As a young pastor, Ryan thought he was ready to get married, but soon after the wedding, he had a big problem.
When I'm doing counseling, I tell people oftentimes that I had the worst beginning six months of a marriage that I know of, and so I'm a qualified counselor for them. And what really began to give me a 180 in my marriage and in understanding my role as a husband was just the ministry of focus on the family. Now, Pastor Ryan points his congregation to all the resources we provide for families because we're still helping him today. Focus on the family empowers me in my marriage because I can understand that other people have gone through the same thing that I'm going through and I'm not alone in the struggles that I face, and my wife and I can gain hope from the stories that are shared on air. I'm Jim Daly. Help us give families hope today.
Donate and your gift will be doubled at focusonthefamily.com slash gift. Today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, we're going to be returning to a powerful story of one woman's heartbreaking and yet transformative journey with sexual sin, and this is not a topic for younger listeners, so we recommend you direct their attention elsewhere. Here's one thing that our guest last time, Jessica Harris, shared. This is such a powerful truth for women who have walked this story of God's not disgusted with us. Sin, yes, but he welcomes us into himself and he offers living water to quench our thirst, and that offer stands for us. And that just seemed so powerful to me. I thought, wow, the God of the universe, the Jesus of the gospel wants to give himself to me like he wants to offer that to me. And if we had that message in church, I think it would set so many people free. John, we had a, I wouldn't say challenging, a very open and honest conversation that was hopeful in the end, talking about Jessica's pain as a little girl being molested and then finding pornography as a 13-year-old and the kind of direction that took her as a girl. And we're going to pick up that conversation today with Jessica and talk more about how Jesus intervened in her life and pointed her in a healthier direction. And I said it last time, it's like 68 percent of men in the church that look at pornography about once a month and a growing number of women.
I think the latest I saw was 28 or 30 percent of women. And so this is not something that is touching just a few people. Pornography is grabbing people, both Christian and non-Christian, and it's a powerful sexual force within us.
And how do we bridle that and make it honoring to the Lord? That is what we're getting at today. So I'm looking forward to day two of this incredible conversation. Right, because Jessica shared about a road of redemption and restoration, and that's what we want for you if you're caught up in the sin of pornography. We want to make our counseling team available to you, and we're just a phone call away. 800-A-Family.
800-232-6459. Or you can visit the show notes to learn more. Jessica Harris is a speaker and author, and today we're reviewing the content in her book, Quenched, Discovering God's Abundant Grace for Women Struggling with Pornography and Sexual Shame. Jessica, welcome back. Thank you for having me back. You've been listening to that.
It's kind of a tough intro, right? It is. But I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for your heart, for your honesty, for your desire to help others.
That's the bottom line. You talked about last time wanting to be caught when you were a teenager and not wanting to be caught all at the same time. You said you felt like if someone said, are you looking at porn? You could probably take a deep breath and say yes. But you doubted you could walk into a room with somebody, an adult, that you trusted and say, hey, I got a problem.
I'm addicted to porn. Even hearing that, as I say, it sounds like an incredibly super mature teenager that could do that, which is probably rare. Picking up the story, you go off to college, a Christian college, no less. Tell us what happens there.
Right. So I went off to college after graduating high school, and I was optimistic because I thought, okay, my little small town church and my conservative family won't be able to help me. But a Christian college, surely they have seen this before.
They have resources. I will be able to get help there. But I still was not going to walk into a room and out myself. So I went off to the college. Hey, God, I hope I get caught here, but I also don't want to get caught. And I would pray these funny prayers like, all right, God, if you don't want me to do this anymore, you need to break the Internet right now.
And it would work. And so I'd be like, see, God, you must not care that I get free because you're letting me still do this. And about maybe six weeks after being at the school, I got a summon to the dean's office and it was, you know what you're getting called to the dean's office for. And so I go into the dean's office thinking, this is it.
This is my chance to finally start breaking free from this. And they had printed off my Internet history report. The Internet use of the college was tracked and they set it down in front of me in a folder. And they said, do you know what's in the folder? I said, I have no idea what's in the folder. And I opened the folder and it's just Web page titles and URLs. And they had highlighted the ones that were obviously pornographic. And the dean starts to talk about how disgusting pornography is, how sick it is, how people who look at it really need help.
