Becoming Whole
Relationships and sexuality are areas of life that can be beautiful or confusing, life-giving, or painful. Becoming Whole is a conversational podcast for men, women, and families seeking to draw nearer to Jesus as they navigate topics like sexual integrity, relational healing, spiritual health, and so much more.
Becoming Whole
BATTLE: An acrostic that will change how you approach your struggles
What if the pull of porn is really a hunger for connection and joy? James Craig sits down with Dr. Marcus Warner to map a route to sexual integrity—one that trades shame and isolation for belonging, identity, healing, and maturity. We unpack the BATTLE model: build community that fosters true belonging, act like your real self as a protector, tackle roots by addressing wounds, lies, vows, and strongholds, take down the enemy by revoking permission and standing in authority, live by the Spirit through a daily relational walk, and expand maturity so emotions no longer derail you.
Marcus reframes recovery with two game-changing insights. First, belonging—not mere accountability—drives transformation because we will fight for people who are glad to be with us. Second, addiction often signals stalled maturity rooted in unresolved trauma and missing skills.
If this conversation resonates, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review. Tell us: which part of the BATTLE model do you plan to focus on this week?
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Free Resources to help you on your journey to Becoming Whole
👉Men's Overcoming Lust & Temptation Devotional
👉Women 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Women overcoming unwanted sexual Behavior)
👉Compass 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Wives who are or have been impacted by partner betrayal)
For most people, the desire for porn is driven by a lack of connection and a lack of relational joy. I'm gonna say that again. For most people, the desire for porn is driven by a lack of connection and a lack of relational joy. Welcome to the Becoming Whole podcast this week. I'm James Craig, the director of projects here at regeneration and a spiritual coach. And I just want to ask you all this question, all the listeners is it possible that you're missing a key element to your recovery journey? I'm asking you to kind of take that with a humble posture. Am I missing something, Lord? Is there something that you actually want to fill in? Well, today I'm joined by one of the most holistic Christian thinkers on formation into Christ-likeness, who's going to speak to his powerful, multifaceted approach to sexual integrity. So if you're struggling with unwanted sexual behaviors or desires, if you're a spouse who can't understand why your husband or wife keep struggling, or if you're a parent trying to know how to walk with your kids, this episode is for you. So our guest today is Dr. Marcus Warner, author and president of Deeper Walk International. Some of you will know if you've been listening to this podcast or if you've been coached by me that his book, Rare Leadership, co-authored with Jim Wilder, has been so impactful and it's been impactful on me and those I walk with. So welcome, Marcus, Becoming Hold Podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Ah, it's a pleasure to join you, James. It's good work you're doing.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, sir. Well, Marcus, I mentioned rare leadership, but we're actually going to focus on a different book of yours, a much smaller book that actually has a few pictures. It's kind of funny. I'm open to a page right now with some pictures. But this book is called Slaying the Monster. So for those on YouTube, you can see I'm holding up almost looks like a Lord of the Rings style battle that you got going on there. But you say in this book that there are many models within the church about how to overcome addiction and habitual sin. But when a model doesn't work, people often blame the person struggling instead of questioning the model. So instead of that dynamic, you're advocating for a holistic approach to overcoming sexual sin. So could you give us just a little like a kind of a quick overview of the model, the battle model? You you love across s I wonder how many we're gonna fit into this episode today.
SPEAKER_01:I have hundreds, so it's yeah, okay. Is it actually in the hundreds at this point? It is, yeah. So the it helps me remember the important things I need to remember, and so I just share them with people. But yeah, I it's it seemed appropriate because it's a battle. I understand the battle, and it starts with B is build community, and it's the idea that a lot of us have this fantasy that I'm gonna fix myself in isolation, show up and be, you know, all of a sudden be super Christian and do it all on my own, similar to the fantasy some guys have when they're in high school, like I'm gonna change my body over the summer and show up, and everybody's gonna be amazed at how buff I am, you know. But it's a but we really need other people, we need to be in community with people who are on a journey that we're on and can encourage each other on that journey. Second one, the A is we need to act like ourselves. And what we're getting at here is that when I am, whatever addiction it is, uh whether it's pornography or whether it's some other addiction, I am not acting like myself when I do that. And it's a mistake to define ourselves by our addictions. That's not the true me coming through, that's a malfunctioning version of me. And so we need to learn to understand our true identity. And beyond that, and I mean, even more than just my covenant identity in Christ that I'm a saint and that sort of thing. That's part of it, but it's also understanding the heart that God gave me and who I really am. So that's the that's the A. T. We've got we got to tackle some stuff. And the first thing we had to tackle are the root issues that led to this. Dr. Wilder taught me to treat my first exposure to pornography as trauma. He said a lot of times guys are celebrated for their first, like, oh, good for you. Wow, you got to see the good stuff kind of thing, instead of saying, Oh, poor you, you were traumatized. That's not something you should have been exposed to. That's not something you should have had to see.
