The Secrets to Effective Prayer Against Pornography

John 14:14, Jesus tells his followers that if they ask God for anything in his name, he will do it. Why then does it seem like God is ignoring your prayers? Especially prayers for things that are truly good and God-honoring, like:

 “Dear God, please let me be free from pornography.”

If you’ve prayed that prayer, my heart goes out to you. Friend, you’re not alone. And I want to encourage you that God can and will answer that prayer if you trust and obey him.

But there are some important things about prayer you need to understand so you can effectively pray against temptation. 

Just saying the words and hoping they come true isn’t the same as effective prayer.

How Should We Pray?

Many Christians struggle with pornography. To learn how to pray against pornography, we first need to see what effective prayer looks like. There’s no better example than The Lord’s Prayer, or “model prayer” that Jesus taught his disciples. We find it in Matthew 6:9-13:

Our Father in heaven,
your name be honored as holy.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one. (CSB)

It’s a great prayer in and of itself, especially if you don’t know what to pray. Many churches (including mine) use it regularly in their services.

More importantly, Jesus gave this as an example of how and what to pray. There are at least six points from the Lord’s prayer that you can apply to your own prayers:

1. Remember, you’re a child of God and you can talk to him as your Father.
2. We should pray that our lives will bring honor and glory to God.
3. Pray that God would carry out his greater purpose and plan in the world.
4. Ask God to let you enjoy his good blessings in this life.
5. Confess your sins to God and pray for forgiveness through the blood of Jesus.
6. Ask God to shield you from temptation.

Applying the Lord’s Prayer to Pornography

Remember, Jesus didn’t give the model prayer to tell you exactly what to pray in every situation—the Bible has hundreds of different examples of prayers.

But, you may find it helpful to have a model prayer for dealing with temptations to watch pornography. Here’s an example of what this could look like—I’ve included scripture references for each point:

Dear Heavenly Father,

You are holy, great, and awesome, but you love me as your child. Nothing else in the world—including sex and porn—can give me comfort like you do. Thank you, God, for your love (1 John 1:31).

I worship you because of who you are. Pornography and self-gratification do not deserve my praise. So let my life bring you honor and glory (Romans 11:33-36).

Even though pornography is a destructive force in the world, you are more powerful, and you will conquer it. You will restore all the brokenness. Help me to see your hand at work and allow me to take part in the victory over pornography (1 Corinthians 15:24-25).

You made human relationships, including sex and romance, good and beautiful. Thank you for that. I pray that I would experience these things as you intended, free from lust and corruption. Help me, because I am lonely and needy (Matthew 7:11)

I confess that I have lusted and given in to sinful desires. Please forgive me for watching pornography (1 John 1:9).

Help me avoid falling back into temptation. Give me the boldness to confess my struggle to a brother or sister in Christ and seek accountability. Keep me honest and faithful to use the tools that you have given me to overcome pornography (James 4:7, 5:16).

In Jesus’s name, amen.

This is just an example, but it’s a good starting point.

Some Points for Reflection

Notice how the first part of the prayer puts the focus on God. Too often, we think about prayer only in terms of what we get. God wants us to think about who he is.

The prayer also points past an individual sin struggle to the bigger picture of God’s work in the world and in your life. God is conquering sin and evil. God has made everything good and holy—including sex—and he will restore the corruption brought about by sin.

 A serious struggle with pornography is usually brought on by some deeper need or brokenness in your life. You may lack meaningful relationships in your life. Or perhaps your struggles go back to trauma or abuse you suffered in the past. Whatever the need or brokenness, God welcomes us to bring these things before him.

Isn’t it interesting that in Jesus’s model prayer, he doesn’t instruct us to confess our sins and pray for help in temptation until we’ve prayed all these other things?

I think the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that we need to have our thoughts and hearts reoriented, so we’re thinking about God and his purpose and glory, not just our immediate situation.  

Lastly, when we pray for God to deliver us from temptation, we should pray this knowing that we will have to act on this prayer. This includes removing things from your life that cause you to stumble (Matthew 5:29), confessing to other Christians, and asking for accountability (James 5:16).

Why Prayer “Doesn’t Work”

So, why do I keep struggling even though I’m praying that God would help me overcome porn? Do I just need to change the words, pray harder, or pray more often?

