/christian/ - christian

>>23460 (OP) 
I havent

>>23460 (OP) 

When I came back to Christ after about 15ish years of apostasy, a bunch of my vices pretty much got taken away right off the bat, or very shortly after my return to Christ (i.e. threw out my pagan idols and paraphernalia; got rid of movies and music that was blatantly depraved; disposed of all my pirated material whether physical or digital; deleted all of my porn, stopped liking or watching vulgar tv shows and youtube channels; watching gory horror films that I used to love felt like being waterboarded; been clean off of drugs for about 7ish years now; etc.)

However, other vices in my life have been more stubborn and have taken a lot more work (i.e. I still struggle with porn; spending too much time on the internet; too much time on secular distractions; greedy and covetous to buy stuff for myself; etc.)

Some things God will deliver you from right off the bat, other things will be much more of a perpetual battle against the flesh, ala Romans 7:15-25.  Sanctification is an ongoing process.  I started out with getting rid of music in my life that was the worst of the worst.  Now I'd say that roughly 95% of the secular music I used to surround myself with is gone out of my life. 

I've been told several times that the Christian walk is a marathon, not a sprint.  So some aspects of your life will require patience, while other more serious things will be a concerted effort on your part.

>>23460 (OP) 
God guided me always in the right direction. I am fundamentally broken mentally and he hardened my character, principles and outlook in life through humility and temperance, out of those restulted faith and love. It took me almost a year of detaching from my ego and spiteful old self before I was manifested properly.

Then I developed my bad habits again, way worse than before. I recommend once you are on the path of detachment and divine union not to throw everything away whatever reason you give yourself. Stay always hopeful, do not hate yourself, do not be afraid, know your position among everybody, only fear God, do the best to your ability and be loving to everybody. Strengthen your heart, but do not let it harden, lest it becomes cold.

>>23464
Very good post Anon. I concur.

>>23460 (OP) 
i havent, but how many here just said, get them out of your life and out of your MIND! even when it is about thinking how bad it is "wow porn is so bad i will def not watch porn ever like lmao!"
this is one of the ways you will surely fall, renew your mind and your thinking 
love you brother

What got me going was setting a specific goal for myself to abstain from something for a set time period (in the case of nofap, three weeks) and then keeping that momentum going by breaking a new personal record every day (I've gone 4/5/6 weeks without nutting, might as well keep going). Now at over a year + one month of nofap and I don't think I could ever bring myself to whack it again, the shame would be too much to overcome.

>>23473
>>23469
>>23466
>>23464
I want to thank you all for your stories/input, I hope the Lord continues to guide us all in striving to live a life that is gratifying to him. Please if at all possible get more anon's here so that they can share their stories and the such.

>>23464
>disposed of all my pirated material whether physical or digital
What. Literally why.

>>23480
the bible says that not financially supporting jewish media corporations is a sin

I prayed for help to be rid of porn and masturbation, and one day the Holy Spirit helped me resolve to stop. Let your shame be more powerful than your lust. I feel so much better spiritually now that I've overcome my worst sin

>>23486
shame comes from satan

>>23460 (OP) 
they are all temptations of Satan. They destroy you, which is what Satan wants.

>>23480
I wonder the same thing, I don't see how piracy is a sin at all. Software should be free when it comes to evil corporations.

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>>23633
for one theres the principle of Deuteronomy 25:4

also though, when it comes to free software, you're usually the product. not the software. especially when we're talking about evil mega corps.

>>23633
Not that anon but I feel that a lot of the stuff that I would have to pirate I don't actually need or want and there are free / libre open-source alternatives for the stuff that I actually need to be productive.

>>23469
This is one of the most salient pieces of advice I've seen on this board. You really do have to give yourself a sort of 'factory reset.' If every path you take leads you to the same place, it's time to move.
Change your brain, become a new person to friends and family. You are in control over yourself and your identity, don't let your old self hold you back from becoming new with God. That's what I'm trying to do now.
If rebuilding yourself is what it takes to keep these things out of your mind, do it. Sexual sin is always regarded as particularly damaging and you are encouraged to not walk, or turn away from it, but FLEE from it.

>>23633
Software should be free, but it isn't, by law, and we should obey those laws, arbitrary as they are. One sin does not beget another

>>23633
Give to Caesar what is Caesars I guess

>>23460 (OP) 
I want to say that breaking bad habits is all about willpower, setting up rules and sticking with them, with no, or very few, exceptions. Making excuses and allowing yourself to go back on what you promised yourself initially is setting yourself up for failure. Every allowance and compromise you grant yourself will chip away at your commitment. 