SPEAKER_00:And so we got to get to those images, they're so they're so overwhelming to the nervous system.
SPEAKER_01:So overwhelming, right? And so it's it is a traumatic event, and we need to treat it like a traumatic event and get to those root issues of what was underneath it that led to all of this starting. So that's number three. The next T in battle is taking down, yeah, we got to take down the enemy, and that is that I am not the enemy, right? I'm not in a war with myself, I'm in a war with an actual adversary who wants who uses pornography as a lure to get me ensnared so that he can cause me to live like a slave, even though I have been set free. And so we need to learn some things about spiritual warfare. How does that work? How do I how do I live in victory on a daily basis? How do I get rid of demonic strongholds, things like that? And then the L is living with the spirit and the idea that you can't train your flesh to overcome this, you've got to learn what walking in the spirit is. And one of the things we try to point out is that walking in the spirit isn't about having a supernatural experience that suddenly fixes everything. There's a lot of people who tend to think that I just need a such a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit that I get zapped and I no longer have this desire. And there's probably stories where that's happened, but that is not the normal way that this takes place. The normal way this takes place is I am in a relational walk with the spirit and learning more and more how to walk in the spirit and crucify the flesh as a result. And then the the E, the last point here is maybe in some ways the most significant. And you could say that the first five actually add up to this, that this is the ultimate goal, and that is that we want to expand our maturity. You may have noticed that when it comes to addictions, that a lot of people just sort of rotate addictions, and that is they'll give up porn for a while, but they'll start overeating, or they'll give up overeating for a while and they'll start smoking or doing some other kind of you know behavior.
SPEAKER_00:We call it I like to call it like sin whack-a-mole, right? Yeah, you get down one and the other one pops up.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And so what the reason that's happening is that we talk about infant level maturity, child-level maturity, adult level maturity, parent and elder level maturity, and also what it means to have holes in your maturity development. Because the thing that causes holes in our maturity development is trauma. And that's both the bad stuff that happens to us, but trauma is also the good stuff we missed out on growing up that would have made a huge difference if we had just had that good stuff in our lives. And so the idea is learning to evaluate where am I at in my maturity development? What got in the way of that? So, are there skills I'm going to need to build? Are there wounds that need to get healed? There's some things that need to happen for me to begin leveling up my maturity and filling the holes in my maturity development.
