Ephraim Renno teaches about pursuing purity in an unholy world, especially freedom from sexual sin and pornography. He explains how addiction can form through secrecy, shame, dopamine, isolation, and unhealthy patterns, while pointing listeners toward wholehearted commitment to Christ, honest community, and walking in the light. The message urges believers to build healing communities where confession, accountability, truth, grace, and practical action can help prevent spiritual shipwreck and restore those in bondage.
Key Points:
– Sexual sin and pornography grow stronger through secrecy, shame, isolation, and the false belief that a person can quit whenever they want.
– Dopamine is a good gift from God, but when pleasure is misused it can train the brain toward destructive habits and cravings.
– Oversimplified answers can discourage people in bondage; recovery requires truth, reliance on God, healthy replacement habits, and meaningful connection.
– Healthy community is part of God’s design and a major part of healing, accountability, encouragement, and freedom.
– Shame says “I am bad,” while guilt can lead a person to repentance and help; bringing shame into the light weakens its power.
– Believers should pursue openness, truth in love, emotional honesty, and small-group support rather than isolation.
– In temptation, Ephraim recommends the acronym BRACE: Breathe, Remember, Ask, Call, and Escape.
Scripture References: Matthew 12:43-45; John 7:37-38; Ephesians 4:11-16; Ephesians 4:25-27; Psalm 139:23-24; 1 John 1:5-7
Well, good morning everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining us. We’re glad to have you on. Hope for Wondering Amish tries to give information and practical teaching us for your walk.
With Christ and as you seek truth, we don’t have the answers, but with the grace of God we just try to provide information that is helpful and practical that you can take home and use. This morning we have Ephraim Renno on to speak on purity and how you can navigate the challenges of sin and become free. I don’t know what all he’s planning to share here this morning, but looking forward to it.
Before we start, let’s have a prayer. Heavenly Father, we pause here before you this morning. We thank you for your goodness, your grace, and especially, Father, we just thank you for the power that you have given us through the blood of Christ that we can be made free from sin. And we know that when you make us free, we are free indeed.
We pray for this morning wisdom and strength and just collected thoughts as he shares. Father, help him to speak what you have laid upon his mind. We just pray for all of the listeners this morning, and we pray that your name would be glorified. We pray it in Jesus’ name. Amen. All right. Thank you, Levi. Thank you for praying that God would be glorified. That’s my heart and desire.
Thank you to everybody that’s on the call this morning and others that will listen later. God bless you. My hope is that in some way I can be a blessing to some wandering soul out there and that I can encourage everyone to be part of the healing journey for yourself if you need it and then for others as well.
I’m not going to be talking about that this morning, but rather focusing on the healing journey. I get very excited when either one of those are talked about. In many of our homes and communities in the mid to late 1900s, anything of a sexual nature was taboo and usually not discussed by the adults in our lives.
We’re finding pornographic magazines along the road or in a neighborhood dump. We may be tempted to think, well, we survived it. And that life went on and, you know, we made our way through and we might be tempted to think that our children can too. And we just continue the cycle of being quiet and these things happen.
Under the surface and behind the scenes. The fact is, in my experience, and I’m sure in others as well, that we didn’t get away without negative effects, without some level of bondage and shame and diminished relationship qualities. And there were some that suffered shipwreck.
He married a beautiful young lady. We’re together for a number of years. Had a number of children. And he fell into pornography. He had a computer and it wasn’t locked down. It wasn’t filtered. He didn’t have any kind of accountability. It just was in secret. And he fell into pornography. It went from that to connections with women. And before we knew anything was happening, he was on his way out.
Marriage fell apart. Children had to grow up without a dad. And sadly, he isn’t an isolated case. But today, it is so much easier than it was in my growing up in the 90s, where pornography usually was connected to magazines. And they weren’t that easy to get. And they weren’t that easy to keep in secret.
And with the electronic devices that we have, it is just so easy to fall into this trap. Not only is it easy to fall into it, it’s usually somewhat easy. Not as easy as the devil would have us to believe, but somewhat easy to keep it hidden for X amount of time.