And I'm thinking, yeah, I do. And then said, that being said, we know this wasn't you because women just don't have this problem. So how dare you, as a sister in Christ, compromise your brothers in Christ this way by giving them your password. You are protecting them. Wow. They concocted a whole story. They had a whole narrative and I never got that chance to say this was me because they already had their entire thing. They really need help. I can't believe you did this to them.
Sign this contract saying you won't give out your password anymore and like go back to your dorm room and change your password. Let me ask. Somebody's got to be thinking. You could have said something like you've got it all wrong. Right. Why didn't you?
Because it takes a very mature teenager to do that. No, I hear that. I just want to make sure because, you know, people would say, well, you had your chance. You could have corrected that, but you let it slide. So that leaned into the don't want to be caught category at this stage. At this point, it was more shame that we talked about last time feeling like the only woman in the world. And now I've got a dean of women out of college who I was hoping had seen this before is now saying this just doesn't happen.
Right. And so then it's like, wow, something is really wrong with me then. So there was almost a terror of if I do say this was me, what on earth is going to happen to me?
Because you're telling me that you can't help me. Basically, what happens now? Yeah.
So I did. I changed my password and I went back to my my dorm room and I just I was crushed by shame from that conversation because I really believed I was alone. How did how did that compromise with Jesus then work into this?
I mean, is that at this stage now you're in negotiations, I guess. So at this stage, I was very much like, God, I'm sorry. I know you want to love me, but apparently I am so screwed up and so unlovable.
I quit and obviously you can't love somebody like me. And so I believed at 17 that if I couldn't be the good Christian girl who used to be addicted to porn, if that wasn't a story that was available, then I had no choice but to be the porn star who used to be a Christian. And I'll have an aside right here from my years of doing this. There are so many women in the industry who have that story. And so that is the road that shame took me down. And I left that college because there was no sense in paying $20,000 a year to not go into medical school, which is where I was intending to go and went back home. And God did absolutely amazing work in my life.
In those few months after I went back home and I rededicated my life to the Lord during that time and I went off to Bible college and that's where the compromise with God came. I will do anything you want me to do. I will be a missionary to China, but you have to understand that this addiction has to come with me.
I have tried everything I can. I can't break it. There are lots of pastors who struggle with this.
There's lots of missionaries I'm sure who struggle with this. It'll be okay. Like God, I'll do whatever you want me to do, but I just don't know what to do with this. So it comes along with me.
It's a package deal. And went off to Bible college kind of with that mentality of it comes along with me. That sounds to me like you hit a moment of truth in an odd way. You were saying God, I'll do anything for you, but what comes along is my baggage. To which I'm sure God says, fine, we'll take care of that.
It also begs this question and this point that you make in the book, which to me, if there's a gold nugget, this is one of several out of your book. But where you said, if God doesn't have your heart, he doesn't have you. You don't have to be addicted to pornography to play that game. I mean, you could be addicted to making money or whatever idolatrous thing is between you and God. That's what that's getting at. If God doesn't have your heart, he truly doesn't have you. And that is a brilliant point.
I don't care if it's pornography or whatever it is. I would say so much of the church is caught up in that. There is something there. Could be food, could be sports. It could be the success of your children. Whatever you're making more important than your relationship with the Lord is your point, right?
Right. And it's, I think because I grew up in a church that was very like you come to church three times on Sunday and one time on Wednesday. And there was like this performance checklist almost.
And as long as you hit the checklist, you are a good Christian. But there wasn't necessarily a relationship there. There wasn't a heart relationship there.
So it was so easy to check off the boxes and then still worship something else and give your heart over to something else completely. But God wants our hearts. He wants that relationship with us. And you're right, it applies to any struggle that we have. Yeah. And I'm going to come back to that where you left off there when you made the compromise with God.
I'll do anything as long as you know this comes with me. Let me ask another question, though, for some who are thinking about this. Pornography is really a distortion of sexual intimacy that God designed to be held within marriage. I mean, God's bullish on sex.
He created it. But he wants it in the context of fidelity because it represents our relationship with him. And even the words used in Hebrew, when we talk about our relationship with God, often refer to our intimate physical relationship with our spouse.