SPEAKER_00:Do you remember off the top of your head, Marcus? I feel like Dr. Wilder, Dr. Jim Wilder has a kind of a particular way he defines trauma, something about like overwhelming, going beyond what our capacity can handle at that time. Do you have that off the top of your head?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you said it pretty well, actually. It's just the traumas and it is there's two kinds of trauma. Trauma B is what overwhelms our capacity. Trauma A is what keeps us from building capacity in the first place. So, for example, trauma A would be I didn't live with enough joy in my nuclear family. It's like I my dad was absent and angry all the time. I didn't get any joy from him. Or my mom was so into her own issues, she didn't have time for me, and I didn't get joy. And I nobody was there staying relational with me, helping me deal with my big emotions and being happy to be with me. And I just it's I they weren't abusive to me. He didn't like smack me with a belt because of that. He just ignored me and I didn't get what I needed. What that does is it shrinks the growth of our emotional capacity, and so it's traumatizing to us in this in the standpoint that I just don't grow things that are extremely important that need to be grown and need to be developed. And so that's a kind of trauma. In fact, it's a harder kind of trauma to actually deal with than the bad, than the B trauma, the bad stuff that happens to us. It's actually almost easier to go back to painful memories of bad things that happened and to experience healing for those than it is to do all of the work of rebuilding skills that we missed. And so, yeah, that's a long answer, but his definition of trauma has is is kind of two-sided. It's anything that sabotages our ability to develop our emotional capacity.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I wanted to bring that out just because a lot of our listeners might be like, yeah, I hear that word a lot. Aren't we just kind of over-psychological psychologizing everything? But but I love the way that you guys are defining that pretty technically, like when you don't actually have the capacity, when you get that overwhelm, or when you haven't developed that. So, listeners, consider that. Consider are there traumas in your life related to either the lack, those those type A absence traumas, or the bad things that have happened. And uh, so we're gonna get into that a little bit more as we go through each chapter. But let's go back. By the way, this book is little, it's only like 84 pages, but I found myself underlining like a quarter of it because it's so dense. And and this is gonna be a dense episode. So hang in there. You can always re-listen, but also get this book, Marcus. I think you've primarily written it toward men, but I think it would also apply to our our female listeners who who are struggling as well with pornography or other things. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, my target audience here was some men that I knew that I wanted to write something helpful for them. But yeah, so it's written with that slant to it, but it applies to a lot of people.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the principles are going to be really relevant. So let's go back to this one of the first one, B, build community. So I want to highlight this. And on page 30, you kind of talk about how most of us wait for leaders, whether pastors or ministry leaders or other leaders in our community to build community for us. But you highlight this idea of we're actually responsible for building community. Can you talk a little more about that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, this kind of gets back to that a trauma idea that is some people, everywhere they go, they build a network of friends and they build a network of people around them everywhere they go, and they just have that ability. But it's a set of skills that they have actually learned over time. And then there's other people and they go someplace and they just waiting for somebody to reach out to them, and they're waiting for somebody to invite them into the community, and they don't know how to build it for themselves. And so partly what I'm trying to say is here is that there are a set of skills that you can learn that help you begin to grow community wherever you go and develop this wherever you are, and that there is a skill set that goes to it that somebody can learn and can master. And one of the things that helps me think about it is the idea of having three people upstream from you, but also three people downstream. And that is three people who are pouring into you, but three people you're pouring into them. And as we all know, I you often learn more by the people you're trying to help than that just from the people that are coming with you. But your your community isn't like I'm the weak person and I need to be around a bunch of strong people, or it can't be like what I call the ghetto mindset that says we just got to get all the weak people together and uh and isolate them. And and because as we all know, we're strong in some parts of our lives and we have weakness in other parts of our lives. It's like nobody is just weak and nobody is just strong. We have a and so we have there are just it's the area of life in which I am struggling, not the totality of my life. So yes, you're right. Building community is a are is something that we all need to get better at and not just wait on somebody else to do for us.
SPEAKER_00:It's a beautiful invitation. I know that that's uh we often might say, well, I'm just an introvert, or those extroverts are great at this, but actually you're saying no, for all of us, this is a skill we can develop. Similarly, and this is gonna be really crucial for those who are looking to recover from sexual struggles. You highlight the idea of accountability versus belonging. You say this on page 33. The key to transformation is not accountability but belonging. That's gonna be a shock to some of our listeners. What do you mean by that? Isn't accountability like all that really matters in this journey?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, what I've found is that most of the people who are making progress are in accountability groups. But what's going on in those groups is not accountability. What's going on in those groups is belonging. What's happening is you are finding a people that you say, I have found my people. I feel seen, I feel understood, I feel connected. And the reality is whether they asked you or not, whether they ask you the accountability questions or not, there's going to be growth there just from the belonging that you're beginning to experience. And so belonging kind of, and the idea here is this is like I will run through a brick wall for people I care about, right? I am going what's really going to motivate me to kick this is that I don't want to disappoint my people. That's going to be far more powerful in the transformation than knowing that somebody's going to ask me whether or not I failed this week. Because what that tends to do is it makes fear and shame the foundation, and it can actually drive people away. Like I failed once too often, I feel shame once too often, I'm out of here. Whereas belonging never gets old.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. And there's something here about like your group is modeling belonging that also can be some of how you learn belonging with God. Like that same feeling of I don't want to disappoint my beloved, my my Lord Jesus. Like that is almost those dots are almost connected through people, right? Like through the people in your community, they're helping maybe develop that skill.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And relational skills are relational skills. And my relation, if I the better I get at relational skills, the more it's going to help my relationship with God as well as my relationship with other people. And so what I found is that a lot of times what we call introverted is actually a lack of relational skills. But there's also, I would say, that introverted and extroverted are real things and that they go into how we're motivated in the relationships that we build, not whether or not we need relationships. So, for example, introverts tend to want a few strong relationships and they like to interact with people one to three people at a time. Whereas extroverts are like the more the merrier, man. Let's have a party, let's get 100 people there. This is going to be great. They feed off of the energy. But extroverts can be very lonely because they're always surrounded by people, but they don't have anybody they're really deeply bonded to.
