‘Purity in an Unholy World’ Ephraim Renno

Guide me all, the great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land. Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining us. We're glad to have you on. Hope for Wandering Amish tries to give information and practical teaching us for your walk with Christ and as you seek truth. We don't have the answers, but with the grace of God, we just try to provide information that is helpful and practical that you can take home and use. This morning we have Ephraim Reno on to speak on purity and how you can navigate the challenges of sin and become free. I don't know what all he's planning to share here this morning, but looking forward to it. And before we start, let's have a prayer.

Heavenly Father, we pause here before you this morning. We thank you for your goodness, your grace, and especially, Father, we just thank you for the power that you have given us through the blood of Christ that we can be made free from sin. And we know that when you make us free, we are free indeed. Father, we just pray that you would give Ephraim this morning wisdom and strength and just collected thoughts as he shares. Father, help him to speak what you have laid upon his mind. We just pray for all of the listeners this morning, and we pray that your name would be glorified. We pray it in Jesus' name.

Amen. All right. Thank you, Levi. Thank you for praying that God would be glorified. That's my heart and desire. And thank you to everybody that's on the call this morning and others that will listen later. God bless you.

My hope is that in some way I can be a blessing to some wandering soul out there and that I can encourage everyone to be part of the healing journey for yourself if you need it, and then for others as well. Addiction prevention is certainly a very worthy subject, but I'm not going to be talking about that this morning, but rather focusing on the healing journey. I get very excited when either one of those are talked about. In many of our homes and communities in the mid to late 1900s, anything of a sexual nature was taboo and usually not discussed by the adults in our lives. But we developed awareness in other ways, perhaps through older cousins or finding pornographic magazines along the road or in a neighborhood dump.

We may be tempted to think, "Well, we survived it, and that life went on, and we made our way through." And we might be tempted to think that our children can too and would just continue the cycle of being quiet. And these things happen under the surface and behind the scenes. The fact is, in my experience, and I'm sure in others as well, that we didn't get away without negative effects, without some level of bondage and shame and diminished relationship qualities. And there were some that suffered shipwreck. One of my closest school friends, he grew up, married a beautiful young lady, were together for a number of years, had a number of children, and he fell into pornography.

He got a computer, and it wasn't locked down, wasn't filtered. He didn't have any kind of accountability. It just was in secret. And he fell into pornography. It went from that to connections with women. And before we knew anything was happening, he was on his way out. Marriage fell apart. Children had to grow up without a dad. And sadly, he isn't an isolated case. But today it is so much easier than it was in my growing up in the '90s, where pornography usually was connected to magazines, and they weren't that easy to get, and they weren't that easy to keep in secret. But today, with the electronic devices that we have, it is just so easy to fall into this trap.

Not only is it easy to fall into it, it's usually somewhat easy, not as easy as the devil would have us to believe, but somewhat easy to keep it hidden. For X amount of time. But this kind of sin, like all sins, but maybe this one is more so, it grows.

Sin grows to more sin, like begets like, and you go deeper, and it gets worse. And eventually, it will come out. Be sure your sin will find you out. It just is impossible to keep it hidden forever. And oftentimes, when it finally does come out, it's so far down the road that there's a real crisis. One of the deceptions that goes with porn addiction is the belief that I can quit whenever I want to. And that's a deception.

Sexual addictions are among the strongest of addictions. There's a number of reasons for this, the secrecy and the shame surrounding it. And there's dopamine. I'd like to talk about dopamine just for a bit here and explain what dopamine does.

When a person experiences something enjoyable that the brain wants them to remember and repeat, it releases dopamine. When you bless your mama with a sweet note, dopamine, a taste of chocolate, dopamine, holding the hands of your lover, dopamine.

God created people to experience pleasure, and dopamine is a key part of that. It helps us develop good habits. When we do something that's good and we get a reward for it, we feel good about it. Now, we don't have to think our way through next time in order to do that good thing again.

