Finally Free: 8 Practical Steps to Purity
This booklet offers eight practical strategies to help you achieve freedom from pornography. These tools are designed to guide you in turning from sin to righteousness. Each strategy provides specific action steps to follow. It is essential to commit to working through them with an accountability partner. If you genuinely want to be free, you must take these steps seriously and remain dedicated to the process.
Chapter Highlights based on Finally Free: Fighting for Purity with the Power of Grace by Heath Lambert
1. Accountability
Chapter 3 Highlights:
· The right kind of accountability — characterized by initiative, openness, clean conversation, maturity, and serious answerability for sin — is hard.
· If you have never confessed your sin to one of the spiritual authorities in your church, you are cutting yourself off from a crucial source of spiritual help.
· True accountability requires an effort to be committed in the long term.
· Your accountability partner must be willing to take time through the week to pray for you, call you, answer your calls, and check up on you. The calling to be a spiritual person who restores another caught in a sin is a high and holy calling that requires time.
Practical Steps
- Identify a Christian in spiritual authority over you.
- Talk to them about your struggle and ask if they would be willing to read Finally Free with you
- Set up a regular time to meet to work through the 8 points in this guide.
- Decide on the discussion point for the next meeting, and come prepared after reading the material.
2. Grace
Chapter 1 Highlights:
· You need to ask for forgiving grace after you look at pornography, but don’t stop there! Ask for God’s transforming grace, his power to change you from the inside out.
· Stop responding by talking to yourself with condemning words and thoughts and start responding to your sin by talking to God with prayers of confession. Self-talk and self-condemnation do nothing to lay hold of God’s forgiving and transforming grace. Repentance does.
Practical Steps:
- Read Chapter 1 of The Discipline of Grace Paperback by Jerry Bridges (Author) – PDF available at harbourfellowship.com/freedom
- Memorize the 3 circles – where do you see God’s forgiving grace and transforming grace in it.
- Ask God for his powerful transforming grace to bring change to your life.
3. Walking in the Light
· Study Proverbs 28:13 using SOAPS method. Write down 10 observations and 2 applications
Chapter 5 Highlights
· You will not experience dramatic change in your struggle as long as you use accountability to describe your sins instead of declaring your need for help in the midst of temptation.
Practical Steps:
- Are there other things to confess (masturbation, promiscuity, adultery, homosexuality, etc)
- Are there past sins against you (abuse, neglect) that you need to bring into the light to begin to experience healing and help.
- Identify the people your sin has affected that you need to approach with an honest confession?
4. Dead to Sin
· Read Romans 6.1-14 and using SOAPS method write down 10 observations and 2 applications
Highlights from the Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges
· No, we are not defeated; we are simply disobedient! It might be good if we stopped using the terms “victory” and “defeat” to describe our progress in holiness. Rather we should use the terms “obedience” and “disobedience.” When I say I am defeated by some sin, I am unconsciously slipping out from under my responsibility. I am saying something outside of me has defeated me. But when I say I am disobedient, that places the responsibility for my sin squarely on me. We may, in fact, be defeated, but the reason we are defeated is because we have chosen to disobey. We have chosen to entertain lustful thoughts, or to harbour resentment, or to shade the truth a little.
· To experience this joy, we must make some choices. We must choose to forsake sin, not only because it is defeating to us, but because it grieves the heart of God. We must choose to count on the fact that we are dead to sin, freed from its reign and dominion, and we can now actually say no to sin. We must choose to accept our responsibility to discipline our lives for obedience.
Practical Steps
- Read - http://easypeasymethod.org/
- Resist any promise of a temporary fix
- Get it clear in your mind: porn provides no genuine pleasure or crutch and you aren’t making a sacrifice. There’s nothing to give up and no reason to feel deprived.
- Make a decision never to watch again and never question it.
5. Radical Measures
· Study Matthew 5:27–30. Summarize Jesus’ teaching in your own words
Chapter 4 Highlights
· You will need to employ radical measures in at least three areas. You look at porn when you have the desire to see it, when you have the time to look at it, and when it is available to you. Nobody looks at pornography without all three of these elements coming together.
· Viewing pornography is typically the last stop on a long road of sexual sins. A dozen other things have gone wrong in your heart and mind by the time you actually look at porn. You will not have victory over pornography until you first have victory in the battles that come before you look.
Practical Steps:
Radical measures in your thinking.
- Make a commitment to repent the moment your thoughts begin to drift toward impurity.
- Identify and memorize a passage of Scripture you can begin using to fight temptation.
- You must reach out for help. You are not designed to fight the battles of sin and temptation alone. Give the names of 2-3 people that you have talked to, and you can call when you are in trouble.
Radical measures in your use of time.
- Identify the places where you access pornography.
- Identify the times when you are most tempted
- Make a plan together to fill this time with activities that will move you toward purity.
Radical Measures for Cutting Off Access
- Install accountability software on your computer and/or phone.
- Allow someone to put passwords on your computer and phone
- Give someone administrative privileges
6. Dynamic Relationship with Jesus
· Read John 15.1-16. Identify what happens when we abide and what happens when we don’t abide. Identify 6 ways that we do abide.
Chapter 9 Highlights
· Many Christians locked in a fight against pornography judge the closeness of their relationship with Christ by whether or not they’ve looked at porn recently. If you didn’t look at porn today, you feel alive and close to Jesus. If you did look at porn today, you feel like garbage and very distant from Christ.
· The truth that God wants you to know is that your relationship with Jesus is bigger than your struggle with porn. If the only time you’re interested in walking with Jesus is when you want his help to get over porn, you’re not walking in the fullness of the loving relationship that Jesus wants to have with you.
Practical Steps:
- Learn and Draw the abiding study
- Set Goals for how you will Connect with God
- Bible Study
- Prayer
- Going
Additional Study
- Chapter 7 and 8 on Humility and Gratitude
7. Godly Sorrow
· Study 2 Corinthians 7:8 –11. What are the two types of sorrow given? Describe each one.
Chapter 2 Highlights
· Worldly sorrow happens when you feel the sting of sin but still cherish a selfish love of sin in your heart. Godly sorrow happens when you are gripped by your sinful separation from God and desire to be restored to him at any cost.
Practical Steps:
- Write down the real reasons for your sadness.
- Spend some time in honest reflection, asking whether you have been sorrowful in your struggle with pornography. Is your sadness over the consequences of being caught or over the break in your relationship with God?
- Be aware that if you’ve had an ongoing struggle with pornography, your sorrow is likely worldly.
8. Your Spouse
· Read Proverbs 5 and using SOAPS method write down 10 observations and 2 applications
Chapter — Highlights
· God wants you to quit thinking about porn and start thinking about your wife.
· For singles, if you are experiencing God-given sexual desires, a consideration should be to pursue marriage to a godly woman in a wise and careful way.
Practical Steps:
- How have you been guilty of being drawn to the temptations of the forbidden woman in Proverbs 5? In what ways have you refused to believe what the Bible says about how dangerous she is?
- If you’re married, consider where you need God’s transforming grace to desire your wife.
- If you’re single, consider where you need grace to serve Christ wholeheartedly.
- Pray and ask God to give you his powerful transforming grace to empower you to be different in this way.