Like all sins, but maybe this one is more so. It grows. Sin grows to more sin like begets like. And you go deeper and it gets worse. And eventually it will come out. Be sure your sin will find you out. It just is impossible to keep it hidden forever. And oftentimes when it finally does come out, it’s so far down the road that
there’s a real crisis. One of the deceptions that goes with porn addiction is the belief that I can quit whenever I want to. And that’s a deception. Sexual addictions are among the strongest of addictions. There’s a number of reasons for this. The secrecy and the shame surrounding it. And there’s dopamine. I’d like to talk about dopamine just for a bit here.
And explain what dopamine does. When a person experiences something enjoyable that the brain wants them to remember and repeat, it releases dopamine. When you bless your mama with a sweet note, dopamine. A taste of chocolate, dopamine. Holding the hands of your lover, dopamine. God created people to experience pleasure. And dopamine is a key part of that. It helps us develop good habits.
We look for it. We feel good about it. Now we don’t have to think our way through next time in order to do that good thing again. It becomes a habit. And dopamine is a key part in creating good habits. In a more perfect world, pain would only be experienced as a result of wrongdoing. And pleasure would only be experienced when one does well. Since we live in a broken, sin-rattled world, one can quite easily come across pain
while doing right. And likewise, to experience great pleasure in things that are wrong. When we experience pleasure from a given action, the brain goes, voila, let’s do that again. And if a little feels good, let’s do more next time. Dopamine is an incredible gift. But like any marvelous gift, it can turn deadly when not handled right. Think about water and air and fire. Water is an amazing gift. We can’t get along without water for very long at all.
Our bodies are a great percentage of our bodies are water. We get thirsty and we start drying up and we actually die in a matter of a few days without water. But water is also very deadly. Lots of people drown in water. Floods are very destructive. Air is a key part of explosives. Many, many people die from explosions.
Fire is very deadly and very dangerous. Many people are killed by fire. But fire is also a great gift. There’s many ways that we have learned to be comfortable and to create beauty and to create power by harnessing fire. Dopamine is a marvelous gift from God. Without it, life just wouldn’t function the way it does.
No pleasure. But when dopamine isn’t respected and used correctly and it’s in the driver’s seat, then it can really wreak havoc. There are other chemicals at play as well. Serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins. But dopamine is a very powerful one. And it’s one that you will often come across when you read and listen to subjects like this.
Dopamine is incredible. But unfortunately, people have learned to manipulate dopamine production. Sex provides the highest natural dopamine hit. And I have a chart here, but I’m not quite able to show it. There are three man-made stimulants estimated to produce more dopamine than sex. Meth, cocaine, and porn. Drugs like cocaine release unnatural amounts of dopamine into the body. So does meth. So does pornography.
Dopamine ensures that the brain remembers and later craves the activities that led to the high. The use of drugs like cocaine, meth, and porn is rooted in chasing that high again and again. Many times, chasing dopamine can be so consuming that people risk it all, their job, their marriage, their ministry, and integrity, for another hit. And I’m quoting out of this book right here, The Freedom Fight.
So, we’ve been talking about dopamine, and what happens is,
when your body creates and experiences an unnatural high level of dopamine, it has ways of bringing the baseline up. So, if the baseline is low, it doesn’t take much dopamine to really feel good, and to really feel well about life, and just feel happy. But when there’s a natural amount of dopamine released in our brains, then the baseline comes up, and now it takes a high level of dopamine
to feel good, and as soon as the dopamine production goes down below that baseline, we get depressed, and things aren’t feeling well. The higher the dopamine consumption, the baseline moves up. Things that used to be pleasurable no longer hold any joy. It takes a larger dose of the same drug to get the same high. We experience this in many smaller ways. Think depression after a mountaintop experience, or the feeling of wellness after fasting.
So, looking at dopamine, let me read this snippet from an article by Harvard Health Publishing. An addicted person’s impaired ability to stop using drugs or alcohol has to do with deficits in the function of the prefrontal cortex. Now, we’re going to talk about the prefrontal cortex a bit. That’s the part of our brain that is very analytical. It looks at situations, and when we do something that’s right because it’s right,
not because of what it’s going to do to us or how it’s going to make us feel, but we know this is the right thing to do. That’s the prefrontal cortex working. When we choose the hard in any kind of situation, we know this is going to hurt. We know it’s not going to be fun, whatever. But we look down the road, and we know that long term, this will have the best outcome.