It can be the same word. And that's the intimacy that he wants to have with us, this deep heart intimacy. Speak to the distortion and why the church particularly needs to understand this and express a healthy intimacy with our commitment to our spouse. Mm-hmm. I think we need to take back the narrative.
But in order to take back the narrative, we actually have to be talking, right? Right. So the church really, we can totally elevate and exalt God's view of sex, like sex is not dirty, it's not bad to talk about, it's not wrong to talk about. And I feel like what people don't realize is pornography is a destroyer of intimacy. Because as a consumer of pornography, you know zero things about those people in those scenes.
And so you are watching the most intimate physical act that two people can partake in. And you know nothing about them and they know nothing about each other. And when I was 17, part of my story was I sent images to somebody.
And I tell people in that moment, it's like my soul died, like the inside of me just shriveled up. Because he didn't care about my dreams and ambitions. He didn't care about my favorite color.
He knew nothing about me. And yet I had given him my body in a way. Yeah.
It's so destructive. And I think if, as the church, we would take back this message of it is intimacy and it reflects God's heart for us and the relationship that he wants to have with us too. But that also goes back to that, is God a checklist that you're doing?
Is he a performance or is it a relationship with God? Because if we don't have that relationship with God, then we don't understand it in a relationship with other people too. And so as we're helping people come out of pornography, one of the things that they struggle with is intimacy. And it's like being fully known is terrifying. It's a terrifying thing to be fully known. And I think as a church, we have an opportunity to take back that narrative too. Like it is a good thing to be known. And there's grace for all of the mess ups and all of the failures. It is a good thing.
Jessica, in the book, you make an observation about confession, which I thought was really interesting. You know, like something that happens in a police station. You go in, you get interrogated, you're being charged with a crime, and maybe they have evidence or what have you.
But it's pretty cold and sterile. Help me understand that comparison and how we as Christians may do that inadvertently with the Lord. Like he's our great inquisitor. I just feel like we have this idea of confession in the church that is come forward, share your wrongs so you can receive your punishment. And that's not what the Bible presents confession as. It's not a step up and own it because God already knows, right? Confession is something we do in our community so that we can find healing. That's what the Bible says is confess so that you may be healed, not so that you may be strung out to dry and punished.
Like it's it's come forward and confess that you can experience the grace and community in the body of Christ. That's what it's meant for. It's meant to tear down shame, not introduce it. But in the church, I feel like so often we have it set up as a way of putting shame on somebody.
Oh, you did that. Well, now here is your mantle that you in this label that you wear. And that's not what it's supposed to be for. It's supposed to be a way almost of summoning help. I'm saying, hey, this is something that I'm struggling with.
This is the way that I have fallen. And it is supposed to call my brothers and sisters in Christ to me to pray and to to communicate that grace that God has for us. And we just we're not great at that in the church.
I don't feel like we don't really when we share testimonies up front, for instance, we don't have a lot of in-process stories. Yeah, tidied up and done. All nice and done. Gift wrap.
With the conclusion. Yeah. You know, I used to do this. I used to do that.
And poof, now my life is like fairy tales and butterflies. And that's not it. It's not typical. And then when I'm someone who's struggling in the church, I see that and I go, huh, I must be doing this Jesus thing wrong because my life's not there yet. But how freeing would it be for someone to get up and say, hey, I am still figuring out how to to deal with anger. Yeah. Because we always like you said, we weigh this so heavily, like pornography or sex. Oh, my goodness.
What if someone got up and said, you know, I'm still dealing with greed. Pride. I'm still dealing with pride. Yeah, I know.
It's true. I'm still dealing with jealousy. Yeah. I'm still impatient with my kids. And God is working on me through that.
And how can we grow together as a church if we treat a confession as a call to help and healing? Yeah. And I'm really I don't know how to address what you're saying there, because I think there's two neon billboards in the New Testament, salvation through Christ and Christ alone, and don't become a Pharisee. I mean, those are kind of the two billboards, right?
Neon signs. And we're pretty good at the first, but we're very bad at the second. It's almost like a predisposition of human beings to have something in order. And then you look down at people that don't have that together. And it is just the weirdest thing about our flesh, especially as Christians. Like you said, confession is for healing. We should be the great confessing church to one another. This is something I'm struggling with. Can you help me? Can you hold me accountable?
