030 Porn Battle Plan: Killing Isolation

Isolation is the breeding ground for addiction. Freedom is actually built in the presence of other men, through honesty, accountability, and brotherhood.

Let’s just be honest about the situation: Most of your battles don’t happen in public; they happen late at night… alone… with a screen.

Here’s the truth:

Porn doesn’t survive in the light—but it thrives in the dark. 

In this episode, Joey will offer practical information about how to become accountable and learn what the Bible teaches about the power of confession.

Transcript

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Isolation is the breeding ground for addiction. Freedom is actually built in the presence of other men through honesty, accountability, and brotherhood. Without this, you're not going to find true freedom when it comes to the addiction you have with porn. So let's just be honest about the situation. Most of your battles do not happen in public. They actually happen late at night when you're alone and you have a screen in your hand. Here's the truth. Porn does not survive in the light. Instead, it thrives in the dark. And if what I have just said is true, and it is, I want you to answer this question for me. What if the real problem isn't what you're doing? What if the problem is actually the way you're fighting? Let's take a little time. Let's talk about that. Welcome to the Iron Pursuit Podcast, where men are forged by the truth of God's word. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. This podcast is a call to biblical manhood. Here, we challenge men to rise above comfort, reject passivity, and live under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Each episode is designed to strengthen your faith, sharpen your character, and equip you to lead with integrity, grit, and grace. So whether you're a husband, a father, a brother, or a friend, this is your invitation to pursue the kind of manhood that honors God and changes generations. This is the Iron Pursuit. All right, welcome back to the podcast. I'm here today to tell you that we are on episode number 30. Man, it's hard to believe we've gotten that far down the road, but here we are, and we are still in our series that I've titled The Porn Battle Plan. And we're on episode number three when it comes to the porn battle plan, and we're going to talk about killing isolation and why you cannot beat this addiction alone. If you have been struggling with uh a porn addiction for any um any amount of time, most likely uh you you probably have been, or uh you know, well, maybe not. Maybe you hadn't been struggling with it at all. Maybe you're the kind of guy that's like, hey man, you know, I have a, I know I'm I watch porn, and I mean this is something that I do, and I'm really not struggling with it. Maybe you're not struggling with it. Maybe you're just comfortable with it. Um if that's you, I don't know why you're watching this podcast. Maybe you need to scroll on to uh to another one uh because this one has to do with you struggling with this and you wanting to eliminate it from your life. And so we're gonna talk about isolation and how we can kill isolation. Now, I want you to just kind of think about some of the things that I said um in the in the intro. Isolation is the breeding ground for addiction. And if you if you've ever experienced what I'm talking to you about, you understand that what I'm saying is true. You want to isolate, you want to get away from everybody else. And whenever you do isolate, it just breeds that addiction and that draw and that pull towards this detrimental activity of your soul. It feeds it more and more and more. I want you to remember in the last episode, we talked about rewiring your thoughts and your motives with different habits and intentions. And at the end of episode 29, I gave you four uh practical strategies to help you start implementing what what I what I taught what I called rewiring your mind around pornography and any other toxic behavior you may have. And I I'm gonna list those real quick. I told you that you need to learn how to interrupt the pattern by identifying the triggers that are in your life, the things that are triggering, making you um think about or making you crave uh the porn addiction. So you have to interrupt the pattern. The second thing was you need to starve those old pathways by calling it cutting it off cold turkey. You can't uh wean yourself off of porn like you would weaning yourself off of nicotine, okay? That's that's just not gonna happen. And then you have to build new pathways. So once you've identified those triggers, you begin to form new actions. So instead of running to the addiction, instead of running to the video or running to the whatever the thing is that you keep going to, you have to start trying to um do do something more tangible. Like, you know, you need to pray, maybe you need to get out and go for a walk, you need to go to the gym and work out, call a brother, um, whatever it might be. And then number four, I told you that you need to learn how to bring it into the light. That is an idea uh that I'm gonna call