That’s our prefrontal cortex doing its job. When dopamine takes the driver’s seat, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t. Those two are held in tension by each other. Let me keep reading. So the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain involved in executive function. The prefrontal cortex has several important jobs. Self-monitoring, delaying reward,
debriding whatever the intellect tells you is important with what the libido is telling you to do. The difficulty has to do with how the brain, when deprived of the drugs to which it is accustomed, reacts to stress. The response is usually exaggerated, negative emotion, and even despair. In this setting, the strong association of learned environmental cues, for instance, smelling beer at a ball game or seeing the corner where the dealer can be found, exacerbates the craving for the substance. And the flood of intoxicating brain chemicals called neurotransmitters,
dopamine, during drug use makes the brain relatively insensitive to normal sources of pleasure, say a good conversation with a friend or a beautiful sunset. What this all means for overcoming an addiction is not enough simply to just say no. The person needs to develop alternative sources of joy and reward, and people who have been isolating themselves in order to drink or use drugs without inhibition may need to work in a purposeful way to reacquire habitual joy.
So addictions are a very real thing. When someone is addicted to drugs or to pornography, which is a very, very strong addiction, we can further hurt or confuse the addict when we give oversimplified answers like, well, just pray more, or just say no, or have more faith. Those are all part of it. But when we oversimplify,
and the person tries it, and it doesn’t work for him or her, then the bondage can be all the harder to overcome. We need to give solid, meaningful answers rather than shallow ones that will further discourage. So to just say no, or to just focus on what’s bad about this, and to try to say no to it,
push it off, try to put it down, that probably doesn’t work. I’m reminded of the scripture in Matthew 12, 43 to 45.
Even so shall I be also unto this wicked generation. So when we are on the healing journey, it is so important to fill our lives with good, healthy things that replace whatever we’re trying to get over. I have a burden here this morning to see us be men of integrity and women of integrity, if you’re listening, and to nurture a culture of integrity.
A little bit about a test that someone did years ago, and I’m again quoting from the Freedom Fight book. I’m just going to read a couple pages here. In the 1970s, addictions were raging in comparison to what had been several generations earlier. I wasn’t around in the 60s, but the 60s was the hippie movement, lots of rebellion, lots of boundaries being broken.
And debauchery going on. So there was lots of addictions that the health community were facing and the scientific community in the 1970s. Drug addictions, sexual addictions, and such like. They were trying to figure out what causes addictions and how do we overcome them. Some experts argued that addictions were caused solely by the chemicals the body got hooked on.
This idea. Researchers put a rat alone in a cage with two bottles. One had normal water and the other had morphine drugged water. The rat almost always chose the drugged water until it became addicted and eventually died. The theory that the drug’s chemicals caused addictive behavior seemed validated. Later in the same decade, however, psychologist Bruce Alexander did another experiment.
The experiment concluded the rats in rat park rarely used drugged water. None ever used it compulsively and none of them ever overdosed.
I find this so fascinating. So if a rat was in a cage, didn’t have anything to do, it would discover the drugged water and it would feel good off of it. So it would keep going back and get more and more and more where it would eventually just completely ignore the clean water and food and it would just live on the drugged water until it died. But then when they did the same kind of test in a rat community where things were functioning well, there’s lots of things to do.
There was relationship, there were playmates, and the list goes on. It was a healthy community. Those rats didn’t get addicted. So the researchers took the rat park experiment one step further. They placed rats in isolated cages for 57 days. Over that time, the lonely rats drank the drugged water compulsively and developed a strong addiction. The scientists then moved these addicted rats into Rat Park.
They gradually reduced their drug use from, from, yeah, they gradually reduced their drug use. Eventually, all the rats gave the drugs up completely and were drug free for the rest of their lives. So the conclusion, there’s power and healing in community. Now, because rats behave this way, it doesn’t prove that humans will too, but there is a powerful lesson in it that a healthy community,
there’s power and there’s healing in it. And when we don’t experience that, we are much more likely to fall into addictions. Our goal, our vision, our hope, here at Hope for Wondering Amish, is to help anyone to, to become a part of a healthy community. And while there’s no communities that are, that are problem-free,
some struggles and all of that, what we really don’t want is people jumping out of whatever culture and tradition that they were a part of, and then just go out into the world, find some kind of easy believism. We don’t want that. We want all of you to be in a biblical, solid church community.