If this is you, God bless you. I’ve been right there with you.

I’ve had my own struggles with lust that wouldn’t go away no matter how much I prayed. I’ve prayed with many friends over the years who faced similar temptations.

Just like I need to know, you need to know that all God’s answers are “yes and amen” in Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:20). So let’s dig into why it seems like God isn’t answering our prayers.

We don’t understand what we’re praying.

Don’t be discouraged because you don’t have great faith. God understands our weakness and the difficulty of temptation (Hebrews 4:15). We don’t have to pray perfectly because the Holy Spirit is taking our prayers to God and making them perfect (Romans 8:26).

But often we pray without really understanding what we’re praying, especially with a prayer like “Father, free me from lust.”

At the same time, you must take this seriously. Ask these questions:

• Do you truly want to live free from porn?
• Do you acknowledge that you lack the power in yourself to overcome it?
• Do you recognize this sin is not merely a bad habit, but an offense against God?
• Do you put your hope in Jesus alone to save you? 

These are hard questions, but important ones to understand. If you can answer “yes” to each of these—praise God! You are already on the path to victory.  

We’re making a “secret confession.”

This might feel uncomfortable, but I need to ask: are you keeping your struggle with pornography a secret? I’ve encountered many situations where people ask God to be free from temptation, but they hide it from everyone else. I’m right there with you—I don’t want to admit my struggles to anyone.

But this won’t work.

Psalm 32:3 says, “When I kept silent, my bones became brittle from my groaning all day long.” Many times, God’s answer to your prayer is to tell someone else about your struggle.

If you’re praying the same prayer again and again but refusing to share your struggle with other believers, it’s not going to work. God says to confess our sins to each other (James 5:16).

That’s the only way you can break the power of shame that porn has over you.

God wants to confront our pride.

This often relates to the “secret confessions”—it’s not just the shame, sometimes we’re too proud to let anyone know what we’re dealing with.

But it goes deeper than this.

James 4:6 and 4:10 say, “God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble… Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”

It’s hard to be prideful when you’re wrestling with lust. Sometimes God allows us to be tempted by porn to humble us. In my own life, I can testify that God allowed me to struggle with lust so I’d become humbler.

 This doesn’t mean God was ignoring my prayers to be delivered from temptation, far from it. He was helping me with a more serious temptation that I didn’t even realize—my pride.

I had to be humbled, and repeatedly confess my sin and ask for help. As I did this, I found that I was experiencing greater victory over lust as well.

Porn is only the surface issue.

Sin has layers like an onion. As you confess them and pray about them, God reveals the deeper sins of the heart.

Struggles with lust usually only scratch the surface. What is going on in your heart? What emptiness are you feeling? What wounds or brokenness are you trying to soothe?

Are there parts of your life that you haven’t opened up to God yet?

Sometimes a struggle with pornography points to hidden places in our hearts where we haven’t fully grasped the gospel. Answering this might involve seeking out help from other Christians or even professional counseling.

We need to persevere.

James 1:2-4 teaches that God allows trials and difficulties to teach us perseverance. We need to persist in our prayers and our struggle against temptation, not for a moment or a day, but for a lifetime.

Many people successfully “quit” porn for a short time, only to fall back into it later. This is because the Christian life resembles a marathon more than a sprint. In a lengthy process, God slowly transforms the believer to be more and more like Jesus.

Keep praying.

Keep asking people to pray for you.

Persevere. 

God works on his own timetable.

Christians have the incredible promise that God is working everything together for their good (Romans 8:28). We often can’t see this because God doesn’t work according to our schedule.

2 Peter 3:8-9 explains that God isn’t being slow to answer you. He operates from an eternal perspective. A day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.

God Will Answer Your Prayer

Covenant Eyes has walked alongside more than 1.5 million people on their journey away from pornography. For many of these folks, it seemed impossible. But I want to encourage you that God hears and answers prayer.

You can be free.

You can experience victory.

Here are some amazing stories of people whose prayers God answered:

• Pinterest Led Me Into Temptation
• I Was the “Perfect” Christian Girl and Addicted To Porn
• My Journey and Liberation From Pornography
• A 21-Day Detox from Porn: Jack’s Story

There are many more just like this. Your story can be one of them.