New To Pureheart, Hope Is Renewed
These testimonies are from current and former Pureheart counselees. Most of these men and women have broken free and now walk in consistent purity and/or healed marriages but some are still in process. These brothers and sisters, married and single, represent a wide spectrum of ages, races, nationalities, denominations, backgrounds, personalities, and levels of addiction and dysfunction but all of them have changed dramatically. If they can change, so can you! For obvious reasons, we have changed their names. Here are their stories (unedited)
Brother “Ed’s” Testimony, Single
I have only been counseling for 5 months, but already I have made some real progress. Even though I grew up in the church and had a dramatic conversion at age 15, I couldn’t shake the habit of masturbation and porn. I have never slept with a woman but I have spent countless hours looking at porn. I started with magazines at neighbor’s houses and then pornographic movies on Cable TV. After I was saved, I had several years of purity, but when I went through problems at my church, I reverted to my old ways, except that by then, I had discovered the Internet. I used to look at hardcore porn and masturbate until I literally vomited from disgust with what I was looking at—but even that didn’t stop me. My addiction killed my relationship with God and I began to withdraw from relationships, isolating myself even further. Whenever I would get stressed or had problems at work, I would binge on porn and masturbation. Of course, this only made me feel worse, which led to more binging, and so on.
I found out about Pureheart through the Internet. I now have hope that I can be pure again, my relationship with God is growing again, and I am renewing friendships with people I haven’t talked to in years. I put a filter on my computer at home and set a rule of no Internet use after midnight when I get back from work. I was pure for a month and then relapsed into masturbation and porn for several days. I then got more serious about consequences for my behavior and set up a plan with my accountability partner (my stepbrother). If I masturbate, I owe him $20 and if I look at porn, it’s $30 a pop. My stepbrother was hoping to make lot of money off me, but so far he has been very disappointed. I now have 3 months and counting entirely porn and masturbation free. My thought life is getting cleaned up as well, and I have real hope that I learn to walk in constant purity for the rest of my life. I want to be pure so that when I find the right woman, I can be someone who has a habit of purity and not sexual sin.