It becomes a habit, and dopamine is a key part in creating good habits. In a more perfect world, pain would only be experienced as a result of wrongdoing, and pleasure would only be experienced when one does well. Since we live in a broken, sin-riddled world, one can quite easily come across pain while doing right and likewise experience great pleasure in things that are wrong. When we experience pleasure from a given action, the brain goes, "Voilà, let's do that again."

And if a little feels good, let's do more next time. Dopamine is an incredible gift, but like any marvelous gift, it can turn deadly when not handled right. Think about water and air and fire. Water is an amazing gift. We can't get along without water for very long at all. Our bodies are a great percentage of our bodies are water. We get thirsty, and we start drying up, and we actually die in a matter of a few days without water. But water is also very deadly.

Lots of people drown in water. Floods are very destructive. Air is a key part of explosives. Many, many people die from explosions, but we can't live without air. Fire is very deadly and very dangerous. Many people are killed by fire, but fire is also a great gift.

There are many ways that we have learned to be comfortable and to create beauty and to create power by harnessing fire. Dopamine is a marvelous gift from God. Without it, life just wouldn't function the way it does, and it would hold no pleasure. But when dopamine isn't respected and used correctly and it's in the driver's seat, then it can really wreak havoc.

There are other chemicals at play as well, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins. But dopamine is a very powerful one, and it's one that you will often come across when you read and listen to subjects like this. Dopamine is incredible, but unfortunately, people have learned to manipulate dopamine production. Sex provides the highest natural dopamine hit.

And I have a chart here, but I'm not quite able to show it. There are three man-made stimulants estimated to produce more dopamine than sex: meth, cocaine, and porn. Drugs like cocaine release unnatural amounts of dopamine into the body. So does meth. So does pornography.

Dopamine ensures that the brain remembers and later craves the activities that led to the high. The use of drugs like cocaine, meth, and porn is rooted in chasing that high again and again. Many times, chasing dopamine can be so consuming that people risk it all: their job, their marriage, their ministry, and integrity for another hit.

And I'm quoting out of this book right here, The Freedom Fight. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in this subject. It's very, very well done. Porn is like candy. It brings a quick high, but it can't sustain you, and it rots the soul.

Sex with your spouse, as God created it, is like a five-course meal. It satisfies and nourishes your relationship. When we consider the unlimited access and the dopamine burst of porn, it's no wonder people get hooked on it. It's not just about the porn. It's about craving for the next high. So we've been talking about dopamine. And what happens is if the body creates and experiences an unnatural high level of dopamine, it has ways of bringing the baseline up. So if the baseline is low, it doesn't take much dopamine to really feel good and to really feel well about life and just feel happy. But when there's a natural amount of dopamine released in our brains, then the baseline comes up, and now it takes a high level of dopamine in order to feel good.

And as soon as the dopamine production goes down below that baseline, we get depressed, and things aren't feeling well. The higher the dopamine consumption, the baseline moves up. Things that used to be pleasurable no longer hold any joy. It takes a larger dose of the same drug to get the same high. We experience this in many smaller ways. Think depression after a mountaintop experience or the feeling of wellness after fasting. So looking at dopamine, let me read this snippet from an article by Harvard Health Publishing.

An addicted person's impaired ability to stop using drugs or alcohol has to do with deficits in the function of the prefrontal cortex. Now, we're going to talk about the prefrontal cortex a bit. That's the part of our brain that is very analytical. It looks at situations, and when we do something that's right because it's right, not because of what it's going to do to us or how it's going to make us feel, but we know this is the right thing to do. That's the prefrontal cortex working.

When we choose the hard in any kind of situation, we know this is going to hurt. We know it's not going to be fun, whatever. But we look down the road, and we know that long term, this will have the best outcome. That's our prefrontal cortex doing its job. When dopamine takes the driver's seat, the prefrontal cortex doesn't. Those two are held in tension by each other.

Let me keep reading. So the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain involved in executive function. The prefrontal cortex has several important jobs: self-monitoring, excuse me, delaying reward, and integrating whatever the intellect tells you is important with what the libido is telling you to do. The difficulty has to do with how the brain, when deprived of the drugs to which it is accustomed, reacts to stress. The response is usually exaggerated negative emotion and even despair.