Can you be my good friend? But we don't have a practice of that. And it's so disappointing. I think you want to see the church afire again, like the first, second century?
If we acted that way, I think many, many people would come and be healed. Because it's real. Because it's real. So, Jessica, all this has happened. I mean, it starts at eight, nine years old, 13 with the accidental introduction to pornography, then this deep, deep valley you go through. Even off to Bible school and all that.
How did it finally get sewn up for you? How did the Lord say, okay, it was fair. You made the compromise with me. I'd go anywhere in the world for you, Lord. But this baggage is coming with me.
How did you recheck that baggage to a different location? Yeah. I was actually at the Bible college. There was an all women's meeting and the dean of women got up and talked about the idea of strongholds and how a stronghold is an area of our life where the enemy still has ground. And it'll keep us from being able to effectively serve the Lord.
Because it's a place where we've essentially been flanked and the enemy is behind us and able to kind of like attack us from behind. And I thought, man, this is me. Like, I feel like my prayers are bouncing off the wall and I can't grow in God.
Like, what's the answer? And she said, we know some of you struggle with pornography, a room full of Christian women. She said, we know some of you struggle with pornography and we want to help you. And so in that moment, I had a choice to share that this was my struggle and I did not want to. And it was like, I imagine God saying, Jessica, you've always been afraid of starting this conversation. They literally had a piece of paper in front of you that says, my name is blank and my stronghold is blank.
You just have to fill out the paper. And I was so angry because I thought, why can't I have a cute Christian sin? You know, why can't my struggle be that I don't read my Bible enough as opposed to like, I struggle with pornography. But I went ahead and I wrote, my name is Jessica Harris and I struggle with pornography.
My stronghold is pornography. And handed that into the dean's staff. They came to my room later and I thought, here we go, I'm getting sent home.
They're going to send me home. And they knocked on the door and they said, Jessica, what you wrote in that paper was brave and we're going to help you. And I went through a program where I met one on one with the dean every week. And we walked through a resource for men, but walk through a resource for a struggle with pornography.
And on top of that, they had a team of women who helped answer the question of who is Jessica without pornography? Because I had become so dependent on it. Who am I?
Yeah. Who am I without it? How do I manage my emotions? How do I deal with relationships in a healthy way? And they answered those questions.
And so kind of that two punch approach helped me to find freedom and to walk in it. I want to mention that person's watching. It's a high percentage of someone who's watching or listening to the program that is snared by pornography. What can they do? I mean, they've tried all the things that you're talking about. They've tried to not get caught. They've tried to get caught.
What can they do to get on that healthy, reparative road with the Lord? So my first thing that I always tell them is, and I know it's scary because I've been there, right? But you have to tell somebody. And that's not to come forward and take your punishment. That is to tear down that wall of shame that says I'm hiding this.
I'm keeping this a secret. Because shame will tell you to run. Shame will tell you to hide. Shame will pretend to protect you.
And it will tell you that your relationships are not safe, that they're not stable, and you cannot share this with anyone. And so our first enemy almost in this battle is actually shame. Because if I think that God wants something to do with me and I have shamed myself into isolation from God even, I am hopeless to find freedom from this. If I don't have Jesus fighting for me, I am not getting free. And if shame has taught me that God wants something to do with me, then my first enemy is actually shame.
It's not pornography. It's not what I'm struggling with. It's the shame that's keeping me trapped there. And so if you want freedom, you go to war with shame.
And the first way you do that is you say, I refuse to be afraid to be known. And I am going to tell somebody this, whether that's a pastor or a counselor or someone, you tell somebody. Because, again, that's where we experience grace and community. And shame will drive you away from that, but grace always calls us to it. Grace calls us to community. Grace calls us to restoration.
It calls us to relationship. And so if you want to walk in grace, your first step is to sit down with somebody and say, this is really hard for me to say. I'm not proud of this.
I'm not telling you this because I'm bragging. This is really hard for me to say, but this is part of my story. And I need help or I want you to know or whatever your purpose or hope is for sharing with that person.
Well, I so appreciate that. And I think that is the first step. And we want to be that place of help for people. And we have caring Christian counselors and a great phone team.
I'd encourage you to call us. That's why we're here. We've been doing it for, you know, 45 years.
