Brother “Bob’s” Testimony, Single

I grew up on the mission field but even there, it was easy to get ensnared in sexual sin. I masturbated for the first time when I was 12 years old. There was immediate guilt and shame that followed, but it felt too good to stop and I was too scared to tell my parents. I masturbated at least once a day for the next five years, sometimes more. I didn’t masturbate quite as much when I was 17-22 years old, more like 3 or 4 times a week. That means that in the last ten years, I’ve masturbated at least 2600 times. I looked at my first porn magazine in a field when I was 12 years old. For the next year, I took bike rides around the neighborhood every weekend, sometimes for 4 hours at a time, looking for scraps of pornographic magazines and masturbating in the bushes. When I was 15, I started looking at swimsuit models on the Internet whenever my parents were out of the house. Within a year, I was looking at hardcore Internet porn whenever I got the chance. At 17, I got bored with pictures and started watching videos online. I didn’t look at Internet porn as frequently when I started attending college (because I assumed the IT department knew what I was looking at), and I didn’t have the opportunity to masturbate as much since I was normally surrounded by guys in the dorm. However, I would binge during breaks when I was away from school, so my heart wasn’t changing at all. That’s where I was at before I came to Pureheart.

I was sick of the cycle of shame and guilt that I was going through. I was starting to serve as a youth leader at a local church, and I felt like a hypocrite since my thought life was such a mess. I had been in three different peer-led accountability groups as a teen, and all of them had disbanded when we kept failing and eventually hiding our sexual sins. Hearing Tim and Jay speak jolted me awake, and gave me hope that I could really be transformed on the inside.

Pureheart has made standing up against temptation and oppression a reality for me. Instead of just shoving information down my throat and saying “You should do this,” Pureheart has walked me through step by step, encouraging me to confess routinely to Christian brothers, speak truth into each other’s lives, pray for each other, and support one another throughout the week. My identity in Christ has been ingrained into me. I now know the difference between a spiritual attack and a fleshly desire, and how I can practically deal with both. I have cut down masturbation from 3 or 4 times a week to only 1 time a week. I even went 40 days without masturbating at one point (something I have never done before). I went without looking at porn of any kind for 4 months – the longest ever for me. With the support of my brothers in Pureheart and by God’s grace, I have made it through a one-year engagement without sleeping with my fiancé – something that seemed next to impossible to me a year ago. None of this has been easy, and I have failed in every area. Yet, the greatest thing I’ve grown in is being able to confess my shortcomings openly among other Christian men, knowing that I will be accepted, pinned to the wall, challenged, encouraged, and empowered to face another day of overcoming temptation.

Having a trained counselor leading the group who has walked through everything I have and who has overcome the same temptations I face is one thing distinct about Pureheart. I haven’t seen an accountability group with this quality anywhere else. In comparison to Pureheart, the other accountability groups that I’ve been a part of were weak in their ability to dig deep and address the heart-issues of sin, shame, and denial.