That’s what we’re after. So, yeah, I just wanted to put that plug in there. Continue reading here. We see these kinds of experiments with humans all the time, comparing it to the Rat Park experiment. Severely injured patients are given a medical form of heroin stronger than most street drugs for months at a time. Yet typically, the patient just stops the drugs when they are discharged, especially if they’re going home to a life where they’re surrounded by a loving family.
Using heroin for similar amounts of time often turned street users who were alone and unhappy into addicts. People were made to connect and to bond even more than rats were. When people don’t have community, when they are isolated, it creates an environment conducive for addictions to take root. The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s connection.
Social media connections. And if you don’t use social media, God bless you. I think most of us have forms of communication electronically, whether it’s phone calls, texting, WhatsApp, whatever. We’re using that this morning on this call. We’re using computers or phones to connect with each other. But in this world of electronic communication, it is so easy to present ourselves in less than real ways.
It’s easy to put our best face out there and our best experiences, our best moments, our mountaintop experiences. It’s so easy to create a different reality online, that which we present to others, different than our real life. And if we do that, it creates a world where people just connect without true connection.
And that’s a situation where we can very easily be lonely and isolated. And then it creates a place where addiction thrives. So a part of healthy community is being real with each other. And I don’t want you to think just because you’re not experiencing healthy community that you have to jump ship.
Lord, you serve God with all that you have and you become what it takes to have healthy community. You become open and honest and real walking in the light. If you’re excited about Jesus and you’re serving him and you’re obeying his word, his word is in you and you are in him. And the people around you can’t handle that. Then it’ll be time for you to move on and find a community where people invite that and encourage that.
But we don’t want to encourage jumping off the ship and then taking baggage with you that will create the same problems in the next setting where you’re in. Sex Addiction Authority Dr. Patrick Carnes surveyed over 600 recovered sex addicts. He identified the two most important factors they said helped them find freedom. The number one factor was reliance on God. The second factor was a healthy small group connection.
And that’s another thing that I really want to promote here this morning is have a small group that is healthy around you for support. So a healthy small group brings acceptance, safety, accountability, encouragement, and processing that can’t be found any other way. Back to what I said earlier about the deception that I can quit whenever I want to on my own. It’s just not true.
It understands that connecting with God and others would be an essential part of recovery. The first two roots in porn or sex addiction are the sexualized society and the addicted brain. The third root is isolation. From the beginning, sin has caused people to isolate from God and one another. After Adam and Eve sinned, what did they do? They went into hiding. They immediately hid from one another and from God.
And we sin. And especially a sin that’s shameful. And this sort of sin that we’re talking about this morning. Especially in this. But just as God called Adam out of hiding, he does the same to us. He wants us to leave the shadows so we can be in an authentic relationship with him and others. I want to just say amen to that. That’s so well said. Authentic relationship with God and with others.
So needful. And we live in a world where that’s not really the norm. Our society is very individualistic. Very, very self-centered. And there are just a number of things that contribute to that. I wish I could go into that more, but I won’t have time. I just kind of have to skip through it this morning here. Just an interesting side note.
Even our houses have changed over the years. Used to be houses where the standard house would have a big front porch. And that’s not standard anymore. Now people like a back deck. Back deck versus front porch. And we just, we tend to pull back and isolate. We all long for fulfillment and true intimacy. When that thirst isn’t met, we try to fulfill it on our own. When we thirst for fulfillment, we are really thirsting for Jesus.
Jesus tells us our thirst for ultimate fulfillment is found in him. John 7, 37 and 38. If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. A personal relationship with Jesus begins when we trust his work on the cross for our sins. We invite him into our lives. We receive him as Lord and Savior, as the Son of God, as the only way to God the Father.
And we commit our all to him. Reading a bit here. A personal relationship with Christ begins when we trust in his death on the cross and invite him to live his life through us. Even if a person has taken previous steps toward Christ, they won’t experience the intimacy they want until they commit fully to him. And I just really want to lift that up this morning to commit 100% to Jesus.