accountability, okay? And today that is what we will focus on by bringing this problem into the light through accountability, okay? Accountability is so essential to your overcoming the problem of pornography in your life. Not just pornography, but really, literally, any sin that that you are struggling with, that you are wanting to find deliverance from, accountability is um it's the key because scripture teaches us this. This is a biblical principle about confession and about accountability. So let's just jump into it. All right, I have a few points for you, like I always do. And we're gonna jump right into number one. We're gonna say this isolation is the enemy's environment. This is where the enemy of your soul thrives. He thrives in this place. And believe it or not, he wants you to come to a place where you will always run to isolation. He wants you there no matter what. Here's the reality of it sin grows best in secrecy. When you have a secret sin, the longer that sin is a secret, the more confident you become in thinking that you can just keep it a secret. You know, it's just like, well, whenever I touch it once, well, that that makes it a little easier for me to touch it again. It's like that little young child who's afraid of touching the lizard or the snake or the frog or whatever it is. But maybe mom or dad or the teacher uh is holding it in his hand and he says, It's not gonna hurt you. I mean, go ahead and touch it. And he and he kind of jumps when he when he goes to touch it that first time, he jumps back. But then he realizes that, I mean, it might feel a little weird, but it but it didn't hurt me. And so I'll touch it again and and then I'll touch it again. And before long, if the child is really giving into it, before long, the child will actually be holding it in in his or her hand. And so, in the same way, when we have a secret sin and we're good at keeping it a secret, we're good at hiding it, we become more confident in our ability to do that. And of course, the enemy, he wants to whisper in your ear and he wants to convince you that you don't need to share this stuff with anyone because your sin has become your little precious. You know that little pun from Lord of the Rings, right? Well, it becomes your little precious. And if you share it, all of a sudden, the pleasure that you experience with this little hidden secret is gonna be broken. And the other the other person or the other people, they're gonna know about it. And so shame shame keeps you keeps you hidden. It keeps uh pushing you towards hiding. Have you ever wondered why you keep your your porn addiction a secret? You ever thought about it? Because and and the reason I ask this is because I can't tell you how many men I have spoken to who either either they they believe this or they just want to try and convince themselves that this is true, but they'll actually say something like, Well, I mean, it's it's not bad, it's not wrong. Um, I mean, it's a woman that I'm looking at, and God made women and he created me to uh have have eyes for a woman or to be attracted to a woman. And so the question is, is that if it really is okay, have you ever asked yourself the question why you would prefer to just keep it a secret? If it's okay, why do you hide it from your wife? Or why would you hide it from your mom and dad? Or why would you hide it from your pastor? Why wouldn't you just bring it out in the open? Why wouldn't you just hold on to it right out in the open and just do all the stuff right out in the open if it is okay? The truth is, is because it's shameful. Because deep down, most men do not believe that this is okay. Even if you say that you do, you really don't believe that it's okay. There's a disconnect between what you tell yourself and what you actually know to be true. Porn, porn use often violates that the internal values that you have. Whether those internal values are moral, whether those internal values are relational, whether they are spiritual, it doesn't matter. You you know that it violates these internal values that you hide have. So by hiding, it protects you from the shame. Because, you know, they don't want, they don't want to be seen fully. You know, you you exposure threatens identity. It will threaten your identity as a husband, it will threaten your identity as a leader, it will threaten your identity as a man of integrity. And of course, I mean, you want to look the best you can out there in front of everyone else. So we hide these things because they do uh they do violate our internal values. And so we we try to hide them because if we expose them, if we bring them out to the light, everybody else is going to know it. And then it it just threatens the identity that we're trying to that we're trying to mask or that we're trying to hide behind. Secondly, it brings us uh in it with consequences and admitting that we have a problem here, it could cost us trust with our spouse or with our uh our partners, whoever it may be, it may cost us some respect. And and by all means, the consequences, I mean, it could cost us some relationships. I can't tell you how many couples I have counseled