemistry, and the attacks of the Enemy? What what do we do with all that?

So that’s… that’s where I’m going today. And so, the first step with any Christian, with any situation, is: you cannot be isolated. And most Christians in America and in other countries are isolated. How do I define that? When I get up and speak, I’ll ask audiences to raise their hand if they meet with another brother or sister for the purpose of accountability and support and prayer once a week. Usually 15% of those hands go up. So there are a lot of people, and this is a big reason why the American Church is so weak and fragmented right now, because we’re all isolated and fighting this game alone. That’s not the way it was meant to be. There are no isolated believers in God’s economy.

So those of you who are listening, I would ask you the same question: Are you meeting with another believer once a week for the purpose of support, prayer, and encouragement? And Proverbs 18:1 says,

“A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; he rages against all wise judgment.”

Rages against all wise judgment. So you’re actually, going hard against what God said is the wise way to live life. And, unfortunately, our churches have us conditioned and trained us with their performance-driven services to be isolated. To be isolated believers. So what do they do? Many services once, you know, about when they’re switching off between the worship band and the pastor, they’ll say, “Hey, greet the person standing next to you.” And then we put on that fake Sunday smile and, “Hi. How are you?” And the other person looks, “Oh, I’m doing fine. How are you?” And then we nod and then we go on and… and it’s just faking it. So that’s not a church devoted to fellowship.

So it’s critical that each and every one of us is a part of a tribe of believers. Or like Jesus did, he had a… he had his inner circle of James, John, and Peter, who he took with him on some of his most intense battles. And that’s what we need. Every one of you has to be a part of a tribe and you have to have your inner circle. Even if that’s only an inner circle of one, that is enough. You cannot fight this battle in isolation. You will get slapped, and smacked, and beat up, and… and we need another brother or sister who will tell us, “Hey, this is not the good way to go,” or “Hey, man, you’re having a really rough day. I’m gonna pray for you,” or “Hey, no, this is… your perception of this is not right.” This is critical. And James 5:16 says,

“Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”

Sins. Plural. Meaning this is an ongoing deal. This isn’t just a once a… one, you know… once a [bleh] once a week thing, or I should say a once a year thing, where we barely do it, and a lot of believers don’t do it at all.

And I can tell you that a lot of people who have come to us for help, they’re sharing their story with us for the very first time. And I almost feel like I’ve just become their best friend [chuckles] somebody they can trust. Not, you know, not that that’s, you know, what I’m trying to do, but… a lot of people are just starved and thirsty for somebody safe to talk to. And there’s a lot of people in our churches today that are starved and thirsty for somebody safe to talk to. And we’re so… there’s one article I saw not long ago, “The Epidemic of Loneliness”. And that epidemic is alive and well in the church today. So you gotta be, you can’t be wound up in isolation. You have to be meeting with other believers.

So now I’m gonna get into: what do we do with the war in the mind? So let’s say you’re, you’re in the grocery store and you noticed–and you’re a guy–and you noticed… a young woman approaching you, and she’s wearing… there’s a lot of skin showing there, or it could be vice versa. I mean, women struggle with lust, too. This is not a man’s issue by any means. And to start off with that, I love going to Italy. We usually go about once a year, once every two years, for ministry purposes, and their coffee there is amazing. It is, I would say, the best in the world that I’ve tasted. Vienna, Austria is maybe the second best. And it’s smooth. And when I first went to… about 2016, I went and they served lunch and then they served an espresso shot to me straight. You know, no milk, no nothing. And I looked at it and I’m thinking, you know, American coffee or Starbucks. I’m like, “Oh, man. This is gonna be bitter.” And I drink it. I was like, “Wow! [chuckles] This is good! This is smooth. There’s no bitterness to it.” There’s there’s… I don’t know the acidity level or… whatever they do, it’s just amazing. And then, they’re… they don’t have sugary drinks. They don’t have the big whopping venti or grandes like we do in the States or even talls, you know, like Starbucks have. They just have small coffee drinks. But, oh, man, it is so good. And a lot of the stuff we have for coffee here in the US is basically milk drinks that are flavored with coffee, with tons of sugar, depending who’s ordering. And so… and then some of their coffee drinks are just amazing, and they have drinks over there that we… don’t have here. And they call American coffee “dirty water”, which I agree with. It’s… it’s just [chuckles] bitter in comparison.

And so now that I’ve talked about coffee for the last minute or two, I want you to stop thinking about coffee. And what some of you just did is as soon as I said, “Stop thinking about coffee,” the thoughts of coffee sprang forth like weeds in your mind. And you weren’t even… and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s the way our brain works when we try and tamp down the thoughts on our own. I call that “fighting our flesh with our flesh”. It never works. So if you try and suppress the thoughts, it’s gonna spring them forth tenfold. So fighting the thoughts, or suppressing the thoughts, or attempting to do that… and that’s how OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, can develop over time, because that’s basically fear run amok. OCD is fear run amok. And we keep trying to stop a thought or shut it down or suppress it, and it keeps coming and then we keep recycle, recycle, stop it, think it, stop it, think it, then we, you know, it can drive us nuts.

So the way to approach this is what I call “turn and connect”. So if I’m in the grocery store, say, and a beautiful woman’s coming up to me, I’ll just… in my heart, I’ll look to God and say, “Lord, I… she’s coming,” and I might even say something honest like, “You know, my flesh would really like to look at her right now. But, Lord, you are my source of life. Fill me with your Holy Spirit right now. Fill me with you.” I haven’t tried to suppress the thoughts. I haven’t tried to fight them. I’ve just gone to God and just in doing that, it cuts the temptation down to size.