In this setting, the strong association of learned environmental cues, for instance, smelling beer at a ball game or seeing the corner where the dealer can be found, exacerbates the craving for the substance. And the flood of intoxicating brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, chiefly dopamine, during drug use makes the brain relatively insensitive to normal sources of pleasure, say a good conversation with a friend or a beautiful sunset. What this all means for overcoming an addiction is not enough simply to just say no.

The person needs to develop alternative sources of joy and reward. And people who have been isolating themselves in order to drink or use drugs without inhibition may need to work in a purposeful way to reacquire habitual joy, social interactions, physical pleasures like a swim or a bike ride, or other healthy, enjoyable rewards. So addictions are a very real thing.

When someone is addicted to drugs or to pornography, which is a very, very strong addiction, we can further hurt or confuse the addict when we give oversimplified answers like, "I'll just pray more," or "Just say no," or "Have more faith." Those are all part of it. But when we oversimplify it and the person tries it and it doesn't work for him or her, then the bondage can be all the harder to overcome. We need to give solid, meaningful answers rather than shallow ones that will further discourage. So to just say no or to just focus on what's bad about this and to try to say no to it, try to push it off, try to put it down, that probably doesn't work.

I'm reminded of the scripture in Matthew 12:43 to 45. When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places seeking rest and findeth none. Then he sayeth, "I will return into my house from whence I came out." And when he has come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he and taketh with himself seven other spirits, more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there. And the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation. So when we are on the healing journey, it is so important to fill our lives with good, healthy things that replace whatever we're trying to get over.

I have a burden here this morning to see us be men of integrity and women of integrity, if you're listening, and to nurture a culture of integrity. So I'd like to talk a little bit about a test that someone did years ago, and I'm again quoting from The Freedom Fight book. I'm just going to read a couple of pages here. In the 1970s, addictions were raging in comparison to what it had been several generations earlier. I wasn't around in the '60s, but the '60s was the hippie movement, lots of rebellion, lots of boundaries being broken down, and debauchery going on. So there were lots of addictions that the health community were facing and the scientific community in the 1970s: drug addictions, sexual addictions, and such like.

They were trying to figure out what causes addictions and how do we overcome them. Some experts argue that addictions were caused solely by the chemicals the body got hooked on. A major experiment reinforced this idea. Researchers put a rat alone in a cage with two bottles. One had normal water and the other had morphine-drugged water.

The rat almost always chose the drugged water until it became addicted and eventually died. The theory that the drugs' chemicals caused addictive behavior seemed validated. Later in the same decade, however, psychologist Bruce Alexander did another experiment. He thought that perhaps the rat chose drugs because it was bored and lonely in its isolated cage.

So Alexander constructed what he called Rat Park. Rat Park provided plenty of activities, friends, and mates—everything a rat could want. Though the rats who lived in Rat Park were still given access to drugged water, they chose the normal water instead.

The experiment concluded the rats in Rat Park rarely used drugged water, none ever used it compulsively, and none of them ever overdosed. I find this so fascinating. So if a rat was in a cage, didn't have anything to do, it would discover the drugged water, and it would feel good off of it. So it would keep going back and get more and more and more, where it would eventually just completely ignore the clean water and food, and it would just live on the drugged water till it died. But then when they did the same kind of test in a rat community where things were functioning well, there's lots of things to do. There was relationship.

There were playmates, and the list goes on. It was a healthy community. Those rats didn't get addicted. So the researchers took the Rat Park experiment one step further. They placed rats in isolated cages for 57 days. Over that time, the lonely rats drank the drugged water compulsively and developed a strong addiction.

The scientists then moved these addicted rats into Rat Park. As the rats spent more time in Rat Park, they gradually reduced their drug use from—yeah, they gradually reduced their drug use. Eventually, all of the rats gave the drugs up completely and were drug-free for the rest of their lives. So the conclusion: there is power and healing in community.