because of the abuse of pornography in their marriage. There are consequences that come along with this, and because we don't want to face those consequences, we hide it. And then and and then we have loss of control because secrecy, it allows the addiction to survive without interference. And um, if you if you can keep it under the low, down low, and and you just hide it, you don't have to tell anybody about it, you don't tell anybody about it, therefore you can keep control. But if you expose it, you lose control. And of course, you're a man, right? Uh, and you you don't want to lose control. So if a man truly, fully believed that it was harmless and good, talking about porn, if it's harmless and good, then you know he wouldn't he wouldn't need secrecy at all. The hiding is evidence that something in you knows that it's not aligned with who you are supposed to be. Therefore, you hide it. And that tension right there, the tension between the evidence of something you know that what's going on is not aligned with who you're supposed to be, that tension between justification and conviction right there. You justify it, but the Holy Spirit is convicting you. That tension between the two is what keeps the cycle alive in your pornography loop. Hidden things stay powerful, gentlemen. Whenever you hide your sin, it grows like mold in dark places. It slowly takes over, and little bit by little bit, it finally consumes, it makes you sick. It brings in destruction. And the longer it's hidden, the stronger it becomes. And just like I shared with you in uh episode 29, the second episode of the porn battle plan, I talked to you and I showed you this um this graphic of of what I called the porn addiction loop. It the hiding, hiding has a similar uh idea or a similar cycle. And and it would look something like this. Like it, whenever you hide, it puts you into a cycle. You you have the sin, and then the shame goes to, I mean, the uh the cycle will go from sin to shame and then to isolation. Sin, shame, isolation. More sin, shame, isolation, more sin, shame, isolation. And it keeps going that way because when you sin, you feel shameful and you know you can't talk about it, right? The devil wants you to believe that you can't talk about it. You can't expose this. So you believe that you can't expose it, so you recluse into isolation. And when you are isolated, you fall into a deeper trap and you go into more sin. The lie the enemy wants to convince you of is that isolation protects you. And the truth is, is that isolation doesn't protect you at all, it positions you to lose. Do you know that the lion in the wilderness wants to isolate his prey because he's stronger against an isolated prey? He's not as strong whenever his prey is in a group of others who can help protect it. Whenever we're talking about accountability today, it only makes sense for me to bring up this scripture for you. It's in Ecclesiastes. Solomon wrote um the book of Ecclesiastes, you know, the uh the wise man Solomon, and Ecclesiastes 4, 9, and 10, this is what he says. Two are better than one. Okay, first of all, two not isolated. Two people are together, two are better than one. I share this scripture a lot in weddings and different things like that. But even though it's, you know, we're talking about brotherhood, the same the same thing is true. Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. Verse 10. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Think about that. He's saying, two is better than one. Excuse me. My throat was bothering me a little bit. I need to get a little drink. But if they fall, if one of them falls, there's another one who to help lift them up. This is this is the beauty of what I'm trying to talk to you about with accountability. Now, isolation is where the the enemy thrives. That's his environment, and that's where he wants you to be. Okay? So keep that in mind as we move into point number two. You were not built to fight alone. If you didn't, if you didn't know that, just think about the the truth behind identity and design. Like God designed you, the identity that God gave you. God didn't design men to walk solo. I can take you all the way back, and well, I will. We'll just go back to the creation account in Genesis, where we have scripture where God said it is not good for man to be alone. Genesis 2, 18. And I can speak for myself, okay? Uh you you uh will be able to, you know, determine how you feel about this in your relationship. But for for me, um, I believe that Katrina has always been my first accountability partner. Yeah, there have now now in all honesty, let me just be completely honest here. Um, there have been times in our marriage when I have um I have been tempted to lie to her. I I have lied to her. Um there have been times where I've been tempted to keep things from her, and I have kept things from her. But the problem was is that I was never able to allow any of that to last. Even if I lied to her, man, I always found myself coming back and I would say, hey, baby, I man, I lied about this and and I shouldn't have done that. And man, the Holy Spirit would just deal with me. He