Or I can just be at home, and not doing anything, and then some thoughts maybe of some old girlfriends from years ago could flutter through my mind. And I don’t… again, I don’t try to shut them down. I don’t try to depress them, suppress them. I turn and connect. I turn to the Lord and say, “Lord, here I am. I want you. Fill me with your Holy Spirit of power, love, and sound mind.” And in doing that, the battle gets cut down to size quickly. Because now I’m focusing on Jesus, and sometimes I’ll focus on him in Heaven in the throne room of grace. And in doing that, it… there’s power in your mind and your imagination. When you light your mind up with an image of Heaven or the Lord, that… that just dissolves the whole fight right then and there, and it brings the Holy Spirit in, and that’s what you want. You don’t wanna be trying to fight this on your own.

And so that that works many times with the flesh and… but there’s times when lust thoughts might keep piling on, and coming, and coming, and coming. And sometimes it’s not the flesh… sometimes it’s our spiritual Enemy. And He… it’s a full-blown attack. And in that case, you have to discern on what’s going on, and you can ask the Lord, “Lord, what is this?” And usually with an attack it has a dark edge to it. You can, in your spirit, you can sense that this is, there’s some evil and wickedness here that’s at a different level than if it’s just one of my flesh thoughts. And then you have to shut it down and take up your authority in Christ.

So go read Ephesians 2. You have been seated with Christ in the heavenly places. You have the authority to tell Him, “No. Leave. Stop.” So for me, I might sometimes say something like, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command any evil spirits coming against me to stop your works right now and leave.” Or I, you know, I could just make it simple. “In the name of Jesus, leave.” Or sometimes I might pray something like, “In the name of Jesus, I cancel all assignments of the Enemy against me.” It depends on what’s going on.

So you have the power and you have the authority to shut down the work of the Enemy when He comes against you. And some battles, I’d say a lot of them, with “turn and connect” or taking up our authority in Christ, usually between those two, they can reduce them or limit… shut it down pretty quickly. But you need to know that there are gonna be some battles that go a lot longer than a few minutes. And I’ve experienced plenty of those where [chuckles] I get woken up at the three in the morning, and three in the morning is the “witching hour”, and then you’re wrestling and you’re praying and, and you’re wrestling and you’re praying, or sometimes it can be on again, off again, over a couple days, which I’ve just experienced recently. Or sometimes when it’s time to come to the radio station here, I can be going through it for several hours leading up to the moment I walk in the door. [chuckles] Because, you know, the Enemy doesn’t want us talking about this stuff and equipping people on how to overcome lust. He’s quite happy if we just keep our church services nice, and comfortable, and easy, and, you know, our little verse-by-verse teaching, and… not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if you’re gonna equip people to be warriors, you have to you have to give them the whole counsel of God. A verse-by-verse sermon is not enough. You have to be able to walk them through and understand the spiritual battle, and where all that comes in in scripture, and give them the whole picture.

So the next part of overcoming temptation is you got… there’s times when you gotta cut it off. In Matthew 5, I’ll read:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into Hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away, for it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into Hell.”

And this verse is written for, to everyone. This is a severe warning to everyone not to play games with sin. And as you might remember, some of you, we’ve been looking for a church the last couple years here locally and the phrases “sin” and “hell”, we don’t hear much in church. And this is not just here in Arizona, I’m talking about where I came from, too. You know, why is it we breeze past the warnings in scripture, especially about those that have to do with Hell? That’s… as soon as we die, there’s only one of two places we’re gonna end up in. And the scary–and sometimes terrifying–thing for me is we’re not warning our people.

I remember that.. I forget his name now, my mind just blanked. He’s the pastor on the East Coast, he said, “we’re loving people into Hell.” And, yeah, the love of God radically changed my life, but I need both. I need grace and I need truth. I need to know also that I cannot mess around with sin. That’s called the fear of the Lord.

And so there was a guy I met with for several years for lunch, about every week, and he kept coming to me week after week saying, “Well, I looked at porn on my phone,”” and “Hey, Bill, you need to put an app on your phone,” or “Hey, Bill, you need to get a dumb phone,” or “Hey, Bill, you need to do something.” And then he gave me the classic Christian cop-out, “Well, I’ll pray about it.” You know, that [chuckles] we Christians have our cop-outs, and the “I’ll pray about it,” is one of them. And there’s nothing to pray about with some issues. There’s some issues when God says, “Cut it off.” Man, we gotta cut it off. And we can’t screw around. So we need these warnings. We need to hear this stuff from the pulpit. We need to hear about Hell. And we need to be reminded of that at some point. And so… and today, in our comfy Christian churches that many are performance-driven, we need to hear it a lot more. And when you see the fruit of this, from people who are walking away from church because they’re just not being challenged or equipped.

And so, if porn on your phone is a problem, you’re gonna have to do something. And it, some people, it’s like they’re waiting for God to drop a thunderbolt on them. [chuckles] “Oh, God, take this away from me!” When he’s, he looks us in the face and says, “I want you to take responsibility and ownership of the things that are under your control.” So if you’ve got a phone and you’re constantly looking at porn app porn on it, then get an app. And I’m in favor of one of those apps that sends out an accountability report. To me, that’s far more effective than a porn blocker. Because a porn blocker, for most men, if we’re honest, is like a challenge. “I wanna see if I can get around it.” And I have never heard of a guy once that couldn’t get around the porn blocking feature when he wanted to.

And, all you got to, I mean… you go to the news websites and there’s sexually-charged images on there. It’s really not hard. And I’m not trying to give you tips, but… sexually-charged content is everywhere. But when I have on my phone a feature where it records every single website I visit and those reports go to my wife and my buddy, which does… that’s my way. I have that on my phone and every week my wife, and my accountability partner, he gets the reports. So, this is for me, and for everyone. And so I’d have to do a walk of shame if [chuckles] I did something stupid like that. And so you gotta take action. You can’t just… play games with this and keep falling, and falling, and falling, and playing games with it, and justifying it.

