How To Handle Bad Memories

You don't have to live with your past.  Replace those bad memories Biblically.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:19

This is Dr. Dave Jones, and today's episode is The Solution To Your Porn Use, is In Your Story . I received a call one day from a man wanting to know if I could help him overcome his Porn addiction. He wasn't necessarily interested in behavior modification and other theories, but wanted to know how this started. He said he was a pastor in his church and has struggled for a number of years and was hoping to learn how this started. He felt that if he could understand that, then maybe he could help the other people in his church as well, with this new knowledge.

Speaker: 0:27

First of all, a pastor confessing his sin. Second, he wanted to change. Third, he is aware that there are other people in his church struggling with porn and Fourth, he wanted to provide biblical guidance to help himself and his church to treat this sin. I'm sure we can continue with other facets in this man's life, but what a phone call. I don't get these very often with such clarity and resolve to change, God's way.

Speaker: 0:27

Most people want to cut to the chase and just want the porn to stop. What do I have to do? How long will it take? Is there a pill I can take? But this man wants to take a totally different approach, and for the first time in my practice I have never had someone approach me with such clarity and understanding. And get this, HE IS SO RIGHT.

Speaker: 0:26

So, Where do we start? How did it start? I hope that you'll just be able to settle back and sit down in an easy chair and think about something that's very important to all of us, and that's our story. We all have one and it contains good and bad memories. Some we cherish and relive and others we avoid and try to forget.

Speaker: 0:32

Let's look see what God's Word has to say about how do you handle those memories. You know, we so often sing and hear people talking about the fond memories of the past. Well, that's wonderful. God gave us our memories for very wonderful purposes. Not only so that we could savor and remember the good of the past, but also so that we could get along day by day and not have to think again afresh about every action that we take, and so on. Many things could be done simply out of habit, which is in a sense an aspect of memory. If you had to think about how to tie your shoe every morning, and which foot to put out of the bed first in the morning, which eye to open first, and how to unscrew the cap of the toothpaste, you wouldn't get to bed at midnight. Well, to breakfast anyway. We're not talking about that side of memory today. We're talking instead about the curse that sin has brought to us through our memories, some we are aware of and some we are not. That is, in a world of sin, memory, which was intended as a real and wonderful blessing for man as it was built into him, can become one of the most nagging, terrifying factors in your life. We're talking about how to handle bad memories, pornography. There are people who are listening today who are plagued with bad memories, memories of sin, memories of immorality, of failure, of the way that they've hurt other people, all sorts of vivid bad memories which they replay. Sometimes when they lie in bed at night before they go to sleep, they hardly find it possible to get sleep because those memories come back and almost as if they were reliving the scene, the TV in their minds go on and the whole world show is replayed again, again and again. Day after day, night after night they face these memories. What can be done about them? How can they be handled? What is it that can really make the difference for you?

Speaker: 3:01

The first thing that you need to do is to put the past where it belongs, into the past. Now you can't do that by just some act of will. You can't just say, Oh, I'm going to shove it all back there and stop making the past a present reality by memory. Memory just doesn't work that way. You see, you need something else to feed into that memory picture. You need to feed in a new event in the memory. You need to change the story. The story that continues to be repeated day after day and night after night needs a new conclusion to it. Instead of the bad conclusion which you remember, your initial response when you first saw that pornographic picture or pornography film, needs to be rewritten now with an epilogue, with a conclusion that changes the whole picture that says where sin abounded, grace more.

Speaker: 3:57

E very time I ask someone when they first saw porn, whether on purpose or accidentslly, everyone can tell me how old they were, where it was, what it was, who else was there and on and on. Instead of remembering the abounding sin, you now need to be able to remember even more vividly the way in which God by His grace turned the sin into a blessing by overcoming and overriding and overshadowing all the consequences and all the badness of the past by His grace. And this is exactly what you can remember in such times as those. Putting the past into the past first of all means setting all matters to rest before God .

Speaker: 4:35

Now, do you want to know where it all started? Your fasination with porn started with reaction to and response to what you saw. Some of you might recall how excited you were, how ashamed you were, how scared you were. The dopamine kicked in and gave you a rush you never had experienced before. Your brain is now acting totally different than it has ever done so before. But you want to do it again and again. You know it is wrong, or you wouldn't be so scared that someone will see you or find out about what you did. And then after the intense feeling calms down and you are back to where you thought you started, you feel bad. There may be a sense of guilt or shame for what you did, and you feel so awful. Why did I do such a thing? I am not that kind of person. And you promise God to never do that again.

Speaker: 4:35

But, life goes on and you try to get back to your life, as you understand it. Then one day you just happen to be in the same place, at the same time as you were when you first saw those pictures. And you remember how it felt. You stand there awhile just reliving the excitement you felt and how much you want to feel it again. Your body remembers and so does your brain. If you give in, your brain will take over and give you the result you want.

Speaker: 4:36

So, what should have happened? If you have never really sought forgiveness before God, that's the first thing you should have done and what you need to do now . If your sin has never yet been brought before him, if you believe in Jesus Christ as your Savior, but you have not gone to your Father and said to him, Father, I have sinned against you, then you need to do that. You need to tell God that you are sorry for that sin. That sin of idolizing porn. If you have not done that, your sin, whether it is guilt, shame, deceit, lying, whatever, will continue to be the catalyst for your ongoing porn usage. Right here is where the memory picture can be changed. Right here is where the epilogue needs a change. It's just the way it goes. That kind of pattern needs to be shattered. It needs to be busted. It needs to be shattered and broken so that they no longer prevail in your life. When you catch yourself doing that, then you have a list ready of all kinds of things that you could be doing that would be profitable and productive to do and to think about at that time that God would have you do. Now, what about the title of this episode. The Solution to your porn addiction is in you r story. How do I explain that? Well , it's a cycle.

Speaker: 7:23

Finally , it may be that your problem is not really so much a difficulty of bad memories, and bad actions, but that the bad memories are stirred up by the fact that there are present difficulties in the pattern of life that you still have. You may really have gotten forgiven by God, and yet still the problem may occur. What is wrong under these circumstances?

Speaker: 10:22

You see, the new way has to replace the old. It's a matter of repackaging with the very will of God Himself as it is expressed in His Word. So we end by saying, Lord, help us to do just that. Help us to repackage our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit as He enables us not only to understand, but to build in new patterns from the Word of God into our living. For we praise in Christ's name. Amen. Thanks for listening. Hopefully, uh if you're struggling with bad memories or you know somebody who is, the dynamic of putting off and putting on is something that we call the replacement dynamic. Stop doing that and start doing this. It's an action-oriented command, and you will feel so much better based upon the actions that you have taken. And the actions that you have taken are based upon what the Holy Spirit has guided you to do.