Why Accountability and Willpower Don’t Fix Addiction
Biblical Truth Most Christians Miss
If you have been alive more than a minute, you have probably heard one, if not all, of these Christian sayings from well-meaning people when you told them about a specific problem you were having:
“Just pray more.”
“Just try harder.”
“Get accountability.”
“You need more faith.”
These are not always helpful, are they?
I’m Ana Murby, and this is Honest Christian Conversations, Minisode edition. Thank you for joining me today.
Whether this is your first time or you have been here before, I look forward to walking through this with you, because it’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way.
Confession time: I have said these things from time to time as well. They were even part of my mentality while I was going through my pornography addiction.
“Just pray more.”
“Just try harder.”
“You need more faith.”
These haunted me during my 17 years of being addicted to porn. I felt like a hypocrite because I knew this wasn’t how a Christian lives, and I wanted to stop. I had the willpower and the spiritual desire to be free from porn, but I wasn’t able to stop.
Why not? I was praying, crying, and begging God to take this from me. I believed and demanded in faith that I was already healed, and yet I wasn’t.
Whenever I was in an “I want to stop” mood, I could stop for long spurts before eventually falling back into the same cycle.
What gives? Why wasn’t I getting better?