brought such conviction over me, I would have to go back and I'd have to straighten this stuff out with my wife. And and um, man, there there was so much freedom found, so much deliverance that came through that. And when I gave my heart to Katrina, I meant every word of it. And it's not that I'm, you know, it's not that I'm trying to um act like I don't have problems or like I don't have temptations or like none of those things come up. But I but I can tell you this, now that I'm much more mature and after 20, yeah, June, June 1st, to be 24 years of marriage to her, I can't imagine lying to her and not inviting her into the struggles of my life. That that's just not even a it's not even a thought anymore. Katrina is the one out of all the people in my life, Katrina is the one who has my back. She fights for me. She guards my six, if you will. And it's it's utter foolishness to disregard her wisdom, her prayers, and and her concern in my life. And and I I really hope, guys, I hope one day that you will understand this and experience what I'm talking to you about uh in your marriage as well. However, this that I'm talking to you about is not just about marriage, it's it's also about brotherhood. It's primarily what I'm wanting to talk to you about is brotherhood. Marriage, your your spouse having being your accountability partner is so good. It is important, and I think that you should have that. But um there are going to be times when you need a brother to be your accountability partner. Now, I want you to think about how Jesus modeled this, all right? Whenever Jesus started his ministry, he started out with these 12 disciples, okay? He surrounded himself with these 12 disciples. But in that group, he had three, okay? He had his he had his three. He had that inner circle of three guys. So what what we're trying to do here, and this is a great book for me to recommend to you, is called The Man Code by Dennis Swanberg, all right? The comedian Dennis Swanberg. He actually wrote a book called The Man Code, and it it is such a good book. I've I've read it, uh, I have put it into practice. I've actually taught it in some men groups so guys could have some understanding about it a little bit deeper. But whenever you begin to think about how Jesus modeled this, he has his big group of 12. And I would say that this big group of 12 with Jesus can be kind of symbolizing. It can symbolize like your group of people that you'd be around at church. It could be uh your men's group, your discipleship group, whatever, but a group where where there are multiple uh people, like a larger group of people. But then Jesus had his three. You have the Peter, James, and John, who were what Dennis Swanberg actually calls the inner circle. And sometimes you have to have, no, not sometimes, you always need to have that inner circle of men. Those three guys that you can count on come hell or high water. Jesus didn't do life alone. And so Jesus is showing us this example of how to live. And if if Jesus didn't live in isolation, what makes you think that you're gonna win in isolation? What makes you think that uh isolation's good for you? If Jesus didn't do it, why is it okay for you? Jesus is our greatest example, and he surrounded himself with brothers. So right now, as I'm thinking about it, maybe, maybe you already have a discipleship group that you're a part of. Maybe uh, you know, you've got a church, you've got a small group, you you've got these um that this larger group of people that are like minded people, you do Bible study together, you do different things together, um, and and that is your group. But who could be your inner circle? Who could be your three? And then you break it down a little bit further. Who could be that one, that one person that you could talk to? To no matter what. You need to try to find those. And as we go through the rest of this episode, you need to be thinking about it. Jot their names down because I have a challenge for you at the end of this episode. Number three, accountability breaks the power of secrecy. For those of you who have known me long enough, you know that I believe and I teach accountability. I have invited many men into accountability with me. And I have also encouraged the same between others. So of course, I'm just one person. I can't be accountable to everybody, and everybody can't be accountable to me. And so I have to encourage you to find someone who is close in your circle or in your life, someone that you have uh, you know, you have a lot of similarities, y'all share some of the same interests, and you both are trying to move in the right direction in your in your discipleship, in your spiritual walk. And I encourage that accountability between brothers. However, we need, we need to get this one right, okay? We we must define accountability correctly because it's not soft and it's not passive. Yes, whenever I hold men accountable, I'll walk up to a guy, I'll say, hey man, how are you doing? And guys that I'm that I'm working with in accountability, they know whenever I say that to them, that I'm not talking to them about their wife. I'm not talking to them