Understand your brain and break porn habits in 90 days.

Scientists are continually discovering new and exciting information on how our brains change through repetitive behaviors, and how these changes can contribute to addictions. The Porn Circuit goes into great detail to explain these changes without becoming overwhelming. The book clearly and easily describes how certain chemicals and hormones interact in ways that encourage certain behaviors, and how repeating these behaviors creates “paths of least resistance” that we are more likely to follow.

The only downside I could find with this book is its focus on finding freedom through behavior modification alone. I personally believe there is a very real spiritual element to addiction that is not covered in this eBook, but I also recognize that is not the focus of the book so it should not be expected. That being said, I would encourage any reader to prayerfully compare the behavior-based approach to freedom presented in this book with the freedom-in-Christ path we see in the Bible.

From the Covenant Eyes page:

Science shows us that acting out with pornography taps into our powerful neurochemistry, and this can quickly lead a person to use porn habitually. Much like a drug, the chemicals that fire when watching porn cause the brain to increasingly crave it until eventually it can feel almost impossible to break free.

In this e-book, you’ll learn:

• What chemicals fire during porn use
• How sensitization, triggers, and compulsiveness turn pornography into a habit
• Why one image is never enough
• How porn ruins sex and intimacy
• How to find freedom in 90 days

What if God isn’t who you think
He is and neither are you?

No book, apart from the Bible, has changed my life more dramatically than The Cure.

A few years back, I heard one of the authors, John Lynch, share the message of The Cure at a men’s retreat and felt as if God was speaking directly to my soul. It was in that moment that God opened my eyes to the reality of His unwavering grace and unconditional love, and that He never asked me to try to fix myself before I could enjoy a relationship with Him.

If you want to learn how God views you, how to sin less, and how to finally experience a meaningful relationship with Jesus, I highly suggest you read The Cure.

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Purchase The Cure on Amazon today!

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Highlighting My Highlights:

I’m one of those guys who can’t read a book without a highlighter in my hand, and as far as I’m concerned, it would be a shame to mark up my favorite content and never share it with you. With that in mind, here are some of my favorite quotes from The Cure:

Chapter One: Two Roads

“We do not see God as He is, and we do not see ourselves as we are.”

“Despite all my passionate sincerity, I keep sinning. Then I get fixated on trying not to sin. Then it repeats: Same sin, same thoughts, same failure.”

“If out primary motive is pleasing God, we’ll never please Him enough and we’ll never learn trust. Pleasing God is a good desire, It just can’t be our primary motivation or it will imprison our hearts… When our primary motive becomes trusting God, however, we suddenly discover there is nothing in the world that pleases Him more! Until you trust God, nothing you do will please God.”

“What if Christ, for the believer, is never over there, on the other side of our sin? What if the power of His death on the cross allows Him to stand right in front of me, on my worst day, and smile bigger and happier than any human being ever could?”

Chapter Two: Two Faces

“No one told me that when I wear a mask, only my mask receives love.”

“This life in Christ is not about what I can do to make myself worthy of His acceptance, but about daily trusting what He has done to make me worthy of His acceptance.”

“We may even be fueled by a sincere desire to make God look good by having our act together. He has no need of such help, but we think it’s our duty. So, we hide our scars and pretend we’re modeling to the world how well God treats His followers. Instead we just come off as weird and smug.”

Chapter Three: Two Gods

“You have as much of God as you’re going to get! He lives in you! You are in Him. How much closer do you want than that? Every moment of every day, fused with you, there He is. He never moves. Never covers His ears when you sin, never puts up a newspaper, never turns His back. He’s not on the other side of your sin, waiting for you to get it together so you can finally be close. It’s incredible! Don’t you think? That’s why they call it ‘Good News’!”

“The reason people rebel is not because they trusted grace or chose to live out of their new identity. It’s the very opposite. It’s moralism, the law of religious practice and thought, that keeps them trying to get away with something.”

“This is the cruel joke we play on ourselves: To bluff and pretend we are righteous, secretly knowing we aren’t, only to eventually discover we actually were all along!”

Chapter Four: Two Solutions

“You can tell another what is going on inside before it happens. And the moment you do—at any point along the way—the cycle stops. The madness, the pain, the damage… all of it stops. The power of sin is broken.”

“I am ‘Christ in me’ on my worst day, in my worst thought, during my worst temptation. So, I learn to tell on myself, both to God and to others. I experience the truth that living in holiness is living with nothing hidden. Then I am clean; I am free; I am healing.”

Chapter Five: Two Healings

“We can almost picture God forced to sit on His hands, waiting until we give up so He can rescue us.”

“If I am to be set free, I must first embrace a forgiveness that is solely for my benefit. Only then can I extend forgiveness to the benefit of another.”