And then, sometimes, we’ve got to run. So second Timothy, 2:22 says: “Flee youthful lusts.” Around the corner from the radio station is a Dunkin Donuts and not far away from that, I think in the same shopping center is a gym. And there were… I used to come, go to Dunkin’ and grab me a coffee on the way, but, what was happening was there were women walking in with very thin, sheer… garments–for exercise–and so I get that. But, you know, yoga pant, exercise dresses, you know, dress, and tops that didn’t leave much to the imagination. And so I, I don’t need that. [chuckles] So I haven’t been to Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner in a long time. And I don’t mean I might not go someday and grab a coffee, but… you know, when I’m coming in here to talk about these things, I just don’t need that hassle. And so, sometimes you just gotta stay away from people or situations that are gonna take you down. And again: We. Are. Responsible.

Talk a few minutes about social media. So when social media… when you’re constantly flipping down your news feed, that mimics the effects of when we’re looking for pornography. So when a guy is looking for porn, he’s usually going from picture, to site, to picture, to whatever, to try and find the ultimate hit. So what he does is, he… this is a part of the brain chemistry and what it does. So guys who are masturbating and looking at porn, it depletes their dopamine–that’s the neurotransmitter in the pleasure center in the brain. And so that gets depleted, and then depression and anxiety can be a problem, and then we can obsessively start looking for porn. And it’s the same thing with social media, where you don’t even realize it when you’re hooked on it. And you’re clicking, and you’re clicking, and you’re looking, and you’re looking. So you want to minimize your time on social media and on the Internet. Me, personally, I’ve been turning my phone off for most of the weekends. I don’t check email during the weekends, for the most part. I stay away from the computer. I stay off social media. I don’t do posts, if I can avoid it, during the weekend, to give my mind a rest from all that stuff. And I also stay away from the news, too, because too much of that stuff is just toxic, especially today.

And then, prayer. Prayer is big. You wanna have a powerful prayer life. By that, I don’t mean two minutes and, “Hup! I’m off to work.” I mean spending a good forty-five minutes to an hour a day with the Lord. And you don’t gotta you don’t have to do it all in one shot. You can do it in in multiple sittings. But you wanna have an effective, powerful prayer life where you’re constantly going hard after God. We’re supposed to be committed to prayer. That’s not just something we study, that’s supposed to be our way of life, is to be a prayer warrior. The early church, they were constantly meeting for prayer meetings, and you wanna be a part of prayer meetings with other believers. And your church does have prayer meetings, right? At least I hope so. Although I can tell you from looking for a church that many of them don’t.

So, people, fire up your prayer life, fire up the prayer meetings, and let’s go to war and make our lives count for eternity.

ANNOUNCER:

Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung’s books, groups, counseling, or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org or call our office in Chandler, AZ at 719-888-5144. Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, e-mail us at email@blazinggrace.org, or call the office at 719-888-5144.

From Letitia:

• “If you want to find Jesus, you go to the broken. I think I’ve learned more from them than from a trillion sermons.”
• “We (the church) are going to have to step out and take some high level risks.”
• “I’m just so thankful that God saved me from a boring Christian life.”

Podcast Transcript:

ANNOUNCER:

This radio program is PG-13. Parents strongly cautioned – some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Jesus’s mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound. For those who want more than status-quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung:

Mike Genung, Host, Blazing Grace Radio:

Hey, Mike Genung here, and welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. A couple of months ago, I ran into a news story on an Australian news website, and the title was “Disruptive Women Leave the Church World to Reach the Brokenhearted“, and that caught me. I’ll read you a couple of paragraphs from it. It says, “You might think the last place you’d find a Christian anti-porn campaigner is in a brothel. But Letitia Shelton regularly visits the brothels and strip clubs in her hometown in Queensland, Australia. In fact, she’s been visiting sex workers for years. For the past 22 years, Letitia Shelton has been leading a radical movement. It’s a movement made up of Christian women from different denominations who, together, are ministering in the same way Jesus did, moving beyond the four walls of the Church to serve those in need in their local communities”. They quote Letitia, saying, “If you want to find Jesus, you go to the broken. I’ve learned more from them than from a trillion servants”. We’re blessed to have today Letitia calling in from Australia. Letitia, thank you so much for doing this. Welcome to the program.

Letitia Shelton, Founder, City Women:

Hello, Mike. Thank you for having me.

Mike:

So I want to invite you to share your story, stories about your ministry, and what you see there.

Letitia:

Well, that’s a huge open-ended question. [laughs] We’ve been on a journey for the last 20 years. How do we, together as churches, reach our city? How do we pastor a city? We’ve got to do these things together. We always say, “It takes a city-wide church to win a city-wide battle”. So 20 years ago, when we became aware of some of the issues in our city, I thought, “We’ve got to work together as churches.” The biggest sin in the city is the disunity of the Church. The most dysfunctional family in a city is the Church. We compete. We don’t join together. We work against each other. So we’ve been on a journey of “How do we not only move into our community, but how do we work together in that way?”. So I started the organization “City Women” 20 years ago to mobilize women across the churches to work together into our city. So not only have we been involved in strip clubs and brothels, but we’ve been in our schools. We’ve been helping refugees, kids in care, pregnant women, women on drugs, the whole range. So it’s just been an exciting journey.

Mike:

The article mentions where you took 20 girls away to the mountains and five of the girls were sitting around a table and sharing about [being] sexually abused. Talk about that.

Letitia:

Yeah, that was one of the catalysts that really kicked it off for me. That was our very first camp – back in 2001, would you believe? – after the mayor of our city had challenged us to get outside church and do something for the young people of our city. So we took away 20 girls up to the mountains, just 2 hours from where I live, and had these five girls sitting around the table. On the second night they’re still sharing their abuse stories, and so it was, I guess, a bit of an epiphany for me that night, realizing, “What the heck are we doing?” We are so busy inside our church, but we’ve got to get outside and move the Church into the pain.

