Pastor John, we have a question from a 17-year-old young man in London who writes, "I have been in bondage to pornography for a few years now. How do I even begin to break free from this?" Speak to this young man who feels the bondage of pornography and who has been struggling with this for years.

So what would you say to him? Well, what I say particularly to any given young man or woman, and I think the women who listen to this shouldn't think, and I'm sure if they're listening, they don't think that this is just a male issue. Increasingly, women are entangled sometimes for different kinds of reasons than men in pornography.

So I don't want to think just men here, although that's usually the way we're thinking about it. Whether I speak to a man or a woman in a certain way is going to depend on what I know about them, whether they're a believer, whether they're walking with the Lord, whether they're really fighting in biblical ways.

So I'm just going to assume as I answer this that the person I'm talking to is a Christian and trusts Jesus and believes the Bible. And here are just things that that young man might consider. Number one, getting right with God precedes getting our pornography issues fixed. That is, justification precedes and is the foundation for sanctification.

The only sin that we can defeat is a forgiven sin. That's the way I like to say it. So that if you get that backward and start saying, "Okay, I've got to fix this sin. I've got to kill this sin or I can't get right with God." That's backwards and that's the opposite of Christianity.

Christ died and justifies, died for and justifies the ungodly. And therefore we start there. So I'd want to encourage them, trust him, trust him for his cleansing and his forgiveness on the basis of faith alone. The second thing I would say is that great things are at stake here.

I wouldn't play fast and loose. I'd say if your eye offends you, tear it out and throw it away. Better to go to heaven with one eye than to hell with two eyes. In other words, we're dealing with really serious issues here, Jesus said. Number three, I would plead with that person that they're going to lose their enjoyment of God if they continually prefer the enjoyment of nudity or something like that.

Because Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." I know in my own experience, the times when I give way to any kind of sensuality, my capacities for spiritual delight in God diminishes. And I know that the trade-off is always lousy. So for the sake of greater joy and greater pleasure, we fight against temptation.

And the fourth thing I would say, from 1 Thessalonians 4, I think verse 4 or 5, it says, "Control your body and treat your wife not in passion, as the Gentiles who do not know God." The implication of that statement, in passions like the Gentiles who do not know God, is that knowing God has a powerful effect on subduing passions.

Here's what I say, I've actually said this to a bunch of guys. When they have been working at this for a long time, I say, "You know, I don't really know how deep or strong your knowledge of God is." So here's my assignment to you to help you overcome pornography.

Get a copy of Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, it's only about 1,100 pages, and read it cover to cover over the next six months. And then come and we'll talk again about your problem with pornography. Because here's what I'm thinking, I think Satan is bringing his attacks against us, and we're using our little pea-shooter, Sunday School level knowledge of God to try to defeat him.

And there's such vast, deep, glorious, beautiful, strong, wonderful things about God that when you're grasped by them, it just has an indirect, powerful effect on making sensuality less of a power in your life. So it's kind of an indirect way of undermining the powerful effects of sexual temptation. Practically, I'd say get a copy, you can even get it online, of John Owen's Mortification of Sin.

It's an 80-page old book that teaches us how to fight sin. My book, Future Grace, has a chapter in it on lust and how I go about fighting it. Online at Desiring God, we've got this little thing I wrote called Anthem, A-N-T-H-E-M. A, avoid, N, say no, T, turn your mind and heart, H, hold a beautiful vision of Jesus in your mind until it triumphs over the other sensual vision, E, enjoy, M, move on.

I unpack each of those as really practical steps. I wrote that, not out of some theoretical view of how to fight temptation, I wrote about it because in the backyard one day, I was pushing my lawnmower and my wife had just told me the night before that she saw some people doing some sexual hanky-panky out behind our garage and I passed the place in pushing my lawnmower where they were and my mind immediately created that scene and became lustful at that moment.

I had to fight back and forth as I was pushing the lawnmower. I'm fighting to get this thing out of my head. I've tasted what these guys are dealing with and so we're in this together and those are my best efforts so far to try to put forward concrete, practical, biblical steps to defeat this monster.

Thank you, Pastor John, for those principles for fighting pornography, and thank you for listening to this podcast. If you have a question for Pastor John, please email that question to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Please include your first name and your hometown in that email. You can find the mentioned resources that Pastor John has written and thousands of other resources for free from him online at DesiringGod.org.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.