about their kids, I'm not talking to them about their job. If I wanted to know about those, those, I'll mention your wife's name, your kid's name. I'll talk, I'll say, hey, man, how's it going at work? How'd it go last week? But whenever I look at you and I say, hey, man, how are you doing? I'm talking to you about your battle with porn. That's what I'm doing. You see, effective accountability is direct, it is honest, and it's consistent. It's someone who's willing to come into your life and look at you in the eyes and be absolutely honest and direct with you, and they will do it on a consistent basis. Real accountability is gonna expose patterns, all right? When you have someone who does this in real life on a regular basis, patterns that you have in life are going to be exposed. Because if you commit to accountability, you're gonna find a brother who genuinely cares about your well-being and they're gonna pay attention to what's going on in your life. If you practice accountability long enough, you will uh begin to notice the triggers that we spoke of in the last episode. And you're gonna start looking for ways to interrupt those triggers. You can expose the pattern whenever you know the triggers are there because you're you're you're on a, you know, you're kind of in a in a in a habit, if you will, of talking to your accountability brother about what's going on. You're having that phone call, hey man, I'm struggling here. And I need you to pray for me. I need you to talk to me, help me to identify some of these things. And your accountability partner understands that they have to be trustworthy and they need to be uh one of these guys who can speak back to you and be honest with you. They're going to start noticing some of these patterns in your life. They're gonna notice the triggers and they're gonna help you expose them. So not only is it gonna expose the pattern, but it's gonna help interrupt the behavior. And I want you to think about it. Before accountability, you would fall into the loop, right? Remember the loop that I spoke to you about in the last episode? How that you have the trigger, then you have the craving, then you have the action, then the regret, and then we put it on repeat. It's trigger, craving, action, regret, repeat. Trigger, uh, uh you have the trigger, you have the craving, the action, you have the regret, and then it repeats again and again, again. But now that you are seeking, now that you are practicing accountability, you're going to see the loop change. All right, listen to me. The loop is going to look more like this. You're going to have the trigger, and you're probably going to have the craving. But because you're practicing accountability and you're allowing this discipline to wash over you, the next step becomes the phone call. Instead of the action, instead of the action being go to the go to the screen, search up the stuff you want to look at, it is I go to my phone, I call my brother. You have the trigger, you have the craving, I'm going to go to the phone call, I'm going to accountability. And then eventually the loop begins to look like this. You have the trigger, and you don't even go to the craving anymore. You just go to the phone call because you train yourself not to go any further. These things take time and they take practice, but you can interrupt the behavior. Not only does real accountability expose patterns and interrupt behavior, but it also destroys secrecy. It's hard to keep a secret when you're always talking to your brother about the problem, isn't it? It's just hard to do. So when secrecy is destroyed, the stronghold of porn is weakened until it finally loses the grip on you. James 5.16 tells us this that we should confess our sins to one another and pray for one another that you might be healed. Because the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Confess your sins one to another and pray for one another so that there can be a healing that comes into your life. You need this. You must practice confession. Guys, I know, listen to me. Let this point be driven home to you. You must practice confession. There are freedom and healing in confession. Sin loses its power when it's spoken out loud. If you continue to hide, if you continue to run away, if you continue to isolate, you are going to give porn stronger power over your life. But if you would just come to the place to where you are tired of being dragged around by the neck by this thing that has a hold of you, and confess and practice accountability, sin will lose its power over you. You come out from the hiding behind the bushes whenever you practice confession through brotherly accountability. Who is the brother? Who is he? Who do you need to call? Who is it that you need to invite into this area of your life? Because, guys, the worst thing that you can do is think that you've got forever to straighten this out. Because you may not. Number four. Number four. Brotherhood builds strength and standards. This is where we shift from just help, quote unquote help, to growth and sharpening. Pay attention to this. We're going to shift from just finding help, all right? People