And say we believe and then go on with life. But we hold back something in life where that’s off limits. I won’t let God into that part. We’re not going to find that fulfillment that we need. It’s only 100% all out. Being sold out to Christ. Now he owns everything. There’s nothing held back. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. Once we come to know Christ, we grow in that relationship by spending time with him. As we would with any good relationship. What does spending time with him look like? Seeking God in a daily walk through his word and spending time in prayer. Living a life of worship. Seeking God with other believers in a church. Surprisingly, God says a close connection with him isn’t all we need. We need companionship and community.
God himself was Adam’s companion. God said it’s not good that the man should be alone. In a perfect world with a perfect God and perfect man, God recognized our need for human companionship. How could God say Adam was alone when Adam had God? It really points to our need for human connection and companionship. I want to draw our attention to Ephesians 4.
Go through and bring out a few different verses. Ephesians 4, 11 says he gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. So part of having a healthy community, a very important part, a very central part,
where we all have a heart, a vision, a desire to become more like Christ, where the stature of the fullness of Christ is our goal. We won’t be able to aim for that when we’re running off of dopamine, when what feels good is what we want to do, regardless of future consequence. The prefrontal cortex is functional.
We’re measured according to how do we get to that goal. Verse 14, that we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the slight of men and cunning craftiness whereby they lie in wait to deceive. These people here, verse 14, they’re just running off of dopamine. Their prefrontal cortex isn’t working. Verse 15, but speaking the truth in love, they grew up unto him in all things, which is the head, even Christ. That’s speaking the truth in love.
It is so key also. Walking in openness, speaking the truth, walking in love. Truth without love and love without truth always come to some bad ends. Jesus Christ came full of grace and truth. We need to be aware of the false dichotomy of mercy versus profit. Jesus had the perfect balance of both. They were held the perfect balance of both. When we say, well, I’m a mercy.
Maybe Jesus would have us learn how to also have that prophet, that truth part in our lives. Or maybe we say, I’m a prophet, and we excuse our lack of mercy by that. I just want to call our attention to the fact that Jesus Christ is full of grace and truth, and we should be too. Verse 16 says, From him, the whole body, fitted and knit together by every supporting ligament, promotes the growth of the body for building itself up in love.
But the proper working of each individual part. This is not speaking just of one person. It’s speaking of a community or a church where every part is working together, and he likens it to the human body. Affluence, technology, and changing social norms all push us toward a self-contained, self-sufficient, independent lifestyle to a greater or lesser degree. I already mentioned the change from front porches to back decks.
Change is how we identify ourselves. When we meet a stranger and we try to get to know the stranger, one of the first things that we tend to ask is, what do you do for work? What’s your occupation? How do you make your living? That kind of thing. It wasn’t always this way. In most of the world today and most of the world in the past, the first question would be, where do you belong? What’s your community? What’s your family?
There’s a shift from identifying ourselves by family, by community, to occupation. And it’s not a good shift. It’s not a good focus. We need to get back to focusing on community.
In these Gentiles, dopamine has completely taken over. The prefrontal cortex is shot. These Gentiles are addicted to all sorts of vices. They’re seeking fulfillment in all the wrong places. They’re coming up with new and more devious ways to get the next high. But at the end of the day, they’re empty, thirsty,
and miserable. And the same way that it worked for them, it will also work for us. So there’s various scriptures that speak of being enslaved either to sin or to righteousness. And with this whole subject of dopamine and how it works, it just makes so much sense what the Bible’s been saying all along, that there’s a real enslavement.
What we give ourselves to becomes our master. What master do we want? Jesus Christ or sin? Verse 25 of Ephesians 4, Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Make a habit of sharing deeply and truthfully. And then verse 26 and 27,
We need to be quick and able to identify our emotions. When there’s healthy emotions going on, oftentimes those can be a trigger to a relapse. There’s unhealthy emotions, whether it’s anger or it can be other things. But we need to be able to identify that and deal with it quickly before the sun goes down, as it says here.
And become a long-standing problem. We need to be very quick to work through those things. Anger is like a check engine light. Check engine light comes on and it’s not the light itself that’s the problem. It’s just an indication of something deeper that could maybe be fixed now without a huge issue. But if we ignore it, it could lead to more and greater
problems later and at very inconvenient times. So men especially, women can have anger problems too, but it tends to kind of be a man thing a little more. Don’t ignore it. Don’t excuse it. Get a small group around you. Work through it. Do whatever you need to get to the root of anger issues. All right. Well, I think I’ll move on there from that chapter.