I think quite often we expect the world to come into the Church but that’s not going to happen… it certainly won’t happen in Australia. People don’t come just to do religious duties. So it’s been a continued journey of, “How do we mobilize people?” and hearing those girls stories that night certainly woke me up to the fact that we have got to be a lot more, I guess, on the front-foot and running into the pain, instead of expecting it to come to us.

Mike:

Here in the US, we see numbers of two-thirds of Christian men in the church, and 30% of women in the church, viewing pornography. 74% of youth viewing porn, and sexting is blowing up in our youth. What do you see there in Australia?

Letitia:

Yeah, exactly the same. It’s a worldwide culture, unfortunately. We’ve all got access to the same mobile phones, don’t we? Have access to the same garbage. I’ve just been in a little country called Fiji, little Pacific island off the east coast of Australia. Population is only a million people, but they rate fourth highest in the world for googling porn. And 64% of their nation attends church! So these same issues are everywhere, unfortunately, because it’s a global culture that are seeking to destroy lives.

So we decided in our city about five years ago that we would address the issue of pornography, and we launched a campaign called “A City Free From Pornography”. Now that might seem like a bit of a crazy title, or an impossible goal, which in the natural it probably is, but the kingdom of God coming to my city looks like a city free from porn. I think it’s important that we declare something that is different.

We’ve been just wanting to highlight and really educate our city on the harms of porn, especially the parents. I think so often they don’t have a clue what is going on, and kids are into it, but parents don’t know how to speak to their kids. So part of our campaign has been to do billboards, which happens around a lot of cities. But we’ve done radio ads, television ads, school presentations, church talks… and I’m just actually, today, heading off right up to the top of Australia to cycle my bike 1000 km – which I don’t know how many miles that is, sorry – but I’m raising money to get a book into homes in my city. It’s a book on how to speak to your kids about pornography.

So I’m doing this cycling trip and I’ve raised $107,000 so far, and we’ve been able to deliver 19,000 books into homes. So trying to get on the front-foot and give parents of our city a resource. Even though it’s available online and they could get it for free, I just want a hard copy of a resource that fits in their home, maybe for years, and makes them think about pornography and what it’s doing to their children and how to speak to their kids. So we’re just having a go and doing what we can with the limited resources we have. But yeah, it’s fun.

Mike:

What we see here is that kids are getting smartphones as early as age six, and then we have people come people come to us for help, and it’s a parent and they’re saying, “My nine or ten year old is addicted to porn, what do I do?” So that connects with what you’re saying about parents haven’t gotten a clue. Is that what you’re seeing there?

Letitia:

Absolutely, yeah. And again, parents parenting is hard enough without having to keep up to date with the latest pornography, and where it’s coming from, and how it’s affecting our kids. But unfortunately, you can’t parent without talking about pornography these days, and it’s damaging effects. Our Australian government surveyed Australian parents, and 77% of parents believe it’s their job to speak to their kids about pornography, but less than half actually do, just because they don’t know what to say or how to say it. So we’re trying to take away any excuses by putting a resource into their hands. So anyway, I’ll be cycling for the next two weeks.

Mike:

You must be in great shape then. That’s 650 miles on our side.

Letitia:

Okay, you’ve done a good job. I might be by the end of it, because I’ve been overseas the last month. I have some limited training. But anyway, I hope for the best.

Mike:

So tell us what you encounter in the way of spiritual warfare.

Letitia:

Yeah, there’s always opposition, but I’ve got to be honest, a lot of things… I don’t know, I just feel the grace of God in a lot of what we do, and we experience a lot of favor. Yes, there’s opposition and I’ve got some great prayer teams, but I don’t make it a big focus. You just got to keep going and keep walking, all that God has called you for, the long term. We’ve been at this for over 20 years now and we’re not going away anytime soon, so it just takes a long term obedience in the same direction, doesn’t it?

Mike:

Yes, it does.

Letitia:

Making sure you got good prayer teams, you walk in wisdom, you have good people surrounded by you. But I think as we’ve worked together as churches, the Bible says God commands a blessing, and you really experience a different grace and joy that you don’t when you’re just doing it on your own. I think a lot of our spiritual warfare comes because we’re trying to fight alone, and the Enemy can pick us off easily. But fighting together is God’s way, and it brings a lot of fruit and joy in that. So I don’t want to make light of the work of the Enemy, but he’s not my number one problem.

Mike:

Well, when I go and speak, sometimes I’ll ask the audience to raise their hand if they meet with another believer consistently for the purpose of prayer and support. Usually only about 15% put their hands up.

Letitia:

Yeah.

Mike:

So that goes back to what we see here, is most Christians are isolated.

Letitia:

Yep. No, they can be. Most churches are isolated, and most ministries are isolated. When you think that God has called us to be one body, there’s one body in each city. There will be many congregations, but we’re the Church of Jesus, and the sooner we can find each other, the more powerful, and can make a greater impact.

Mike:

One quote from something you said in the news article was, “If we can have less porn, we’ll have less domestic violence, we’ll have less rape, we’ll have less abortions, we’ll have less broken marriages”. So it’s really preventative. Talk about that. Because I think a lot of people think, “Well, porn is just… we’re just looking at pictures, we’re not really hurting anyone”.

Letitia:

Yeah. This is why I started our campaign in our city, because when you look at all the research, pornography fuels all those things you just mentioned. While we work with vulnerable women and girls – and we’ll continue to pick up the pieces and help those suffering – you want to prevent and get to the bottom of what is causing a lot of this pain. I’m not sure what it’s like in your nation, but our nation has a huge domestic violence problem, and we spend billions of dollars per year trying to fix it. But no one wants to address the issue of pornography. Not that porn causes every bit of domestic violence, but it sure does a lot, and shapes those violent tendencies within – especially young boys – from a young age, and their ability to look at girls and women as human beings. So, yes, we’ve got to begin to speak up and it’s not always a popular discussion. But especially as I keep it focused on our children, no one disagrees that kids should not see pornography. If we can stop them from seeing it and ending down roads and years of addiction, hopefully that will stop them from acting out in ways that could end them up in prison and with criminal charges.