Now, because rats behave this way, it doesn't prove that humans will too, but there is a powerful lesson in it that a healthy community—there's power and there's healing in it. And when we don't experience that, we are much more likely to fall into addictions.

Our goal, our vision, our hope—Hero and Hope for Wandering Amish—is to help anyone to become a part of a healthy community. And while there's no communities that are problem-free, we'll always have some struggles and all of that. What we really don't want is people jumping out of whatever culture and tradition that they were a part of and then just go out into the world, find some kind of easy beliefism. We don't want that. We want all of you to be in a biblical, solid church community.

That's what we're after. So yeah, I just wanted to put that plug in there. Continue reading here. We see these kinds of experiments with humans all the time, comparing it to the Rat Park experiment. Severely injured patients are given a medical form of heroin stronger than most street drugs for months at a time. Yet typically, the patient just stops the drugs when they are discharged, especially if they're going home to a life where they're surrounded by a loving family. In contrast, using heroin for similar amounts of time often turns street users who were alone and unhappy into addicts.

People were made to connect and to bond even more than rats were. When people don't have community, when they are isolated, it creates an environment conducive for addictions to take root. The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety; it's connection.

So I'd like to talk a little bit about our modern social media connections. And if you don't use social media, God bless you. I think most of us have forms of communication electronically, whether it's phone calls, texting, WhatsApp, whatever. We're using that this morning on this call. We're using computers or phones to connect with each other. But in this world of electronic communication, it is so easy to present ourselves in less than real ways. It's easy to put our best face out there and our best experiences, our best moments, our mountaintop experiences. It's so easy to create a different reality online that which we present to others is different than our real life.

And if we do that, it creates a world where people just connect without true connection. And that's a situation where we can very easily be lonely and isolated. And then it creates a place where addiction thrives. So a part of a healthy community is being real with each other. And I don't want you to think just because you're not experiencing a healthy community that you have to jump ship.

You seek the Lord, you serve God with all that you have, and you become what it takes to have a healthy community. You become open and honest and real, walking in the light. If you're excited about Jesus and you're serving Him and you're obeying His word, His word is in you and you are in Him. And the people around you can't handle that, then it'll be time for you to move on and find a community where people invite that and encourage that. But we don't want to encourage jumping off the ship and then taking baggage with you that will create the same problems in the next setting where you're in. Sex Addiction Authority, Dr. Patrick Karn surveyed over 600 recovered sex addicts.

He identified the two most important factors they said helped them find freedom. The number one factor was reliance on God. The second factor was a healthy small group connection. And that's another thing that I really want to promote here this morning: have a small group that is healthy around you for support. So a healthy small group brings acceptance, safety, accountability, encouragement, and processing that can't be found any other way.

Back to what I said earlier about the deception that I can quit whenever I want to on my own. It's just not true. If a lack of close connection with others contributes to an addiction, then it makes sense that connecting with God and others would be an essential part of recovery. The first two roots in porn or sex addiction are the sexualized society and the addicted brain.

The third root is isolation. From the beginning, sin has caused people to isolate from God and one another. After Adam and Eve sinned, what did they do? They went into hiding. They immediately hid from one another and from God.

And that's exactly what still happens when we sin, and especially a sin that's shameful and this sort of sin that we're talking about this morning, especially in this. But just as God called Adam out of hiding, He does the same to us. He wants us to leave the shadows so we can be in an authentic relationship with Him and others. I want to just say amen to that. That's so well said. Authentic relationship with God and with others, that is so needful. And we live in a world where that's not really the norm. Our society is very individualistic, very, very self-centered.

And there are just a number of things that contribute to that. I wish I could go into that more, but I won't have time. I just kind of have to skip through it this morning here. Just an interesting side note: even our houses have changed over the years. Used to be houses where the standard house would have a big front porch, and that's not standard anymore. Now, people like a back deck, back deck versus front porch. And we just—we tend to pull back and isolate.