And you won't surprise us. We know a lot about how humanity behaves. We've been answering those questions. I wonder, Jon, how many millions of phone calls over those 45 years focus has managed.
That would be an interesting number. Yeah, and it's okay. It's a safe place. And we're going to provide that help that you need, including getting a copy of Jessica's great book, Quenched, into your hands. I think it's a tool that all of us need, no matter what we're struggling with, but particularly for those struggling with pornography, particularly for women. But I'm sure men can benefit from the read as well.
These are universal things that entrap us. And the way out, as Jessica has clearly described, is to deepen your relationship with the Lord. I do want to ask you, Jessica, because people are going to say, what's the end of the story here? You thought you could never get married once you shared this story, and it was out there that you had this addiction. And yet God even saw to those details.
Yes, He did. So I have, my first book is a self-published memoir that I made for a pastors conference that I was speaking at. I thought, I only get 40 minutes to speak, but I can write more. And so I'll give them this book so that they'll have more of a story. And I was dating somebody at the time, and he almost gave me the courage to do the book.
I thought, okay, God, thank you for giving me the hope of a future family. Now I'll write this book for you. And as I finished writing the book, we broke up. Oh my. And I thought, that's it.
That's over. I'm forever going to be the woman who talks about porn and no man's ever going to want me. Well, somebody, his name is Michael, bought that book to be able to, he's a pastor, to be able to work with the people that he works with. He read that book and he said, I see, I see a whole and redeemed and grace-filled woman of God.
And I want her. And so he reached out to me via email. Now in the field I work in, I get a lot of emails that are from a lot of questionable men. And so I get this email from this man claiming to be a pastor and claiming to want a case of my books.
And I said, you can have the books, but I'm not going to have coffee with you. And we continued to talk back and forth and we got married a year later. And now you have three kids. And now we have three kids and he, he's just so supportive of this ministry and of what I do.
We got married and two days later I was in Mexico speaking and he sat in the audience and came up to me afterwards and he was like, I'm just so proud of you. And so here's this thing that I thought was just going to be a lifetime of shame, kind of a lifetime of battling shame, of being that girl who talks about porn and like no one's going to ever be able to see past that. God has so blessed with a man who doesn't see that. He just doesn't see it.
It doesn't come up. It doesn't come up in our marriage at all. Like it's not a thing that he's like afraid. Like it's just not, it's part of our life in that it's my ministry and that's the extent. Well, it's a beautiful end to that story. I want to make sure we heard that because that's the right end. And yet a beginning, right, with the kids now and everything else. So thank you for being with us. This has been really, really good.
Thank you for having me. What an incredible conversation with Jessica Harris these past couple of days on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. And as Jim said, here at the ministry we have resources to help you if you or someone you know is struggling with pornography. Let me urge you to call 800, the letter A in the word family, to speak with one of our caring Christian counselors.
We'll schedule a time for them to give you a call back and that's a free phone consultation thanks to the generosity of our donors. I'll also recommend you get a copy of Jessica's book, Quenched, Discovering God's Abundant Grace for Women Struggling with Pornography and Sexual Shame. We have copies of that here and the details are in the show notes. John, I really believe Jessica's message is important for families to get a hold of, especially if you're raising daughters or if you're involved in mentoring or teaching teen girls.
Certainly your church library should have a copy of this book and I'd like to put a copy of Quenched into your hands when you send a gift of any amount to Focus on the Family. That's our way of saying thanks for supporting the work we're doing here together to strengthen and equip parents and give families hope when they face trauma or challenges like Jessica experienced. Here at the end of the year, our Focus team is evaluating our budget and the resources we have in place for 2025. Based on our research, we anticipate hearing from more than 200,000 families who will be working through a significant crisis in this next year.
And that's why we need to hear from you. A monthly pledge or a one-time gift will enable us to respond to these hurting parents and their children. So can we count on your generous support here at the end of the year? Yeah, donate today, 800, the letter A, and the word family.
That's 800-232-6459. We'll be happy to accept your contribution, tell you more about Jessica's book, Quenched, or connect you with one of our counselors. Of course, we'll have all the details in the show notes. On behalf of the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Listen at FocusOnTheFamily.com slash Christmas Stories or like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