wanna people want to give you all these help lines. They want to say, hey, man, you know, you need to go find get some therapy and you need to, you need to get self-help, and you need to talk to somebody about this. I I think, yeah, you need to talk to somebody about that, but I don't think all the time it needs to be someone that you're paying for counseling or that you're paying for therapy. I don't think it needs to be that all the time. Yeah, those those things are good, and and people have have paid me for counseling and therapy. I don't want to say therapy, I'm no therapist, but um people have have done things like that. But I want to help you understand what it means to move away. Not I want you to shift from just thinking that this is help to shifting into the position of understanding that this is growth and sharpening. Okay. Now you may have noticed uh in the podcast, every episode, there's an intro and there's an outro at the front and at the back of, um, or at, I should say, at the beginning and at the end of each episode. And there's a recording of me sharing uh, you know, like the Iron Pursuit email and some other info about where you can watch it and blah, blah, blah. But in the outro, I say something like this: embrace the clashing, because that is where the iron is sharpened. This podcast uh stands on the scripture of Proverbs 27:17. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Listen to me. In the early days of my life, I would go into the workshop where my grandpa was. Now, my grandpa was um like a mill wright, he worked in the paper mill uh in our hometown, and he worked with his hands a lot, he built things, he he was very, very skilled in a lot of different things. But I remember walking into the shop one day as my grandpa was sharpening a line mower blade, and and as he put that blade against the uh the sharpening stone, um it was a you know it was a it was a grinding wheel, sparks were flying, right? Sparks were flying. And and I I never really knew why I remembered that. I mean, just that day, but I do remember that I I wouldn't stop looking. I kept I kept watching it, and finally he re he realized that I was there, and so he handed me a pair of uh uh of goggles to put over my eyes to protect my eyes because I just kept staring at it and I watched those sparks fly. And I I I understood this whenever the Lord laid this podcast on my heart, the iron pursuit. He laid this on my heart about Proverbs 27, 17, as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Iron is not sharpened without grinding, without clashing against something that's harder than it. You can't sharpen a knife blade or a sword blade or anything else uh without putting it up against something that is actually harder than it is. And the reason most men run away from the sharpening uh of their character is because they really don't know what to do when things become uncomfortable. And as men, you need to learn how to be uncomfortable. I think that you need to intentionally put yourselves in uncomfortable positions, uncomfortable situations because it's in the uncomfortable places where where we make a decision on what we're gonna do about it. In the uncomfortable situation, is where we make a decision of how am I gonna deal with it. And if you never put yourself in uncomfortable places, you're never gonna know how to react, how to respond to it in the first place. You're you're just gonna keep running away from it. So whenever you share your weaknesses with someone you trust, that person is going to sharpen your character and it's going to build your faith. Don't run away from the clashing. Just because it's hard doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. Muscles do not grow stronger if they are not put under stress and under pressure. You have to constantly challenge the muscle if you want it to grow. You have to challenge your mind if you want it to grow. You have to challenge your spirit if you want it to grow. And if you want to overcome porn, you have got to challenge yourself. You have got to put yourself in a position where you will face clashing. And the clashing comes whenever you find someone in your life who can be that accountability partner. You see, what a strong brotherhood provides is that it provides that challenge. It's not just comfort. It's not just, oh, brother, come here, let me hug you. Let's cry on one another's shoulder or or whatever. No, it's it's challenge. It's standards. It's it's where a guy's like, hey, man, there's no excuses here. We have standards and we're gonna live up to these standards. But not only is he gonna challenge you and show you what the standards are, uh, he's gonna give you the encouragement, not enabling you to keep living the way that you're you've been living, just coming up with some excuse. He's gonna give you encouragement to say, hey, man, you can live above this. You don't have to keep doing what you're doing right now. You see, you're gonna rise or you're gonna fall on the level of men that you surround yourself with. If you surround yourself with men who simply agree with you, you're gonna become weak. If you just