SPEAKER_00:And introverts can some they can lack the they can have the same lack of relational skills.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. They can have the same lack of relational skills. So I'm not saying that introversion introverts do lack relational skills. I'm saying sometimes it's confused for that. Yeah. That what's actually going on, but that both introverts and extroverts are equally motivated by relationship, they just go about it differently.
SPEAKER_00:That is so powerful. Thank you for unpacking that. Let's go on, though. There's so much to cover. Act like yourself. This one is super, super powerful. In your book, Rear Leadership, you talk about triggers and masks, and we don't have time to fully unpack all of that. But I'm really curious about this. On page 42, you say the New Testament said only refers to Christians as sinners, like twice, and even those two are debatable. Is that true? Like, don't aren't aren't we kind of yeah. How do you how do you view us when it comes to being sinners, you know, or not?
SPEAKER_01:Well, you know, the most common term for Christians in the New Testament, used over 80 times, right, is some form of the Greek word hagias. And hagias is the word for holy. And so it's like you holy ones, you saints, you sanctified ones, you know, you who have been sanctified, right? So the descriptors are almost all around that. So we need to understand what that means? What does it mean to be holy? It helps me to think of it in terms of sacred space, and what I mean by that is like in the old testament, if you wanted to be where God was, you needed to go someplace. Like, let's go to the temple, let's go to the tabernacle, that's where we're gonna meet God. Well, where do you go to meet with God now? Well, you're the temple, right? You've become the temple of God, and that means I go to meet with God in, you know, and he's inside of me, and I can connect with him anytime that I want to because I have become the sacred space in which in which the living God dwells. So that's a pretty remarkable, profound thing. And so the idea is that I'm now belong to God. The other way of looking at it is that my identity comes from who I belong to, and so my identity comes from my people, these are the people I belong to, but it also comes from my belonging with God. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So many of us were kind of modeled like if we sin, if we mess up, if we fall short, the relationship is seriously harmed. Like our parents might have shamed us or pulled away from us, or peers might have done that, or whatever. And you're you're you're making the point that there's something deeper happening here in light of what Jesus did on the cross, like there's no way God's not doing that, He's not behaving that way toward us.
SPEAKER_01:No, not at all. I was taught, you know, that sin separates us from God, that it causes a break in fellowship, is usually the way it was described. And the image in my head as a kid being taught that was that God turns his back on me until I clean myself up. Yeah, and then as soon as I clean myself up, then God will be happy to see me again. But that there is this window of time where God wants nothing to do with me, right? And that's just couldn't be more wrong. God knows that you need him more in those horrible moments than you do when you are strong and everything is going well, and so he wants to be invited in immediately and said, I'm not turning my back on you there. It's like, let's let's let's look at this together, let's deal with this together, bring this big thing to me, and let's stay relationally connected as we go through it. It's a very different picture than what a lot of us were taught.
SPEAKER_00:One of our one of our groups is called Awaken 360, and one of our former volunteer leaders would say, Bring God with you into temptation, bring him with you when you start looking up images, which sounds crazy, and maybe we I need to pause on that for a second, but then also come right back to like the point is he's not actually leaving us when we're giving into stuff, and the more we can invite him in, be relational with him, it changes our posture, like it changes our perspective.
