Every year Covenant Eyes provides scholarship opportunities for students who use Covenant Eyes. The applicants write essays in which they share their experiences, struggles, and victories—and their perspectives on what it means to use today’s technology with integrity.
Here are seven keys to a life of integrity shared by one of our scholarship recipients, a young man who asked to remain anonymous.
1. Be intentional.
“Because our culture is hypersexualized, it makes it impossible to stumble accidentally into a life of integrity. However, if someone truly desires to lead that type of life, it is possible if they are willing to go countercultural and fight for it.”
2. Find your “why.”
“First, one must define what their goal is in fighting porn and why this goal is important. Living a life of integrity is incredibly important for me because I am a Christian. Jesus commands us to live a blameless life and many times His harshest words were directed toward hypocrites. Because of this, I cannot condemn pornography with my mouth and yet be addicted to it in secret.”
3. Understand the consequences.
“If God is humanity’s creator and good, then it makes sense to live as He says, because we will flourish that way. When I do watch porn, I suffer severely. I find less joy and happiness in life, and I lose motivation to change. I find it difficult to concentrate on necessary work, and I feel hopeless about my future. Being free from all those issues is a compelling reason to stop watching porn.”
4. Understand the obstacles.
“The biggest challenge that pornography brings in quitting is that it feels so good in the moment. When viewing it, large amounts of dopamine are released into the brain. While my body craves the dopamine rush, I feel terrible afterward. Unfortunately, my brain remembers where it got the large dopamine rush. The habitual viewing of porn is the hardest part of quitting.”
5. Get accountability.
“When I am stuck in these bad habits, I hide from people. I try to hide my shame. However, hiding does not help at all. It leaves me feeling alone, inferior, and hopelessly broken. The longer I hid my problem the more I struggled with it. I would always say, ‘This is the last time I will ever look at that.’ Yet without fail, within a week I would have watched it again. And I would hate myself more and more until I stopped believing I could beat it. When I was alone, I was without hope and broken, yet I hid it from everyone who cared and wanted to help. I was in a wicked spiral that had no end to it until it reached the pits of hell.”
“Accountability is surprisingly freeing. Having someone to talk to and be completely honest with is relieving, because we were never meant to live a lie. Covenant Eyes has been a part of this journey of accountability. It has been incredibly beneficial because even when I try to hide my sin, there is someone who can lovingly call me out on it and talk with me about it. Allowing someone else into my life to hold me accountable through Covenant Eyes is a blessing like no other. They can know when I am struggling, call me to repentance, and encourage me to keep up the fight.”
6. Renew your mind.
“So, what does it look like to live with integrity? This does not only mean that one does not watch porn. Someone can stop viewing it but have pornographic images running through their head all day. This is not integrity because what one professes is different than how one lives. My goal for living a life of integrity is to not only stop viewing porn but to control the desire to view porn. (I recognize that from time-to-time natural urges do come up which makes one wish for sexual activity, but having control of those urges and not yielding to them is the goal).”
7. Follow God’s plan.
“In this culture, we need more people who understand the right view of sexuality. We need people who will stand up for the sexual ethic that God teaches, not one that preaches to go wherever one’s desires lead us, and not the one that teaches us to kill all desires for sex. If we can change our view of sex, then we can change our view of marriage. If we change our view of marriage, we change our families. If we can change our families, then we can change the world. I look forward to doing my part in this. Do you?”
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