Highlighting positive effects can boost your morale by showing that the struggle is worthwhile. I've lost 25 kg and gone from obesity to normal weight in the last few months, and seeing the lower weight on my scale and how relatively small my new clothes were made struggling the next day much easier.

>>23460 (OP) 
My two worst bad habits, smoking and porn, God delivered me from, not at the same time of course but the process was very much the same. You really just have be serious, I mean really serious not the "okay let me see if I can go without it today" pseudo-seriousness. You have to realize that you are going to subject yourself to pain and that you are going to be okay with that. For smoking it started with removing all ash trays and throwing away all cigarettes, and just waiting each day out until eventually the desire dies. Porn was pretty much the same way. Until I deleted my files and the bookmarked links, it did no good to get back to the computer. So for a lot of those beginning days I stayed away from the computer. You cannot change your habits if you don't like being uncomfortable. You have to find the mindset of wanting pain, not in a sick sadomasochistic way, but in the way of desiring the Cross. Of course, I still have many bad habits I need to struggle over, like being better organized, and cutting down on my gaming and YT watching. But you can conquer them if you are willing to pick your Cross and be uncomfortable for an extended period of time. It hurts but feels much better afterwards. As they say "There is no Resurrection without the Cross."

> Until I deleted my files and the bookmarked links, it did no good to get back to the computer.
Blessed is the Lord who delivered you. Hypothetically, if a porn addiction not particularly profound would have nonetheless made a poor anon memorise a couple URLs, resistant to most blocking strategies, would you suggest any countermeasures besides burning prayer?

> You have to find the mindset of wanting pain, not in a sick sadomasochistic way, but in the way of desiring the Cross.
Purging is pain. This is wise, and feels good enough now, but may the Lord show His mercy when darkness creeps into the heart and the teeth grind like they're about to shatter. I knew this feeling when I moved to my current location and was forced to ditch benzos cold turkey. After ten years and a respectable dose. Only by His mercy did I crawl out of it without throwing myself off the building or having a stroke. I felt my body would wring itself into minced meat. Those meds will run the anon's soul through a cheese grater and roast it. I hope quitting porn voluntarily is easier, else I'll have to move to a country of bloodlust Mohammedans and join a clandestine church in the sewers.

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>>25886
>would you suggest any countermeasures besides burning prayer?
There are accountability programs that monitor if you visit a porn site such as
https://www.covenanteyes.com/
But of course there are ways around that as well. Porn addiction can be tougher than some of the other addictions because it is tied into our electronic usage. It isn't as simple to eradicate as throwing out all the pill bottles, cigarette packets, or alcohol bottles. So a suggestion would be a serious fasting from you device usage. This would be where you have to ask yourself how serious you want to quit. If your electronic usage is causing you to sin, get a flip phone and go to the nearest library to use the computer. Simple as. Another tactic is one I used and it is simply asking yourself "How much do I fear God?" It is one thing to keep falling into an involuntary sin, but another to know what you are about to do in front of God and continuing to that regardless. Would you watch porn and masturbate out in the open in front of people? Then why do you do in front of God? Do you fear man more than God? These were some of the questions I had to ask myself over and over in those early days of fighting. I also would think about how my sin, like the butterfly effect, is part of a larger picture and influences more than myself. My porn addiction drove extra traffic to those sites that continue to feed on the hypersexualization of our culture. These sites which corrupt our youth and distort our perceptions of marriage and relationships. How my actions though small in some ways affected the woman on the other side of the screen. How I, even though minuscule, was still a part of the larger problem of a great number of women today valuing being whores over marriage and raising a family. All of this was part of the mental fight. I no longer wanted to be associated with that sin. Psalm 33/34:14 "Depart from evil and do good; Seek peace and pursue it."

>I also would think about how my sin, like the butterfly effect, is part of a larger picture and influences more than myself.
This is why no sin is 'private'. Every sin, big or small, is truly cosmic, an offence against God. I don't enjoy the exercise of meditating on Christ's pain, but it helps to keep ourselves upright. Thanks.

I haven't. I've quit addictions before. But it has come to pornography being the last of my known big sins. And it's the hardest one to break of all. It's like the evil within me knows its on its last legs, and is therefore using pornography to hold on to its dear life harder than ever before. The evil's primary weapons are using the fear of my life becoming boring, and incapable of feeling intimacy for the opposite sex, without phonography. To quiet the evil, I meditate on scripture with applications to fantasy and escapism, such as "Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this is also vanity and vexation of spirit." I have also greatly reduced ownership over material possessions which no longer bring me joy as a way to show myself that life still goes on even if I am "without" and "bored."