We all long for fulfillment and true intimacy. When that thirst isn't met, we try to fulfill it on our own. When we thirst for fulfillment, we are really thirsting for Jesus. Jesus tells us our thirst for ultimate fulfillment is found in Him. John 7:37-38: "If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." A personal relationship with Jesus begins when we trust His work on the cross for our sins. We invite Him into our lives. We receive Him as Lord and Savior, as the Son of God, as the only way to God the Father.

And we commit our all to Him. Reading a bit here, a personal relationship with Christ begins when we trust on His death, in His death on the cross, and invite Him to live His life through us. Even if a person has taken previous steps toward Christ, they won't experience the intimacy they want until they commit fully to Him. And I just really want to lift that up this morning: to commit 100% to Jesus.

When we just raise our hand and say we believe and then go on with life, but we hold back something in life where that's off limits, I won't—won't—won't let God into that part. We're not going to find that fulfillment that we need.

It's only 100% all out, being sold out to Christ. Now He owns everything. There's nothing held back. If anyone is in Christ, He is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. Once we come to know Christ, we grow in that relationship by spending time with Him as we would with any good relationship.

What does spending time with Him look like? Seeking God in a daily walk through His Word and spending time in prayer, living a life of worship, seeking God with other believers in a church. Surprisingly, God says a close connection with Him isn't all we need.

We need companionship and community. After creating a perfect world where God Himself was Adam's companion, God said, "It's not good that the man should be alone." In a perfect world with a perfect God and perfect man, God recognized our need for human companionship.

How could God say Adam was alone when Adam had God? It really points to our need for human connection and companionship. I want to draw our attention to Ephesians 4. I'll just go through and bring out a few different verses. Ephesians 4:11 says, "He gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." So part of having a healthy community, a very important part, a very central part, will be where we all have a heart, a vision, a desire to become more like Christ, where the stature of the fullness of Christ is our goal.

We won't—we won't be able to aim for that when we're running off of dopamine, when we just—when what feels good is what we want to do, regardless of future consequence. The prefrontal cortex is functional when we have a goal and our lives are measured according to how do we get to that goal?

Verse 14 that we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the slight of men and cunning craftiness whereby they lie in wait to deceive these—these people here. Verse 14, they're just running off of dopamine. Their prefrontal cortex isn't working. Verse 15: "But speaking the truth in love, they grew up unto Him in all things, which is the head, even Christ." That speaking the truth in love is so key. Also, walking in openness, speaking the truth, walking in love, truth without love and love without truth always come to some bad ends.

Jesus Christ came full of grace and truth. We need to be aware of the false dichotomy of mercy versus prophet. Jesus had the perfect balance of both. They were held—yeah, perfect balance of both. When we say, "Well, I'm a mercy," maybe Jesus would have us learn how to also have that prophet, that truth part in our lives. Or maybe we say, "I'm a prophet," and we excuse our lack of mercy by that. I just want to call our attention to the fact that Jesus Christ is full of grace and truth, and we should be too. Verse 16 says, "From Him, the whole body, fitted and knit together by every supporting ligament, promotes the growth of the body for building itself up in love by the proper working of each individual part."

This is not speaking just of one person. It's speaking of a community or a church where every part is working together, and He likens it to the human body. Affluence, technology, and changing social norms all push us toward a self-contained, self-sufficient, independent lifestyle to a greater or lesser degree. I already mentioned the the change from front porches to back decks. Another significant change is how we identify ourselves. When we meet a stranger and we try to get to know the stranger, one of the first things that we tend to ask is, "What do you do for work? What's your occupation? How do you make your living?" That kind of thing.

It wasn't always this way. In most of the world today and most of the world in the past, the the first question would be, "Where do you belong? What's your community? What's your family?" So that there's a shift from identifying ourselves by family, by community, to occupation. And it's not a good shift. It's not a good focus. We need to get back to focusing on community. At verse 17, "This I say therefore and testify on the Lord that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart, who, being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all in cleanness with greediness."

In these Gentiles, dopamine has completely taken over. The prefrontal cortex is shot. These Gentiles are addicted to all sorts of vices. They're seeking for fulfillment in all the wrong places. They're coming up with new and more devious ways to get the next high.