SPEAKER_01:Right? It's like he never leaves us, he never actually turns his back on us and walks away. He is always there, he is always engaged. It's whether or not we and I'll put it this way the more you can stay in the relational part of your brain, and the more that you can stay in the relational in relationship with God, the more strength you will have to resist temptation, the less relational you are. Because when you do pornography, you actually go into the non-relational part of your brain. You are not craving a relationship with this person, you're craving sex with this person. It's a very different thing, right? So you're crave a uh now there may be relational elements and fantasies, but I'm saying is that that by and large, we're not really looking for a mature relationship.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. We're not looking for true satisfying joy, which we'll come back around to in a moment, but we're we're we're trying to fulfill kind of a more temporary form of satisfaction, almost like a pseudo-relationality, a pseudo-joy.
SPEAKER_01:Good word for it. It's a pseudo-relationship.
SPEAKER_00:One of the things that is key in this chapter of acting like yourself is becoming a protector. And I found this so powerful and beautiful, both in this book and in rare leadership and other place of overlap. You talk about we're not gonna be able to unpack this a ton, but you talk about possums. What is it? Possums, yeah, predators and protectors. Predators and protectors, yeah. So a lot of us kind of have that possum posture where we shrink back. When we're giving into pornography or other sexual struggles, we're often giving into a predator posture or kind of identity, so to speak. Like it's like me to use someone for my satisfaction. That's what a predator is kind of going through or dealing with. But you're saying let's actually act like our true selves in Christ, which is to protect. Can you unpack that just a tiny bit?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So the Daryl Brazzell uh introduced this concept to me and pointed it out. And in Timothy, Paul writes, treat younger women like daughters, you know, other women like sisters, older women like mothers. Well, what are daughters, sisters, and mothers? They are categories of protection. And for most of us, right, there are exceptions, but for most of us, we would never dream of doing this to our mothers. We would never dream of doing this to our sisters or our daughters, right? It's because those are categories of protection. And so part of what he's saying is see yourself as the sort of person it's like me to be a protector of these people and to not take advantage of them. And I remember, like, I met with a young lady who was traumatized by her grandfather in a sexual way. And one of the things help her understand look, there are grandfathers that you could literally offer yourself to them and they would not take advantage of you because they are protectors. Yeah, and that's what the mindset is like somebody could offer yourself to them, and you're like, no, no, no, that is not like me to do that. That's not who I am, and that's who we want to be, that's the identity we want to reinforce. What possums do possums tend to look at pornography as I am the weak person, you are the strong person, heal me, fix me, give me what I'm lacking. Predators go into pornography, and that is, oh, that looks tasty. I want some of that, right? And so there's a two different things going on there. Sometimes we have both of them going on at the same time. But some of us lean one direction or the other more than the other.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And you say in rare leadership that to notice weakness, like to notice a vulnerable person, does not actually mean that you are giving into being a predator because both the greatest saints and greatest sinners notice weakness, but the greatest saints are the ones who come in and protect that person, the weakness, the predators are the ones who come in and take advantage there. So it's not I I just felt that it was so freeing for those who are struggling with like, okay, I notice this attractive person. They seem to be interested, or I'm I'm wanting them to be interested. To notice is not necessarily what's wrong, it's what you're doing with it, how you're viewing them, or are you praying for them? You know, that kind of posture, posturing. Right.
SPEAKER_01:And so you do, and you realize that I mean you said that that well, and that is that I look at it as two different locker rooms, right? It's like if you got a rot locker room run by bullies, what happens to weakness, right? It gets pounced on. If you got a locker room run by mature people, what happens to weakness? They get helped, they get protected. And that's what we're saying. We don't want to be the bullies, we want to be the protectors. That's kind of what we're getting at.