In the nation of Fiji, where I’ve just been, I’ve got a friend who works in the prison in the capital city, and his job is to interview sex offenders as they come in, and he said 100% of them have been addicted to porn. 100% of the sex offenders. So is that a coincidence? No, not at all. So that’s why we stand up, and not just to stop these evil things from happening, but we want to see beautiful marriages, beautiful relationships, beautiful intimacy and sexuality. So we’ve got to fight for the beauty of all that God has created, don’t we?

Mike:

Amen. So on a nationwide basis in Australia, do you see pastors talking openly about porn and equipping people on how to overcome and break free from it, or what do you see?

Letitia:

The by and large, no. I mean, there will be little pockets, and maybe the youth pastor will do one or two talks a year. But generally, no, it’s not on their radar. Again, it depends. Some are brilliant. But that’s not really the majority, and that’s why they have me come and speak. It’s hard for them to keep up to date with where it’s all at – not that they need to be up to date – but look at a big rate to see the church engage in a lot more of the cultural issues, not just porn. And not just speak about them, but actually come up with solutions in their cities, really. Because yes we need to talk to our people, but we’re also here to pastor a city.

That’s why I just didn’t start a campaign to the churches in my city. I started a campaign to the city, because actually Jeremiah 29: says, “When you seek the welfare of the city, you will be blessed.” So it’s amazing that as you look at the bigger picture first, it trickles down into the churches as well. Very few pastors think city-wide and think with the big vision like that. And that’s okay. They’re not all wired that way. But there’s people – that’s why we need the body of Christ – because there’s people in our cities who think bigger, and we need to tap into each other. Otherwise we’re going to get nowhere, and we are getting nowhere. Look at our nations, your nation and my nation. If only we’d stop and go, “Is that really working as churches? No. What does the Bible say?” But we continue on thinking that we’ve got the latest and greatest, don’t we?

Mike:

The early Church was devoted to prayer, fellowship, and teaching, and they changed the world. And we focus on the worship band and the teaching, and we’re crumbling.

Letitia:

Yeah, well, when you look at the books of the Bible, Corinthians was written to one church in Corinth. Philippians was written to one church in Philippi. So they weren’t all these little denominations there that were competing against each other. They were devoted together in unity, meeting together daily, and the Spirit of God fell upon them and they turned the world upside down.

Mike:

You’re quoted, and this really resonated with me, “I’m so thankful that God saved me from a boring Christian life”, and I can relate to that because I’d rather be right in the thick of the fight than sitting on the sidelines and watching.

Letitia:

God calls all of us into an adventure with Him, and I’ve just been called to the vulnerable in my city. But wherever people find themselves – we’re all missionaries, aren’t we?

Mike:

Yep.

Letitia:

Whether we’re a truck driver, or mother at home, we’re on the street with neighbors. Whether we’re a school student, we’re at school. So we’re meant to be a missionary. And again, I think most… 99% of Christians want to wake up every day going, “I’m going to the mission field today”. They think it’s a boring life. So they’re not engaging with the Spirit of God to see his kingdom come, where we find ourselves, the missionaries, each day. So we just allow the boredom of life, rather than stepping out and seeing what God wants to do, where he’s placed us, and taking some risks.

Every time I take a risk, yes, it’s scary, but I find that God is out there in the unknown. He’s waiting for me to step out. He needs us to move. We’re his plan A for his kingdom come. I don’t know who else we think is going to do it, but when God decided that he wanted to populate the Earth, he put us, human beings, and Adam and Eve were given a job right at the beginning. So I think we don’t have an understanding of what our role is on Earth, and we live just like the rest of the world, and it’s boring. And just going to church every week is boring, too. Maybe not your church [laughs] but mine can be, sometimes. So I’m thankful that God gave me a bigger vision than even just pastoring my own church. He gave me a bigger vision that we’re here for the city, that we’ve got to do it together, and that we’re going to have to step out and take some high-level risks, which are exciting.

Mike:

I couldn’t agree more. I also agree with what you said about sometimes church can be boring, because we’ve been looking for a new church here for the last two years. Sometimes it just feels like there’s too much of an emphasis on comfort and making people feel good, but not challenging them to take those risks like you’re talking about.

Letitia:

You know that you’re following Jesus and he can… obviously, he’s got you on a journey that’s exciting as well.

Mike:

We’re doing a billboard campaign ourselves in Las Vegas beginning the end of next month. So we’re right there with you.

Letitia:

Good on you. Yeah, keep going.

Mike:

How did your billboard campaign go?

Letitia:

Yeah, we just kind of do them every… probably twice a year. I’m in – compared to las Vegas, I’m in a tiny little city, called Toowoomba with about 150,000, so we’re nothing like you guys. But we’ve got some big digital billboards in the middle of town which we use, and whenever we put them up there there’s always a greater foot traffic to our website. We always get more letters of abuse. Conversations are happening in workplaces. The local newspaper usually picks up on it. So to me, it just keeps creating conversations, and if you can send people back to our website where we have a lot of information and resources and just local people speaking. So, again, it’s not going to change the world, but it’s just kind of something to keep a pebble in your shoes to make you feel discomfortable and get the conversations happening. Again, this is long term stuff, so one billboard campaign’s not going to win the day, but I just got to keep going for many years from different angles, I think are really important.

Mike:

Yeah, it’s “planting seeds” is what I would call it.

Letitia:

Yep.

Mike:

So talk about City Women. I think we have about a minute left here. Talk about City Women. So who’s coming to you to help out? What does your organization look like?