At the end of the day, however, my efforts can only quiet, but not quit, the evil. It's as if this suffering is one thing God is keeping the keys to as I means to exercise my unconditional trust in him. After all, the race goes to people according to time and chance, and not by man's efforts. And the man who put away childish things, was already a man before putting away childish things. It is not the putting away of childish things that made the man.

I've been 3 weeks and 4 days without porn, acting out and i have zero desire to use it, what helped me was being reborn in a baptism where the old sinful self dies and i am a new creation in Christ. I'm not 100% how to do this successfully since i got baptized before and nothing happened. Perhaps it's about the belief you have tied to them baptism, or read every passage about baptism because there lies the explanation or death and rebirth with Christ. I would say ask God to help you and seek God, and becareful that your vice doesn't get the better of you.

I haven't. In fact as I am typing this post, I am wiping my left hand with a dirty cloth. The problem, I think, is that I dont recognize a need to turn down my vices, after all, its not something that interferes with my life, nor am i doing them in copious amounts that one would look down on me as a degenerate. Either I continue this path (which slowly kills me) or go full addict and finally feel the need to abstain completely from this vice.

>>23480
>>23633
Steal from the rich corporations, they deserve it as they're greedy and all the money they got wasn't earned but gained by wickedness or by abusing the poor man.

>>26169
Eh, I dunno. Not because "stealing bad." But because when they're not getting my money, their ideas/products are still getting my time and attention. And there is a subtle absurdity in using modern concepts/products to combat, or to comfort the self from, modern concepts/products. It's like buying the antidote from the same merchant who sold the poison. Neither can any group that forms as a response to the aforementioned thing have a lasting answer. Because the existence of such groups are dependent on the existence of what they're reacting to. It seems the only winning move, is to not play.

>>26169
>Romans 12:21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

>>26143
Feeling more about this, I think a big part of the problem is I have been heavily using pornography as emotional compensation for so many years, that my person is too invested into it to just quit. It's more than an addiction. It's a way of life. Quitting would be quitting a part of myself. And so now the question becomes how to release all of those emotions tightly locked up in porn for moving them into something else. Maybe letting go of putting in the effort of quitting to continue with heavy use until something just suddenly changes, or I hit rock bottom? But I don't know.

>>26646
Quit completely, delete every porn image off your devices and stop whacking it. If you can abstain for a day, then you can abstain for a week. If you can abstain for a week, then you can abstain for a month, and so on. Small steps, and if you fail, you pick yourself up, ask Christ for forgiveness and strength, and start over again. It's a journey and a hard one, but eventually it will be a distant memory and you won't even have to think about it anymore.

>>23460 (OP) 
The biggest thing was getting involved not just in a church, but also in a good Christian group of friends who love the Lord more than anything else. When you spend time around other people, you become more like them. It took special permission for particularly advanced souls before certain monks became hermits. You need good people in your life who will build you up and expect better of you.

>>26646
There's nothing wrong with quitting a part of yourself. Otherwise, we would never improve. You need to face your emotional insecurities and flaws before they destroy you. Try to find a good Christian therapist who can help you avoid hitting rock bottom in the process. And stop abusing yourself. You deserve better. Once you've crossed that bridge, you'll thank the Lord that he brought you there. Remember, you are more than your addictions and flaws.

>>23461
one day you will, by the will God.

>>26650
>If you can abstain for a day, then you can abstain for a week
Wrong, also your own imagination can make porn or porno situations
The best way is to distract yourself

I have not. And I probably never will. Notwithstanding the most success I have with quitting pornography by far is a proverbial cutting off of that which offends me, in removing myself from ownership over desktop PC's and laptops (I post this from someone else's computer.) Now I am "free" from pornography. "Free" because I do not practice the habit anymore, but I still have the habit. And I am sure if I went back to my old ways that I would quickly pick up from where I left off.

I still use a smartphone for computing tasks. But curiously smartphones do not have the same grip on me like PC's and laptops do. Perhaps the web browsing logistics do not mesh with me. Perhaps it is because it was PC's, and not smartphones, that had dominion over my impressionable adolescent years. Either way, thank God for me being enough of a no name wage slave that I do not need my own PC for my job. It makes the transition to a smartphone and staying away from computers easier.