SPEAKER_00:What a picture of of Jesus, too. Like the way he the the vulnerable, the the possums in society came to him and and he called out the prote the the predators, the the religious predators, especially. And so so beautiful. Let's move on to the first T, tackle the roots.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:This is this is so important. I think besides maturity, if we want to think of these as two categories, I've heard you talk about it this way. Besides maturity, healing, which obviously they're very interconnected, but outside of maturity, healing is the most important thing we can do to overcome struggles. So you say this on page 60. A stronghold is simply an area which you are not free to be yourself. Again, think back to what we were just talking about, acting like the saint that God says we are if we're in Christ. A stronghold is an area where you're not free to be yourself. So you give a this is one of those places we'll introduce a cross stick of wolves, W L V S, wounds, lies, vows, strongholds. Can you just give a little bit of a picture of like how we end up in these places of strongholds where we can't act like ourselves?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So I say the world wounds us, the devil lies to us, and our flesh makes vows. And the fruit of all that is stronghold in our life. So the world wounds us. So for example, right, I was introduced to pornography as a seven-year-old, right? And all of a sudden, it's like this traumatic thing happens to me in my life. Now, that wound has happened. The devil will take advantage of that and he will plant seeds in the wounded place in my heart. And those seeds will be lies, and there'll be things like, you're a pervert, you're no good, you're dirty. If anybody knew what you were really like, they wouldn't want to be around you. You know, God is disappointed with you. You're gonna have to really, you know, be super Christian now for God to accept you. In other words, all kinds of lies. That's what the devil does. He starts planting these seeds in that, and it's not that I I believe those things while I'm in the moment, but they begin to feel true afterwards because of what has happened. They take root, yeah, they take root, and so then my flesh gets involved, and my flesh makes a vow. And my vow is an I will statement. And an I will statement is I will never let myself fall in this area again. I am going to, you know, beat this, or I will hide this from everybody. Nobody will know. I'm gonna keep this secret, or I will. It's an I will statement of how my flesh is gonna take control of the situation so that I can now manage this and be in control of it. And because it's my flesh making the vow, it doesn't trust God. And it doesn't trust God to get me out of this, it doesn't trust God to be with me in this. It's it's uh it's a flesh vow that's of how I'm gonna take control of this situation, and it can again and again swing to opposite extremes. And that is, I can just vow I'm never gonna do it and then beat myself up relentlessly if I ever do, or I can swing the other way and vow that I'm gonna hide this and seal it off so that never finds out. There's different kinds of vows, but the implication is all of these things work together to create slavery in my life, and that's what stronghold is. It is an area of slavery in my life where I am not free to act like myself and not live out of the true heart that God has given me.
SPEAKER_00:One of the ways I think we talk about lies is you've probably heard this term unholy agreements. So we talk about unholy agreements and unholy vows as kind of the lies and and the vows section. And so we're agreeing, we often are ending up agreeing with these lies unless we've had such a robust place of like, oh, I'm a seven-year-old, but I can go to my parents. Or I'm, let's just say you were exposed at age 20, which would be pretty miraculous in our culture, but I'm now mature enough where I can say this is not who I'm gonna be. So you talk about how the spirit's also trying to or is planting seeds, but we often let the lies and vows take root, in part because so many children are being exposed. Children don't have, by definition, the maturity to know exactly what to do with such an overwhelming traumatic event.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And the last statistics I saw were that seven to nine is the average age of exposure. And by age 10 or 11, majority of children have watched video porn, and it's just mind-boggling. I mean, they're still a couple of years from puberty in most cases, and it's already established. We have what I call porn saturated society. You know, when I was a kid, you had to go look for porn, now it comes looking for you. Absolutely, it's just a very different world in which we live, and uh and it makes it all the more important to not be alone in the journey.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, because if you had that relational capital with God and with others, the the wounds don't have to become traumas. Like if we had that relational connection, we're not necessarily being overwhelmed. Yeah, we're not lacking what we needed in that.