Letitia:

Yes, we’re an umbrella for about ten different ministries that are helping different people in the city. I mentioned before, we’re out there with the sex workers, the refugees, kids in care, school kids, pregnant women, a whole range. So each of those ministries have different leaders over them, and our job has just been to make women across the city aware of these ministries and how they can get involved. Generally, I find that women really want to do something; they feel the pain of a city, they want to get involved, they’re happy to work together, they don’t have so many hangups. So, yeah, it’s just great to see them come forward and want to volunteer, in whatever area they’re passionate about. As we’ve work together, we’ve been able to accomplish a lot more than if we do this work by ourselves. So that’s the general gist of how it works. It’s been an exciting journey, and it’s changing. Things start and then they stop. There’s seasons for different ministries that we’ve run, but it’s just been an exciting journey as we’ve tried to look at how we can meet the needs.

Mike:

Well, we’re out of time and I want to thank you very much, Letitia, for joining us and calling us. I know it was five in the morning, your time when you called.

Letitia:

Yeah.

Mike:

I love what you’re doing, and I love the impact you’re making. So thank you for joining us, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Letitia:

My pleasure, Mike. Thank you so much.

ANNOUNCER:

Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung’s books, groups, counseling, or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can email us at email@blazinggrace.org or call our office in Chandler, Arizona at (719)-888-5144. Again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, email us at email@blazinggrace.org, or call the office at (719) 888-5144.

Episode Transcript

ANNOUNCER:

This radio program is PG-13. Parents strongly cautioned – some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Jesus’s mission was to comfort those who mourn, bind up the broken hearted, proclaim liberty to captives, and open prison doors for those who are bound. For those who want more than status quo Christianity has to offer, Blazing Grace Radio begins now. And here is your host, Mike Genung.

MIKE GENUNG, HOST, BLAZING GRACE RADIO:

Hey, Mike Genung here, and welcome back to Blazing Grace Radio. Glad to have you along. For those of you who might be listening in for the first time and wondering who is Blazing Grace? We are a Ministry to persons who struggle with porn addiction, sex addiction, adultery… and we put equal emphasis on the wife’s recovery. So we minister to men, women, teens, youth. We have people who come to us for help at every age, from age ten all the way up to age 80. So sex and porn addiction in the Church have reached every age group. So we help everyone. We do counseling for teens…

Usually what happens is a couple comes to us for help, and probably the average age of a couple coming to us for help is in their forties, fifties, sometimes sixties. They can get up there in their seventies, too, because normally what happens is a guy doesn’t tell his wife about his porn problem until he’s well into his marriage, even into his forties. Later their marriage blows up and then they start looking for help. Maybe he doesn’t want to get help for a while, and then the marriage gets worse. So then eventually they come to us, and then when we have marriages coming to us in crisis, basically – which I love, because I love being on the front lines and fighting for God’s people and seeing change and growth and restoration.

So one brief announcement. Here in Chandler, Arizona, we have a Men’s Group, a Blazing Grace Men’s Group, going. They meet Monday nights at 6:30. Gene and Bo lead that group, and they’ve been on the show several times, Bo was on it several weeks ago. This is a man’s group for men who want to recover from porn addiction, adultery, sex addiction. Now we have a new Wives’ Group, Blazing Grace Wives Group. It’s actually led by Jean’s wife at a separate location. This is for wives whose husbands struggle with porn addiction. They meet at a separate location, also Monday nights at 6:30. So if you’re interested in participating, getting help in one of those groups, then send us an email or contact us, go to blazinggrace.org and we’ll hook you up with them.

Also for those of you outside of Arizona – or outside of Phoenix, I should say – we have our phone groups, prayer groups – by phone, by Zoom – prayer groups for free. So feel free to participate, especially in the prayer groups, because every single believer should be participating in a prayer group these days, especially in the dark times that we’re in.

And wow, spiritual warfare. Being on a front-line Ministry like this, I get my share of spiritual warfare, and the last 24 hours have been up there. Last night – or yesterday – I was talking to a woman on the phone who I’ll be interviewing next week, and I started talking to her. A minute into the call all of a sudden the phones went down, called her back, phone disconnected again. Then I told her after the second time, “Wow, somebody really doesn’t want me or wants this phone call to happen”. I slept horrible last night. One of those nights you don’t sleep well and some praying off and on. And then this morning I go into the office and just like chaos. Not from our team in the office, but just from things going outside the office that was coming at us. So it was chaos and stress leading up to the moment that I left to drive here to the studio. So it’s game on.

It’s been game on for decades, actually, with the spiritual battle against the Church. And we are a Church at war. So the question always has to be, “Are we acting like a Church at war? Are we acting like a Church that is in a country that has lost significant ground and the Enemy is taking more ground day-by-day? Are we equipping people to be overcomers? Are we talking openly about the issues that people are struggling with?” And that’s one of the things we endeavor to do at this show, is open up wide the issues and the areas where people are struggling with, and in bondage to.

So today, I’ve already started to touch on spiritual warfare, and a big key to that is prayer. And I texted a buddy of mine and said, hey, “I’m taping today, would you pray for me?” And prayer is a big deal. But also knowing who you are in Christ. I am God’s Son, and so we are his beloved Sons and Daughters. You have to understand and believe in your identity in Christ. Prayer is big. Identity in Christ is big. And sometimes perseverance is a big deal. So some of these spiritual battles… aren’t always over in just a minute after you say a prayer. Sometimes they can go on hours, or even a day or so, and then just on and off. That’s because that can be because there’s something God wants to do. The Enemy sees what’s coming down the pike, and he wants to do everything he can to throw you off. So perseverance, sometimes you just got to stand there and let the storm blow by. You keep going. You keep fighting and you keep resisting. Submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Each of you who are a believer in Jesus Christ, you have the Holy Spirit of the living God in you. You have more power than you realize. Prayer is your most powerful weapon. Right there alongside that is the word of God, knowing the truth, knowing the truth of what he says in scripture is about you, and about the spiritual battle, and then what our role is to be as believers. It’s not to be comfortable Christians sitting on the sidelines, who go into Church Sunday morning, take in the show or the performance, and then go home, and then nothing changes, and we continue to lose ground. That is not equipping people and challenging people for the battle ahead.