have a bunch of yes, ma'am men that are all around you, just like, oh, yeah, yeah, man, that's good. That's good. I mean, we should go that way. You're right, you're right. If they never disagree with you, you are going to become weak because you're never challenged. You need men around you who will oppose your thoughts, oppose your ideas. You know, if they're wrong, you don't just need somebody that's just gonna argue with you just to make you mad. Uh that's not what I'm saying. But you need someone who's gonna challenge you, look at things from a different perspective, oppose you when it's necessary, challenge you when it's necessary, and call you to a higher standard. If you don't have people like that around you, I would question that you have any friends at all. Number five. Silence is a strategy of defeat. Maybe you've gotten in the habit of saying things like this. Well, I'll I'll just handle it myself. I don't I don't want anyone to know. I've got it under control. And if you have gotten in the habit of saying things like that, you're setting yourself up for defeat. You're going to lose. You you may say that you want to beat porn, but if this is your mindset, you're simply lying to yourself. You will not win this battle by yourself. There's there's just no possible way that that you can do it. You you can let's just let's just call it what it is, okay? Let's just call it what it is. If you think that you're strong enough to do this on your own, you are oblivious to the truth. You cannot do this on your own. That's not strength, guys. That's pride that's keeping you stuck. And don't forget what the scripture tells us. The scripture says in Proverbs 16, 18 that pride goes before the fall. If you are a prideful man and you're unwilling to confess and be accountable, you are setting yourself up for destruction. And what you refuse to expose, it just, you know, you you choose to keep it. If you if you're not willing to say, hey, here's my problem, and you and you put it out there like this to your brother, to your accountability partner or partners, you are choosing to keep it. If you're not willing to expose it, you keep it hidden behind the bushes. You put it in your tent, you cover it up, and you're gonna continue to hold on to the weight that's pulling you under the water, or you're gonna let go of that weight and you're gonna reach up to your brother. Which one is it that you want to do? Do you want to be free from this, or do you want to continue to just be in bondage? So let's give you some practical application, okay? Practical. Remember, I told you earlier that I wanted you to think of those of the men. Let's let's go back to the Jesus model. The Jesus model is that Jesus surrounded himself with 12 men, and I know that Jesus was teaching those men, but he surrounded himself with these guys because he didn't want to be alone. Jesus did not teach isolation. Yes, there were times where Jesus got alone and he prayed to the Father, and there's times when you need to do that as well. You need your quiet time, your alone time, all those things. But Jesus consistently spent his days surrounded by a group of men. All right. So he had his 12, right? But he also had his three. He had his close inner circle. And I told you a while ago, think about those men uh who would be a part of that close inner circle. And I wanted you to write it down. I'm not, I'm not talking about 20 guys. I don't, I'm not talking about surface level friendships. I'm talking about men who will look you in the eye, tell you the truth. They will live with discipline right along beside you, and they are not afraid to call you out. Who are they? Right now, you know who those guys are. You know who that guy is, whoever that person is, okay? So you have practical application here. You have to find those one to three men in your life who will be the guys who tell you the truth, live discipline with you, and they're not afraid to call you out. And then we go to number two. Get very specific, not vague. I don't want vague stuff here. You are never going to fix anything by saying, eh, you know, man, I mean, I struggle sometimes. I mean, well, that uh that's not gonna cut it, all right? That kind of bull mess is not gonna cut it. Instead, this is what you have to say, all right? And I'm telling you this because this is what I had to do in order to come out from behind the bushes of the porn addiction in my life. You need to be very specific by confessing to your brother when it happened, where it happened, how often it happened, and this is what triggered it. All right. Yeah, I mean, I was, I mean, I was checking out at Walmart, man, and I turned over there and looked, and there's a magazine, and there's this chick in a bikini. But man, all of a sudden, in a bikini, that image, it went in my mind, and I thought about this, and before I knew it, I had checked out, I'd bagged my groceries, and I went all out there in the parking lot. I pulled over to um the the backside of the parking lot, and I pulled up an image on my phone, and I mean, whatever. I don't know, I just made that up. But what I it has to be like that