(The following is a personal post from one of our group members.)
I'm a recovering lust addict. I was fully enslaved to lust, unable in my own efforts to break free from the prison and chains by which lust held me in bondage. Lust was slowly killing me, taking my joy, my good desires, my right purposes, my relationships, my freedom and my life from me. I was dying inside, and I hated myself and what I had become.
And yet lust still attracted me. This was the insanity of it all! I longed for, sacrificed for, pursued, cherished, coddled, pined for, begged for the illusion of what lust could do for me. The fantasy of lust remained attractive to me no matter how much I hated the bondage it brought.
Something deadly serious had to happen. Either I was going to die from lust, or I would have to die to lust. But I had become powerless over lust, unable to be free of it, and certainly unable to kill it in me.
Instead of fighting lust and successfully killing it myself, I needed Someone to be my Savior over lust. I needed a Power greater than me and greater than lust to win the fight for me, to take on my lust for me, because I could not bear it or be free of it.
"Every time I surrendered a wrong in process—temptation to lust, resentment, or fear, for example—and would say something to the effect, "I don't want to bear this; I want You to bear it for me; I cast it onto You," it worked. Someone has to bear my wrong, and Someone does." (SAWB, p. 121)
For me, God does make this happen. God, in his graciousness, accepts the lust I surrender to him and puts it to death. He makes it possible for me to have life in him. But God is not my errand-boy who simply wants to keep taking my lust while I go on about my life playing my own games and living life as the master of my own destiny. Believing I could be the master of my own life got me into this trouble in the first place. No, I needed a new Master, one who knows what is best for me. I need to surrender my will and life to the "One who has all power," to a "loving God" who "could and would" restore me to sanity.
I must be willing to be changed by God from the inside out. And this is where the Steps of the SA program come to bear on the whole process of recovery. The Steps can, if done with the proper attitude and actions of surrender, bring me into a right relationship with God and others. And when that happens, lust begins to lose its attractiveness. Its dishonesty and delusion become transparent. I find that I really do want to be rid of it, to be dead to lust. Surrender becomes easy as the default action to take when temptations to lust appear in my sight and mind.
God takes care of the lust, and in that moment of renewed freedom, I respond, "What's next God?"