So today I’ll be talking about three areas, three key areas that I believe that if we as a Church were to delve into, we would have an enormous impact.

The first one is spiritual warfare, like I just mentioned. I know that’s not a positive or encouraging topic, but believe me, your home is not safe from spiritual attack or the Enemy coming against your kids and flipping them, getting them exposed to pornography, or whatever it is. So you have to realize our homes are not spiritual safe zones all the time. They can be with prayer, and we pray a lot at home, but there’s still times when the Enemy gets in and he messes with and causes strife. We have to realize our homes, our churches and our families are in an intense spiritual battle.

So I’m talking about spiritual warfare, youth and sex. Those are the three areas we really need to be punching in on these days. Let me hit all three today. So I have in front of me a survey from the General Social Survey that was posted recently, actually in 2021. They have a survey of the religious affiliation of youth, 18-35 year olds – millenials. And in 1980, 80% identified as Christians, 18-35 year olds. Think about that. That’s a pretty high number. Fast forward to 2021, and the number dropped like a lead balloon to 48%. That’s a huge chunk gone of youth that no longer identify as Christians. At the same time, in 1988, those who had no affiliation with any kind of religion, they were at 7%. Today, the none’s are at 45%. So we are losing our youth, and I’ve had guests on who have spoken to that. They see that 80% of our youth are walking away from the Church by their early 20s for various reasons.

My question is, “Why aren’t we talking about this from the pulpit on Sunday morning?” We should be warning parents, “Hey, 80%! That means if you got four kids, like I do, you got a high probability that, unless significant things change, three of your kids might walk away from God by the time they’re in their early 20s!” Why aren’t we talking about this openly Sunday morning? Man, we should be, like, pulling out all stops, and we should be talking about this Sunday morning and saying, Parents, you cannot play games with your walk with God. Your kids are watching you. They’re watching your relationship with the Lord, your prayer life. And Dads, if you’re viewing pornography, which – stats show that two thirds of Christian men are viewing porn – that’s not exactly going to be a good example for youth either. They can smell a phony. Our kids are pretty sharp.

We have to start talking about this opening from the pulpit that we have lost. We are losing, and have lost, wide segments of our youth in the Church, and the video monitors, and the other things… We’re not equipping them and sticking into their lives in the areas they’re struggling with and getting wiped out with. So spiritual warfare is intense with teenagers. The Enemy is trying to take them out before they even hit their 20s. Suicide is the number two cause of death with teens today. The number one cause of death with our youth is accidental death, like a car accident or something like that. So where does suicide come from? That’s from losing hope that’s buying into a lie, that there is no hope. We’ve got to start fighting for our youth and quit hiding from this stuff.

I mean, yeah, okay, we’re in the middle of our Bible study, our verse five study of first Corinthians, blah, blah. That’s not that that’s a bad thing, but how much longer are we going to watch the youth exit out the back door while we do nothing? I’ve talked openly that we’ve been looking for a Church here locally, and I have not heard this mentioned from a single Church, from the pulpit, once. Not only in Arizona but also in Colorado where we lived. Why is it we’re not talking about the reality of what’s going on here and that we need to have some significant changes? Most importantly, we got to be on our knees praying, and I’m going to keep screaming from the rafters that we need to become houses of prayer.

Prayer is our most powerful weapon. The early Church began with seven days of prayer, and after seven days of prayer, Peter did his first message – which you can read in minutes – and 3000 people came to Christ. But our churches, most of them are not houses of prayer. I mean, I’m talking about like 95%. I can’t even find a Church that spends time in prayer here locally. That’s not the way it should be when we’re given the model of a Church that’s devoted to fellowship, prayer, and the Word. We do one out of three, we do the Word, and we do the worship band.

Prayer is critical right now. We need to be praying and tearing down the heavens for our youth, for those who are in bondage to sin. We’ve got to be equipping our youth in these areas. We’ve got to be speaking them to them openly about the sexual issues that many are getting in bondage to. I can say this because we’re having more and more teens coming to us for help who are addicted to pornography. When was the last time you had anybody from the pulpit talk about youth being addicted to porn? Let alone adults addicted to porn? Which… those numbers are up at the two thirds of men viewing porn numbers. But sexting is blowing up. And yes, Mom and Dad, that’s your sweet little Jimmy and your sweet little Karen. We got to start opening this stuff up. We got to stop backing down from it. We got to start talking openly that something is going wrong here, and we’re not ministering to people where they’re struggling.

So for the rest of this show, I’m talking about sex and pornography, as you’ve heard me, in the context of the Five Non-Negotiables that a man must do if he wants freedom from pornography. So there’s no negotiating with these things. If you’re in bondage to porn, you’ve got to do them. There’s a lot more to this than just, “Hey, show me not how to look at pictures”.

So first off, James 5:16, “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power, as it is working”. You must meet with another man or group for the purpose of accountability, support, encouragement and prayer once a week, every week, for the rest of your life. That doesn’t mean you have to go to a support group for the rest of your life, but isolation must be rooted out from your life. Most Christians – I’m talking 80% plus – are isolated, which is why there’s such an epidemic of pornography in the Church.

When COVID hit in 2020 and everybody was forced into isolation and lockdowns, our requests for help just shot right through the roof, which shows us the problems we have with dealing with being alone in silence and isolation, and what our true coping mechanisms are. You have to be connected with another brother once a week, and this goes just as much for women. Ladies, you got to be connected with another sister, too. We have to remove isolation from the Church. Acts 2:42, “They were devoted to fellowship”. We’re not devoted to fellowship… A performance-driven service is not enough. So what that means is we break people up into small groups of two or three. We have them share, we have them pray for each other, and you would make an enormous impact on believers today.