We could spend in it. Ephesians 4. What are the boxes that we might be in? Thinking of that rat test again. The rat that was in a box by itself, isolated, and got into drugs. What might the boxes be that we are in? Seek for ways to identify what box you might be in if you are. Psalm 139, 23 and 24 says, Search me, O God.
And know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. And see if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. We need to have that posture before the Lord. Our hearts open and ask God to search and to cleanse. God will honor that request. I can say that from experience. If we are serious about God leading us in truth, He will honor that.
Marvelous ways. Shame is very significant in this discussion. Shame will lead us to isolate ourselves and to present ourselves different and better than what we really are. And it will also, it will become a vicious cycle because if we fall into sexual sin, there’s shame connected to it. And then shame leads us to more
of that same sin in order to feel good and in order to feel like we’re in control of our lives. And yeah, sexual sin leads to shame. Shame leads to sexual sin and it becomes a vicious cycle. I’ll read a little bit here. A snippet on shame I thought was good. Shame convinces us that we are unwanted and we pursue behavior that confirms it.
And freedom disarm the power of shame. So shame might be a box that people, shame is a box that people can be in. Shame is the most interconnected and influential of the roots of addiction. Shame is different from guilt. Guilt says, I’ve done bad. But shame says, I am bad. At the core of shame is self-loathing and a sense of worthlessness. A person’s shame declares some version of, I am not enough. There’s something wrong with me. I’m bad.
I don’t matter. Shame researcher Brené Brown defines shame as an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Guilt can be a healthy emotion when it shows a person their sin so that they can turn from it. Shame, however, makes people feel like they are unable to change because of an inherent personal flaw. Guilt is something people feel because they have done something bad. Shame is something they feel because they are bad.
Guilt can be good. Shame is toxic. Guilt is good because it allows people to see they need help. Shame makes them feel they don’t deserve help. With guilt, a person can have the hope of a fresh start. With shame, there is hopelessness because the person is the problem. Guilt can be a springboard to an improved life. Shame is an anchor that keeps people stuck. I think there are good thoughts in that.
He is certainly a very key part of the answer. He is the answer. We don’t want to oversimplify it. We also need to identify where it comes from, how to get out of it, and certainly bringing things to light is huge in overcoming shame. I don’t know how you found it, but the amount of people going for professional counseling
from what I saw when I was growing up in the late 80s and 90s. And please, going for counseling is good if we go to the right place. There’s good counselors out there, and there’s bad counselors that are teaching false doctrine. And by all means, if someone needs counseling, I don’t want to put any kind of shame on that or stigma, not at all. But all I’m trying to say is,
there seems to be a real uptick in emotional difficulties. Often shame is involved. That’s a whole subject that I’m not prepared to talk much about. But I wonder sometimes, I’ve often wondered, how many times was there sexual sin and shame, and it was capped, covered up,
to the next, to eventually the person is in a real crisis. I don’t want to say it’s always. I know it’s not always. The whole picture is much bigger than that. But I think it can be a very key element to it. Shame fuels rationalization and self-deception. So when we live in shame, we don’t want to be in shame. We’re not made to live in constant shame. So we start rationalizing what we’re doing to make ourselves believe
because we would like to not live in shame, but we also don’t want to expose the reasons that we are living in shame. So we rationalize and we end up deceiving ourselves. Shame fuels rationalization and self-deception. That can certainly be a box that we can live in. Perhaps it’s lost hope. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick, Proverbs says. When we have large goals, visions, dreams,
and they get dashed. That can be a box that we live in. And again, I think having people to talk to and to process things and with God’s help come to accept life as it is and see God’s hand in the difficulties in life that can help us get out of the box and into community. Trauma, unhealthy emotions, self-reliance. Those could all be boxes that we live in.
That’s when we learn healthy ways to process and cope with pain, not new ways to ignore and medicate it. A healing community. What are the marks of a healing community? Vulnerability certainly is a big part of it. We need to nurture safe places for people to be vulnerable. If you have people in your life that are vulnerable with you, by all means, protect their hearts and make a safe place for them to be that.
Shame into the light. Healing can be found. It is only when one is fully known that we can be fully loved. That’s where God would have us be fully known and fully loved. That’s the way we are with him. He fully knows us and he loves us anyway. And he calls us to follow him and love like that.
