Video coming soon. The video teaching for Day 21 is still in production. Read the full lesson below, it will be added here as soon as it is ready.
Bear with me: this one's a bit of a rant, but I mean every word of it.
Here's what I've seen, over and over, for years: pornography is at pandemic levels in the pews. Not "a struggle some men have." Pandemic levels. It's sitting in the third row on Sunday morning. It's teaching your kids' Sunday school class. It is, more often than anyone wants to admit, standing in the pulpit. And yet, in a huge number of churches, it's almost never named out loud: not from the platform, not in a sermon, not in a men's ministry announcement. It's the elephant sitting in literally every pew, and pastors (good men, godly men) walk right past it week after week, because it's uncomfortable, because it's awkward, because nobody wants to be the guy who brings it up.
I understand the discomfort. I've felt it myself, standing in my own pulpit. But comfort was never the assignment.
Today's assignment: go tell your pastor
Actually do it, not just think about it.
If you go to a church and you have a pastor (an actual man, with an actual name, who stands up and preaches to you), go to him, specifically, and tell him the truth about this fight. Not vaguely. Not "pray for me, I'm dealing with some stuff." Tell him what it actually is.
If you've already told him, great. Or maybe you're not in a context where that's really possible right now: between churches, or part of a recovery group, or a private accountability text thread functioning as your real spiritual community. If that's genuinely your structure, that counts. I'm not asking you to manufacture a pastor relationship you don't have. I'm asking you not to use "I don't really have one" as an excuse when the truth is you do: you've just never told him anything real.
Why this matters so much
"Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you."
Read that carefully. Your pastor is going to stand before God one day and give an account for how he watched over your soul, not in a vague, general sense, for you, specifically. And how can a man watch over something he doesn't know is under attack? How can he pray for a battle he doesn't know you're fighting? How can he preach toward something he doesn't know is sitting in his own congregation, if every man in it keeps it perfectly hidden from him?
You are not protecting your pastor by keeping this from him. You are disarming him. You're asking him to shepherd blind.
Let the men set over you actually know.
The workbook walks you through exactly how to have this conversation, and the community gives you men who already have.
And there's something else in that verse worth noticing: "let them do this with joy, not with groaning." A pastor who finally hears the truth from a man in his church, who gets to walk with him toward freedom instead of guessing in the dark: that's not a burden to him. That's joy. That's the actual job he signed up for. What wears a pastor down isn't hearing hard things. It's finding out later that hard things were happening the whole time and nobody trusted him enough to say so.
What to do
Go tell your pastor. Or if you genuinely don't have one right now, go tell the men who are functioning as that structure for you: fully, honestly, not the managed version.
The men who keep watch over your soul can't do their job in the dark any better than you can do yours.
This is Day 21 of Victory Over Pornography. Tomorrow: the hardest conversation in this whole process, should you tell your wife. Continue to Day 22 →