Next, the second of the Five Non-Negotiables. You must make and execute an action plan to remove all the stumbling blocks of temptation that are under your control. In Matthew 5 we’re taught, “If your right hand caused you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better that you lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell”. Jesus is talking to everyone. He’s talking to believers. He’s talking to everyone. So you can’t just say, “Well, that’s just for non-believers”. No, he’s talking to everyone. Some people have this attitude like, “Well, God, would you take it away from me?” Meanwhile, guys are binging on their phone every day, or whatever it is, once a week… No, he puts the responsibility on cutting off the summing blocks in our hands. This is a principle that goes across the board.

Whether it’s struggling with porn, or lust, or masturbation, or pride, or arrogance, or overeating, or drugs, or alcohol, or whatever it is, we are responsible for cutting off the stumbling blocks of sin under our control.

So if you have Netflix or something at home and it’s a stumbling block, turn it off. Or Apple TV, or whatever it is. Put an app on your phone that has the function that will send an accountability report to your wife, or a buddy, or both. From where I sit, the porn-blocking feature is okay, but I have never heard of a guy who could not get around the porn-blocking feature when he wanted to. It’s like a challenge, and it really doesn’t take much. I’m not going to give you any hints here, so you must cut off the stumbling blocks under your control. No more playing games with sin. That doesn’t mean we don’t grapple with it. That doesn’t mean we’re going to live a perfect life. That’s not happening this side of eternity. But we have to start going after the areas that are taking us down.

Then, on a weekly or a bi-weekly basis, husbands: make and keep an appointment with your wife where she can ask you any questions she wants. This has several purposes. One, for accountability in the marriage, but also to rebuild trust, because trust is rebuilt by our actions. The big mistake a lot of guys make is they don’t want to tell their wives anything, and then she starts battling with fear and insecurity so that flares her up. So when you do this where you meet together once every one to two weeks, that resolves that issue, but also it relieves the pressure of her to want to keep asking, “Hey, how are you doing? How are you doing? How are you doing?”

So when you have a weekly or a bi-weekly appointment, you’re rebuilding trust in your marriage, but you’re also taking up humility because it takes humility to answer those questions. When she looks you in the eye and says, “Hey, how are you doing with porn and masturbation?” And you know you have to answer those questions. It will help you because the next time you’re tempted, you will think long and hard about, “Man, I’m going to have to tell her next week, I don’t really want to do that”. You see what I’m saying here? It’s going to make you think twice before you go jumping off the cliff. It rebuilds trust, which is a big deal. Trust is the cornerstone of every relationship. It is the cornerstone of marriage. If you don’t have trust, you don’t have a relationship. So this is a critical piece. When she asks those questions, do not get defensive, and whatever you do, do not lie, which is the Fourth Non-Negotiable, which is: all lying and hiding must stop.

So no matter what your wife asked you from this day forward, do not lie. If she looks at you and says, “Hey, did you masturbate yesterday?” and you did, do not lie. I’ve heard a lot of wives say that the lying hurts them more than what the husband did. A lot of guys are blind to this fact, but this goes back to trust being the cornerstone of marriage and of every relationship: do not lie. Own up to it. That way, then you can both move forward. But the thing is, our wives just look at us and they know when we’re lying. I mean, they got that 6th sense thing going.

Every once in a while my wife will look at me, “Are you okay?” and I’m having had a bad day or whatever. “No no no, I’m fine”. It’s not that I did porn or anything, but I just had a rough day. I didn’t want to talk about it. She gives me that look that looked like, “You’re full of it”. And I’m like, “All right, no, I’m not okay. I didn’t have the best day. I just don’t want to talk about it”. But when it comes to asking those questions about how you’re doing with lust, do not lie. You will keep your marriage broken and torn apart if you lie. That has to be removed; no matter what she asked, do not lie. Leviticus, 19:11. Simple. One of the Ten Commandments: do not lie.

And then the Fifth Non-Negotiable is: you must work to resolve the heart issues that are driving your sex addiction, or your porn addiction, or whatever it is. Because this is not as simple as having a little bit of accountability and going to a group. There are always core root issues from the heart that drive sexual sin and pornography, and what those are usually is lies. I don’t care who I’m working with – man, woman – after I spent time with them, there’s always a package of somewhere between eight and ten lies that get exposed that we ended up praying through breaking and renouncing. Those lies are what drive the sexual sin, and until those lies are broken, until that bondage is broken, then the chances are sky high that you will stay in bondage to this stuff.

A lot of guys, let’s face it, a lot of us came from fathers who were not emotionally engaged, or involved, or knew how to be. Most men grew up in homes – and I’m talking Christian homes, too – where dad was just checked out. He just did his job, did his thing, came home, went to bed, and that’s about all we got from them. In extreme cases, there was physical abuse or beatings. So you have to be willing to go there and face your heart, and face the heart wounds, and face the things that are taking you down. That’s where the healing comes from, and that’s where the light and the sunshine begins to shine in from the Holy spirit, the love, and the joy, and the peace come from, and the hope come from both for you and your wife.

So hey, if you’re hurting and you want help, don’t mess around. Contact us, participate in one of our groups. Eight week course for men, ten week course for wives. There’s my books and I want to challenge you, keep challenging you. Work with us and let’s set up a conference to make a difference. Thanks and we’ll see you next time.

ANNOUNCER:

Blazing Grace is a nonprofit international Ministry for the sexually broken and the spouse. Please visit us at blazinggrace.org for information on Mike Genung’s books, groups, counseling or to have Mike speak at your organization. You can email us at email@blazinggrace.org or call our office in Chandler, Arizona at (719) 888-5144 again, visit us at blazinggrace.org, email us at email@blazinggrace.org or call the office at (719) 888-5144.