We don’t want to avoid fire because people have been burned. We don’t want to avoid air even though it’s a key component.
We treat it with care and respect for our sustenance and enjoyment. And I want to encourage you if you have been hurt in church to not give up on church. I know that’s a temptation, but it’s never the answer. Seek whatever help you need to be able to put yourself in church situations.
And continue in God’s heart for the church. Reading a little snippet here again about authenticity. There is no intimacy without authenticity. So I’m reading someone by the name of Steve wrote this.
Wow. Here’s a key verse that really goes along with all of what I’ve been sharing this morning. 1 John 1.
5-7.
It brings so much beauty and it brings clarity. It brings truth, healing. Light is a tremendous gift. And you know what? Light always is stronger than darkness. So whatever darkness you have faced, are facing, light is stronger. So bring things into the light. Open up to where light can shine in.
And just be real. It’s when we are real that we can have fellowship and that we can experience the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ. A call to action. I just want to leave you with this. Have a small group. And I’m speaking to anyone that is struggling and stuck in sexual sins. And even otherwise. I think all of us just need this, what I’m sharing. So have a small group.
In temptation, remember the word brace. Brace. Acronym for breathe. Remember. Ask. Call. And escape. When you start getting tempted, stop. Breathe deeply. Remember. Remember the resolves that you made last time you failed. Or sometime. Remember those things that you know about this.
Ask. Ask God for help. Say a quick prayer. Call. Have someone to call and talk to and talk through. Talk through the situation that you’re in. Accountability there. Just have somebody to call and talk to and then escape. Get out of whatever situation you’re in. Remove yourself. Move on to a different situation where the temptation can leave. I think it’s very powerful.
Remember the word brace. Breathe. Remember. Ask. Call. And escape. We can all use this for ourselves or we can be a part of this for someone who needs it. Well, I think I’m going to wrap it up with that. My heart and vision would be that this could be helpful to someone out there.
That we could all develop a vision and get together in developing a culture where these things can be handled well and where addictions are overcome, where there’s safe communities and the shipwrecks that we all know exist, that there wouldn’t be more.
Together and save one person from shipwreck. It is so worth it. So God bless you. I will leave it there. I know there’s so much more that could be said, but hopefully there’s something there that somebody can take. All right, Levi, hand it back to you. Hey, thank you, Ephraim. That was very good and informative. I was blessed with the things you shared and especially with that rat.
Experiment that was really powerful. I don’t think we realized the value of community and just socializing and having other people in our lives. So yeah, it seems like that’s a vicious cycle. When we sin, like Adam and Eve, we want to hide. We want to isolate and then isolation causes more sin. So that was an interesting loop. And then one addiction that you didn’t mention that I think we’re facing today that we might not always even call an addiction.
I know usually we talk a lot about social media, but just any type of scrolling. Yeah, it can be very, very addictive. And again, that dopamine hit is what is causing that. Every time the screen changes, there’s another small dopamine hit. So we just keep going and going. I’m hoping we don’t, but that’s a very common problem now in younger people.
Some of these shootings and other horrific things that happen, if there’s more research being done, it looks like some of those are tied into feelings of isolation, and then that is part of the problem. But yeah, it’s very good. I appreciate the message and the content. We’re going to open it up here for all of you who have joined for questions and answers or comments, if you have thoughts to share.
You’ll be able to unmute yourself and share. Hey, while they’re thinking, I want to just thank you, Levi, for bringing that in, the thing of addiction to technology that is very real. And I’m just happy that you touched on that a bit. Yeah, good morning, Brother Ephraim. Thanks so much for sharing. It was, yeah, very, very good. And I’m sure this talk will be a help to a lot of people.
The thought of somebody going into isolation is a very sad thought. And it’s also a very dangerous place to go, to go in isolation. And the thought of seeing somebody find community and seeking out community, that’s really beautiful. It’s like the opposite of isolation. Community is like the opposite of isolation. And life is full of choices.
So to go in isolation, that’s a choice. To seek out community is a choice as well. And that shame that people find themselves in when they find themselves in pornography, immorality, will obviously be a thing that leads to further isolation. And like you mentioned, the prefrontal cortex isn’t doing its job in our brain. So we’re not making the right decisions. So isolation is like, oh, I’ll just kind of remove myself.