But at the end of the day, they're empty, thirsty, and miserable. And the same way that it worked for them, it will also work for us. So there's various scriptures that speak of being enslaved either to sin or to righteousness. And with this whole subject of dopamine and how it works, it just makes so much sense what the Bible's been saying all along, that there's a real enslavement. What we give ourselves to becomes our master.

What master do we want? Jesus Christ or sin? Verse 25 of Ephesians 4: "Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Make a habit of sharing deeply and truthfully." And then verse 26 and 27: "Be ye angry and sin not, let not the sun go down upon your wrath, neither give place to the devil." We need to be quick and able to identify our emotions. When there's healthy emotions going on, oftentimes those can be a trigger to a relapse.

These unhealthy emotions, whether it's anger or it could be other things, but we need to be able to identify that and deal with it quickly before the sun goes down. As it says here, don't let it fester overnight into the next day and the next day and become become a longstanding problem. We need to be very quick to work through those things. Anger is like a check engine light.

The check engine light comes on, and it's not the light itself that's the problem. It's just an indication of something deeper that that could maybe be fixed now without a huge issue. But if we ignore it, it could lead to more and greater problems later and at very inconvenient times.

So men, especially women, can have anger problems too, but it tends to kind of be a man thing a little more. Don't ignore it. Don't excuse it. Get a get a small group around you. Work through it. Do whatever you need to to get to the root of anger issues. All right. Well, I think I'll move on there from that chapter. There's a lot of time we could spend in it. Ephesians 4: What are the boxes that we might be in? Thinking of that rat test again, the rat that was in a box by itself, isolated, and got into drugs.

What might the boxes be that we are in? You know, seek for ways to identify what box you might be in if you are. Psalm 139:23 and 24 says, "Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." We need to have that posture before the Lord. Our hearts open and ask God to search and to cleanse. God will honor that request. I can say that from experience. If we are serious about God leading us in truth, He will honor that and come through in marvelous ways. Shame is very significant in this discussion.

Shame will lead us to isolate ourselves and to present ourselves different and better than what we really are. And it will also become a vicious cycle because if we fall into sexual sin, there's shame connected to it. And then shame leads us to more of that same sin in order to feel good and in order to feel like we're in control of our lives. And yeah, sexual sin leads to shame. Shame leads to sexual sin, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

I'm going to read a little bit here, a snippet on shame. I thought it was good. Shame convinces us that we are unwanted and we pursue behavior that confirms it. To find freedom, disarm the power of shame. So shame might be a box that people—shame is a box that people can be in. Shame is the most interconnected and influential of the roots of addiction. Shame is different from guilt. Guilt says, "I've done bad," but shame says, "I am bad." At the core of shame is self-loathing and a sense of worthlessness. A person shamed declares some version of, "I am not enough. There's something wrong with me. I'm bad or I don't matter."

Shame researcher Brené Brown defines shame as an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Guilt can be a healthy emotion when it shows a person their sin so that they can turn from it. Shame, however, makes people feel like they are unable to change because of an inherent personal flaw.

Guilt is something people feel because they have done something bad. Shame is something they feel because they are—because they are bad. Guilt can be good. Shame is toxic. Guilt is good because it allows people to see they need help.

Shame makes them feel they don't deserve help. With guilt, a person can have the hope of a fresh start. With shame, there's hopelessness because the person is the problem. Guilt can be a springboard to an improved life. Shame is an anchor that keeps people stuck.

I think there's good thoughts in that. Whether guilt or shame, Jesus Christ is the answer. And He—He—He is certainly a very key part of the answer. He is the answer. We don't want to oversimplify it. We also need to identify where it comes from, how to get out of it. And certainly, bringing things to light is huge in overcoming shame. I don't know how you found it, but the amount of people going for professional counseling just has gone way, way up from what I saw when I was growing up in the late '80s and '90s.

