The president of a missionary organisation in China has written candidly about his struggle with pornography, and how God freed him from the grip of sexual sin.
Tabor Laughlin, who is also an author and doctoral student, shares his powerful experience in an article for the Desiring God website .
Laughlin reflects that he discovered pornography as an adolescent and consequently, ‘the allure of cheap and easy pleasure constantly haunted him’.
‘Trapped’
“My struggle intensified in middle and high school when my mom’s health faltered. I turned to the empty promises of pornography to try to fill me up and help me cope.”
After turning to Christ he said he “continued to struggle with sexual sin”.
His addiction to pornography led to “impure relationships with girls” and he failed repeatedly in his fight against temptation.
“I felt trapped. I felt helpless”.
But ten years ago, the Lord intervened to ‘change his life significantly’.
Prayer
One night he attended a men’s prayer meeting with a friend where he started to pray, “confessing vague struggles”.
Mid-way through the prayer his friend interrupted and exhorted him to “share more specifically” about the sin, reciting James 5:16: “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”
Laughlin proceeded to do so: “In that moment — with a knot in my throat, feeling exposed — I knelt on the ground and confessed aloud in great detail my past and present sexual sins both to God and the other guys there. And they prayed for God to completely cleanse me of those sins.”
Marriage
He continued: “At that very moment, God took away my struggle with those sexual sins. For a while, I was haunted that I eventually would stumble back into sexual sin, but it didn’t happen.”
“God also used that event to prepare me for marriage three years later”, he said.
Concluding the article, Laughlin says he is “incredibly thankful to God for his mercy” and that his experience reminds him of how he should ‘honestly and humbly confess his sins before God and others’.