“We must be weakened to the point we drop our defenses long enough to look to God and call out, ‘Help.’ This condition is called repentance… Repentance isn’t doing something about my sin. It’s admitting I can’t do anything about my sin. It’s trusting that only God can cleanse me, and only He can convince me I’m truly cleansed.”

Chapter Six: Two Friends

“What if it was less important that anything ever gets fixed than that nothing has to be hidden?”

“God allows some pain to awaken our hearts. Many of us are awakening to the pain of realizing we can’t even control our world the way we thought we could. We’re stuck with unresolved issues, symptoms we’re trying to fix, without the help of anyone else.”

“Nothing defines religion quite as well as attempting impossible tasks with limited power, all while pretending that it’s working.”

“Only those who risk trusting other flawed, fallible others to love them get to experience love.”

Chapter Seven: Two Destinies

“We can strive to sin less, but not love more. But, when we love more, we cannot help but sin less. This effort allows us to extend love to the wounded, angry, and unlovely. It is the effort of actually living out of who He has made us to be.”

“The quality of your life is based in trusting this: Where you re right now is the perfect place for you, or the God of all goodness and power would not allow you to be there.”

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Purchase The Cure on Amazon today!

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What if lust for porn is really a search for true passion?

From Amazon: In a world where there are 68 million searches for pornography every day and where over 70 percent of Christian men report viewing porn in the last year, it’s no surprise  that more and more men struggle with an addiction to this false fantasy. Common wisdom says if they just had more willpower or more faith, their fight would be over. Is the answer really that simple?

According to the counselor and ministry leader Michael John Cusick, the answer is no—but the big truth may be much more freeing. Backed by scripture, Cusick uses examples from his own life and from his twenty years of counseling experience to show us how the pursuit of empty pleasure is really a search for our heart’s deepest desire—and the real key resistance is discovering and embracing the joy we truly want.

Cusick’s insights help readers understand how porn struggles begin, what to do to prevent them, and most importantly, how to overcome the compulsion once it begins. In the end, this powerful book shows us all how the barrier built by porn addiction can become a bridge to abundant life.

I wish I had discovered this book ten years ago.

I’ve read a lot of books over the years dealing with the specific issue of pornography addiction, but this one easily stands out above the rest. The author, Michael John Cusick, paints an in-depth picture of the true source of our desire to keep coming back to these images which can never truly satisfy us.

The book is written in a way that is very easy to understand, even though the topics can be quite in-depth. I highly recommend Surfing for God to any man who is struggling with pornography, especially those of you who feel as if you have tried everything and have all but lost hope.

 

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Purchase Surfing for God on Amazon today!

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Highlighting My Highlights:

I’m one of those guys who can’t read a book without a highlighter in my hand, and as far as I’m concerned, it would be a shame to mark up my favorite content and never share it with you. With that in mind, here are some of my favorite quotes from Surfing for God:

“When we fixate on porn, we choose to remain selfishly anchored to our own pleasure above all else.”

“If we seek on the physical level what can only be obtained on a spiritual level, then we set ourselves up for a never-ending cycle that only leads to desperation, despair, and bondage.”

“A man’s sexual appetite is a barometer for what’s going on inside his heart.”

“Most men don’t feel terribly strong or adequate in the presence of a real, live woman—wether they’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a decorated war hero, or a seasoned pastor. And yet, God designed our masculine souls to be energized by offering ourselves on behalf of our female counterparts.”

“Only when we identify [our core thirsts] will we begin moving toward those desires according to God’s design.”

“As a man heals from his bondage to porn, he must understand his brokenness and allow it to compel him toward Jesus. Our brokenness is our only requirement for receiving God’s grace.”

“Some wounds aren’t the result of a specific event but the slow accumulation of disappointments. It’s not the two-by-four over the head that these men have trouble accepting as a wound, it’s the drop-by-drop buildup of pain and sorrow that can erode our soul as well.”

“That’s what porn and lust do to us. They tell us we’re not going to receive God’s provision, that we’ll never be satisfied with His manna, so we’re better off finding out own. But the intimacy we experience in those illicit moments is a counterfeit intimacy. It makes us feel like men without requiring us to be men—until we wake up one day with a cheap imitation of intimacy in our top drawer.”

“Unbelief is rarely concerned with God’s existence or whether we believe that Christianity is true. Instead, unbelief deals with God’s character—is God trustworthy, and is He truly who He says He is?”

“A false self cannot be loved. A fake self does not exist, it is only an illusion. You and I can only be loved for our true selves, as unlovable as we think we might be.”

“At the core of humility is trust—trusting God, and trusting others with who you are.”

“The goal is not to turn off the faucet of lust, but to turn on the faucet of trust.”

“I’m not horny; beneath feeling sexually aroused, what I really feel is lonely.”

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Purchase Surfing for God on Amazon today!

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