specific. Vague confession is gonna produce vague freedom. In other words, it's not gonna produce freedom at all. You have to be very specific. Find the guys, find who they are, and get very, very specific and allow them to expose these triggers in your life so that it all can be interrupted and we can change the habits of our lives together. Third, you have to build a system, not a conversation. There needs to be weekly check-ins. This is what I'm trying and hoping to develop in the porn of the porn battle plan masterclass, where there can be weekly check-ins, even daily texts if necessary and if needed. There has to be real questions. Did you stay clean? Have you cheated? When were you tempted? What were you tempted with? And you have to get on level and be honest. All right. Number four, you have to remove private access points. This ties back to the earlier episode when I talked to you about cutting off porn from your phones. You have to put in blockers, you have to do whatever it is that you need to do to shut off your access to this trash that is destroying your mind and it is destroying your spirituality. Even if you need to turn off social media, turn it off. You must eliminate those late night isolations, whatever it is. If your wife is working or the kids are in bed early and you're left alone, whatever it looks like, you must eliminate those late night isolations. Right now, there are a lot of opportunities for you to be able to get into live chat rooms where people have Bible studies, phone calls, different things like that that are going on. You can eliminate the late-night isolation by getting involved in some of those things. And then that will help take the urge or the temptation away from going and chasing a porn rabbit hole, okay? And just going down the rabbit hole and not even knowing how you got there by the time you get to the end of it. If you keep giving yourself private access, don't be surprised by your private failure. Okay. And if you remember, I told you that if you're unwilling to be disciplined in private, you are not willing to lead in the public, okay? And you, if you're not, if you're not going to be strong enough to be disciplined in private, you're not going to be qualified to lead in public. So number five, and I'll wrap up with this, you need to plug into brotherhood environments. You need to get into places where these other guys are. This is where uh your personal calling, the personal calling of your uh of your life and my life right now, like where my personal calling fits in here, because I deal with men's groups, uh, discipleship circles, retreats, like you know, retreats that I'm involved in, like some of you guys are involved in. This is where all of this fits in. You need environments that call you up and and and and don't and they don't give you places to hide. They they call you up, they challenge you, and they want to help you expand. Expose these things that are in your life. So right now, there's something in your life that you don't want anyone to know. And that thing is the very thing that's keeping you in bondage. I was there. I know I've been in this place before. Things uh that I knew were holding me back, but yet I didn't want to share it with anybody. I didn't want to talk to anyone about it. And as long as I held on to that, it kept me in bondage. Because I mean, if I can keep it a secret, nobody knows about it. I just keep going back to my secret place over and over and over. And I give myself that fix. And if if I can keep doing that, then I just, then I just keep living my life the way that I want to. But if you're serious about freedom, then today is the day that you have to stop fighting alone. If you're serious about it, right now, whenever this episode is done, you need to make the call, you need to send the text, you need to set the meeting. As I'm saying this, you already have a name of the person that you feel comfortable uh being accountable to or being accountable with. Don't hesitate, okay? Make the call. Make the call. The reason you need to is because your freedom doesn't start when you try harder. All right. It starts when you step into the light. Porn is going to breed. It is going to multiply in the dark. It is going to keep festering and it's going to get worse and worse and worse. But as soon as you expose it and you tell and you and you bring the light onto it, it just kind of shrieks and it falls back. Okay? So freedom is not going to start just because you try harder. It's going to start when you step into the light. So here's the deal, and here's the truth as I close. You can have isolation or you can have freedom. But gentlemen, you cannot have both. Hey guys, thanks again for listening. Remember, share, like, and subscribe. If you think this podcast could help someone else, please share it with them. Check us out on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook at the IronPursuit. If you're interested in my personal or marriage coaching, send me an email at theironpursuit79 at gmail.com. Thanks again for listening. And remember, never run from the clashing because that is where the iron is sharpened.