And please, going to counsel for counseling is good if we go to the right place. There's—there's good counselors out there and there's bad counselors that are teaching false doctrine. And by all means, if if someone needs counseling, I don't want to put any kind of shame on that or stigma. Not at all. But all I'm trying to say is there seems to be a real uptick in emotional difficulties. Often, shame is involved. That's a whole subject that I'm not prepared to talk much about. But I wonder sometimes—I've often wondered how many times was there sexual sin and shame? And it was—it was capped, covered up, and it leads one thing to the next, to eventually the person is in a real crisis.

I don't want to say it's always. I know it's not always. The whole picture is much bigger than that, but I think it can be a very key element to it. Shame fuels rationalization and self-deception. So when we live in shame, we don't want to be in shame. We're not made to live in constant shame. So we start rationalizing what we're doing to make ourselves believe that it's okay because we would like to not live in shame, but we also don't want to expose the reasons that we are living in shame. So we rationalize and we end up deceiving ourselves. Shame fuels rationalization and self-deception.

That can certainly be a box that we can live in. Perhaps it's lost hope. Hope deferred, make of the heart sick. Proverbs says, "When we have large goals, visions, dreams, and they get dashed, that can be a box that we live in." And again, I think having people to talk to and to process things and with God's help come to accept life as it is and see God's hand in the difficulties in life, that can help us get out of the box and into community.

Trauma, unhealthy emotions, self-reliance—those could all be boxes that we live in. True freedom comes when we learn healthy ways to process and cope with pain, not new ways to ignore and medicate it. A healing community. What are the marks of a healing community? Vulnerability certainly is a big part of it.

We need to nurture safe places for people to be vulnerable. If you ever—if you have people in your life that are vulnerable with you, by all means, protect their hearts and make a safe place for them to be that. When we can be vulnerable, bringing our shame into the light, healing can be found. It is only when one is fully known that we can be fully loved. That's where God would have us be fully known and fully loved. That's the way we are with Him. He fully knows us and He loves us anyway, and He calls us to follow Him and love like that. Church community should be a very significant part of any believer's life, but it's not the only community we encounter.

You have family, neighborhoods, pursue closeness in family, pursue closeness in community, in small groups of friends, and certainly in church. But you might say, "I've been hurt in church," and that's probably true. We don't avoid water because people have drowned. We don't avoid fire because people have been burned. We don't avoid air, even though it's a key component in explosions.

We treat it with care and respect for our sustenance and enjoyment. And I—I want to encourage you, if you have been hurt in church, to not give up on church. I know that's a temptation, but it's never the answer.

Seek whatever help you need to be able to put yourself in a church situation and continue in God's heart for it, for for the church. Reading a little snippet here again about authenticity. There is no intimacy without authenticity.

So I'm reading someone by the name of Steve wrote this. Sure, my friends may have enjoyed being with good Christian Steve. My family may have been proud of successful family man Steve, and my wife may have loved faithful Steve who wasn't cheating on her. But if any of those people got to know the real me, they'd reject me in a heartbeat. Or so I thought.

The result, sadly, was no matter how much anyone tried to love me, I knew they were only loving fake versions of me that didn't exist. The real me was hidden away where no love could ever reach it, parched with a loneliness that it was never quenched.

Wow. Here's a key verse that really goes along with all of what I've been sharing this morning. First John 1:5-7. This then is the message we have heard of Him and declare unto you that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth.

But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin. Light is such a marvelous, marvelous thing. It brings so much beauty, and it brings clarity.

It brings truth, healing. Light is a tremendous gift. And you know what? Light always is stronger than darkness. So whatever darkness you have faced, are facing, light is stronger. So bring things into the light, open up to where light can shine in, and just be real. It's when we are real that we can have fellowship and that we can experience the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ. A call to action. I just want to leave you with this. Have a small group. And I'm speaking to anyone that is struggling and stuck in sexual sins and even otherwise. I think this—this I think all of us just need this, what I'm sharing. So have a small group and in temptation, use the word—use, remember the word brace.

Brace, acronym for breathe, remember, ask, call, and escape. When you start getting tempted, stop, breathe deeply, remember, remember the resolves that you made last time you failed or sometime. Remember those things that you know about this and then ask, ask God for help.

