KANSAS CITY—Many of the hard truths about how harmful pornography is to marriages are contained in a new book by Christian Communicators Worldwide, Delivered by Desire, written by Daryl Wingerd.
Wingerd, a pastor with Christ Fellowship of Kansas City, a Missouri Baptist Convention congregation, shares his story of deliverance from being a slave to sexual sin. Even as a believer his struggle with sexual temptation was “fierce and depressing” when he relied on personal resolve.
Eventually he learned that his love for God was his most powerful incentive for pleasing God through sexual purity. Wingerd endeavors to help the Christian man who says, “I’ve tried and I’ve tried to stop looking at pornography, but I’m finally realizing that I don’t know how.” Truths are essential medicine. On pp. 27-29, he advances ideas like viewing pornography in order to obtain sexual pleasure will rob your sexual pleasure, sexual sins will torment your conscience, and viewing pornography today will make you more susceptible to sexual temptation in the future.
The next chapter is even more instructional. He describes how pornography is “marriage poison” in that viewing it is adultery.
Jesus used the same word for physical adultery and mental adultery, Wingerd writes, so its seriousness should not be denied. Viewing adultery is also a degrading insult to your wife, and, as a single man, it will make you more likely to commit adultery as a married man.
The way out of sexual sinning is illustrated by the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944 that required four basic and interrelated elements of military strategy that correlate to the sexual struggle. Those were and are: sufficient troops, ships, planes, vehicles, guns, ammunition, fuel, food, and medicine to launch and sustain the invasion (an arsenal of biblical truth); a reliable way of getting those resources to the front lines (ditto concerning the battle in your mind); the effective deployment of resources at the point of attack (ditto for truth at the point of attack); and the desire to win (ditto).
Wingerd has included discussion questions at the end of each chapter as a tool for small groups. For more on the book, visit www.CCWtoday.org.
ALLEN PALMERI / associate editor