I have my secret life and do what I want to do and not have other people tell me what to do. That’s horrible. That’s destructive. And I think you mentioned about sin leading to death. That’s very, very real. When I was probably about 13 years old was the first time I was introduced to pornography. And it was a young man in our neighborhood. I think he was probably about 17 at the time, driving around, unaccountable to his parents.
And it wasn’t that many years later to that young man was locked up in prison.
He got in a relationship with an underage girl and I feel like he’s probably spent, I don’t know, if it’s about four years in prison or something like that and on probation for a long time. But it’s like he never was able to pull himself out of his destructive life that he found himself in. And I’m not even sure where he’s at today, but I know he’s not in a good place.
They had a fellow that the police were after and he was not yielding himself to be arrested. And he ended up inside a house and the police surrounded the house. They wanted him. It was like a standoff for, I think, maybe seven hours. And this individual ended up taking his life. And I forget his age. I feel like he might have been in his 40s, maybe 50s. I’m not sure. And it was the same thing with him.
He’s an underage girl anyway, or a minor. And it’s kind of like that secret life. You know, I’m just thinking of the 17-year-old boy back in the day that I knew. You know, he seemed happy. Life, you know, probably what he was doing seemed innocent, harmless, fun. But it was sinful. It was entering that secret life. And same with this fellow in Phillipsburg that took his life. Where did he start? Did he start?
Did he think someday I’m going to shoot myself? No. It was like he started with things that seemed harmless. You know, I mean, he was a little boy at one point. He made choices through life. So I’m just saying life is full of choices. So let’s choose to be a man, or if you’re a woman listening, a woman or individual that seeks out community, seeks to be transparent, seeks to be honest and open, and seeks community.
Let’s make those choices, not the choices to isolate ourselves and do what we want to do because we don’t want anybody telling us what to do. That’s very destructive. So that’s that secret, shameful life. Let’s choose to be open, transparent, honest, and walk in the light. So anyway, thanks so much, and God bless for all that you put into preparing this talk. It’s very good. Well, thank you, Elam. Very, very much appreciate what you added here. Amen.
Thank you, Elam.
I realize some of these conversions that happen, people are in addictions, and they’re in some very terrible situations, and then they find Jesus, and he just sets them free, and it seems like the addictions are over. But I think most of the time, what people don’t realize underneath the surface is that the temptations don’t go away, and they still have a battle, but they now have power and strength to overcome.
I was explained one time how our brain is wired. It’s basically saying our brain is wired is actually technically correct, I think. It was explained like the brain is like you could think about noodles maybe. It’s this whole mesh of wires that’s together, and when you do an activity or you do something, two ends of those wires are welded together.
And then the more you do that activity, the more of those wires, the weld gets stronger and stronger. So when we do bad activities, we get into addictions, those welds become really, really strong, and when we stop doing that activity, that weld is still there. It’s a tendency that, you know, this is the default, the brain just defaults to that.
When we have an addiction and we’re trying to overcome that, it’s not so much that we say, well, yeah, God, just take that all away, because it’s an actual physical connection in the brain. We have to bring in some other activity, something else that replaces it. I think, Ephraim, you mentioned the scripture of the man that had a demon that was expelled, and then he went out and found seven others and came back. It says that it was clean and swept.
It wasn’t filled with something else. So, yeah, I would just like to encourage people to not feel like if they have temptations and, you know, why is this still, you know, why am I battling with this? The reality is that it is hardwired in our brain when we have experienced and participated in wrongdoing. But we have to be intentional, use that prefrontal cortex to make decisions on replacing something beneficial instead.
I think we’ll just briefly open it yet here for if anyone else has something they would like to share and then we’ll close it. Okay, if no one else would like to share, Ephraim, would you like to close us with a prayer yet? Yeah, sure. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the power of the gospel, for your love and sending your Son, Jesus Christ, for our Redeemer, our Savior. I pray for everyone that listens to this talk this morning,
you would use it in your kind fatherly way for good. Bring glory to your name and help us in this day and age to be wise, to be prudent, to be discerning of the times. I pray that we would have courage to pursue new heights and to, yes, walk in the light as you are in the light. Thank you that where sin abounds, grace does much more abound. We believe in that. We take courage in it.
And I pray that you would guide us today and throughout our lives in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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