Say a quick prayer, call, have someone to call and talk to and talk through, talk, talk through the situation that you're in. Accountability there. Just have somebody to call and talk to and then escape. Get out of whatever situation you're in. Remove yourself. Move on to a different situation where the temptation can leave. I think it's very powerful. Just remember the word brace. Breathe, remember, ask, call, and escape. We can all use this for ourselves or we can be a part of this for someone who needs it. Well, I think I'm going to wrap it up with that. My heart and vision would be that this could be helpful to someone out there and that we could all develop a vision and and get together in developing a culture where these things can be handled well and where addictions are overcome, where there's safe communities and the shipwrecks that we all know exist, that there wouldn't be more.

If we can all work together and save one person from shipwreck, it is so worth it. So God bless you. I will leave it there. I know there's so much more that could be said, but hopefully there's something there that somebody can take. All right, Levi, hand it back to you.

Hey, thank you, Ephraim. That was very good and informative. I was blessed with the the things you shared and especially with that rat experiment that was really powerful. I don't think we realized the value of community and just socializing and having other people in our lives. So yeah, it seems like that's a vicious cycle. When we sin like Adam and Eve, we want to hide, we want to isolate, and then isolation causes more sin. So that was a—that was an interesting loop. And then one addiction that you didn't mention that I think we're facing today that we might not always even call on an addiction is technology. I know usually we talk a lot about social media, but just any type of scrolling.

Yeah, it can be very, very addictive. And again, that dopamine hit is what is what is causing that. Every time the the screen changes, there's another small dopamine hit, so we just keep going and going. I'm hoping we don't, but that's a very common problem now in younger people. And yeah, young people, some of these shootings and other horrific things that happen, if there's more research being done, it looks like some of those are tied into feelings of isolation. And then, you know, that is part of the problem. So, but yeah, it's very good. Appreciate the the message and the content.

We're going to open it up here for all of you who have joined for questions and answers or comments. If you have thoughts to share, you will be able to unmute yourself and and share. Hey, while they're thinking, I want to just thank you, Levi, for bringing that in, the the thing of addiction to technology that is very real. And I'm just just happy that you touched on that a bit. Yeah. Good morning, Brother Ephraim. Thanks so much for sharing. It was, yeah, very, very good.

And I'm sure it'll—this talk will be a help to a lot of people. But the the thought of somebody going into isolation is a very sad thought. And it's also a very dangerous place to go, to go in isolation.

And the thought of seeing somebody find community and seeking out community, that's that's really beautiful. It's like—it's like the opposite of isolation. Community is like the opposite of isolation. And life is full of choices. So to go in isolation, that's a choice.

To seek out community is a choice as well. And that shame that people find themselves in when they find themselves in pornography, immorality, will obviously be a thing that leads to further isolation. And like you mentioned, the prefrontal cortex isn't doing its job in our brain, so we're not making the right decisions. So isolation is like, "Oh, I'll just kind of remove myself and I can have my secret life and do what I want to do and not have other people tell me what to do." That's horrible. That's destructive. And I think you mentioned about sin leading to death. That's very, very real. When I was probably about 13 years old, was the first time I was introduced to pornography.

And it was a young man in our neighborhood. I think he was probably about 17 at the time, driving around unaccountable to his parents, really anybody. And just, you know, he came across as a happy-go-lucky fella. You know, he'd show up on the farm, big smile and, you know, big talk and joking and stuff. And yeah, one day he showed up and here he pulls a porn magazine from under his seat.

And yeah, that's the first time that I ever saw saw porn. And it wasn't that many years later that that young man was locked up in prison. He got in a relationship with an underage girl. And I feel like he's probably spent about—I don't know if it's about four years in prison or something like that—been on probation for a long time. But it's like he never was able to pull himself out of his destructive life that he found himself in. And I'm not even sure where he's at today, but I know he's not in a good place. And then here, a few weeks ago in Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, I have some friends that live there. They had a fellow that the police were want were after, and he was not yielding himself to be arrested.