SPEAKER_01:And I think I tell the story in the book that you know, meeting with a guy who came to me as a pat when I was pastoring about his porn addiction. And it basically started with sexual trauma when he was 12 years old, right? As he was entering puberty and he was traumatized by at a church camp of all places, right? And so God met him in that memory, did something to heal that memory. And what that does is it resolves the memory, but it doesn't give you instant maturity. And this is one of the things we have to understand is that healing experiences, belonging, belonging doesn't give you instant maturity, healing doesn't give you instant maturity, nothing gives you instant maturity. You can't just choose instant maturity. All right, it you got to think of maturity as like lifting weights and working out. It's just it's it's the habits that you build that over time create results. And that's kind of what we're after on the maturity point.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I hope that if you're a spouse of someone who is dealing with sexual sin, recognize are there strongholds that that are there places of maturity gaps that might actually bring a deeper level of compassion? Obviously, they still need to get after what they're dealing with and plug into a community and and pursue healing and maturity. But I hope that gives a little bit of perspective for a spouse who's like, why did why why does my husband or wife keep going back to this behavior? What about for parents, Marcus? Because that you were just describing a few, you know, really yeah, traumatic things that can happen in childhood. How would you speak to parents about like, oh shoot, I didn't maybe realize my nine-year-old might have been exposed by now? Like, and perhaps there's a wound or you know, that this wolves pattern has begun to develop. What do you say to parents?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there's a couple of things. One is you want to let sure make sure that the kids know that you are happy to be with them and that you are happy to go through this with them and that they are not alone. That's the main thing. You want to stay relationally engaged with them as they process through it. You don't have to fix it. Um, you just want To but you're going to stay relationally engaged with them as they go through their their journey. The other thing is that it's a good idea to pray, ask them if they're open to praying about it. And if they are open to praying about it, then you can do some of the some things to invite Jesus into some of these traumatic moments and see if they can receive some healing. But I seen a lot of parents do that. And it's like, would you like to ask Jesus for help with this? And I'll stay present with you while we do it. And and uh what we're doing there is we're just having the child say, Jesus, that you know what happened, you saw where would you show me where you were, and would you do something to make this better? And then you have them pay attention. Does anything change after you pray that prayer or take a look? You know, what does your memory change in any way? Is there anything new thoughts that you have? What is it you feel like Jesus wants you to know? And so we talk about how to do that. I call it the real prayer process because it's a four-step process that we've outlined. It's the chapter on tackling the roots.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so great resource here, and what a beautiful opportunity as parents. I love that first word you said stay relationally engaged. This is not like I just need to get this out ASAP. Of course, we don't want our children giving in and being controlled by these types of behaviors, but staying relational is so such a precursor to being able to see deeper workouts.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I've been in a in a couple of groups of women, you know, whose husbands are recovering from this. And I one of the things I noticed was there's a lot of talk of betrayal. And I just want to say this that on the identity thing for women, what they have to avoid is taking on the identity as someone who has been betrayed. There's a difference between having been betrayed and dealing with that as a wound and taking that on as an identity. And I just say that I just caution that we don't want to take on that identity. You want to deal with that as a wound in all the ways that you would normally deal with a wound, which includes forgiveness and healing and warfare and you know yeah, some of what we're getting after here.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, all the other stuff and being super relationally supportive, but that's such an important word because the field now does primarily talk about what happens to a spouse who's been betrayed as betrayal trauma, and that is part of what is likely happening. If your system's overwhelmed by finding out that is what has happened, betrayal has happened.
SPEAKER_01:I'm saying let's but yeah, but let's not have the identity.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. That's beautiful. So the second T is take down the enemy. Just one major thing I want to hone in on here. You talk about permission and authority. And so for some of our listeners, we obviously do talk about spiritual warfare and being led by the spirit here at regen a lot, but many of them, many of our listeners and and and people who come to our ministry come from backgrounds that might not be as acquainted with spiritual warfare. And I just thought what you said, let's see, it's on page 67 about permission, like about the fall giving permission. God is still sovereign. Let me just read this on page 67. God is sovereign. This means that demons can only do what they have permission to do because of the fall. They have permission to roam the earth and create problems for people. However, they can only claim a place in your life if you give them permission to be there. We give permission by entering into agreements with them, like kind of believing their lies, like we just spoke about. And this mostly most commonly happens, believing their lies, engaging in sinful practices, and refusing to forgive others. So can you talk to those who might be a little bit less familiar with, hey, there might be a spiritual component. In fact, if we read scripture and take it seriously, there probably is a spiritual component, at least as a piece of the puzzle, not necessarily the whole thing, but what what do you say to them about permission and authority when it comes to habitual sexual struggles?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I take a legal approach to spiritual warfare, and that is legally, you know, I'm asking the question if if a if a demon is harassing, tormenting, doing something, why? What is giving them permission to do this? And there's only three answers, right? It's either God, for whatever reason, has just said, I'm going to give you permission to do this, like he did with Job. Or the answer is, I have done something to open up a door. Or the third answer is there's something in my environment that is allowing this to happen. And so, for example, I know people who go to hotel rooms and they struggle with pornography more in hotel rooms than anywhere else. Well, why? It's because there's been so much pornographic sin in hotel rooms that there are spirits that have access there. And so, one of the things I do every time I go to a hotel is just say, in the name of Jesus, I cleanse this place and command anything that's spiritual to get out of here. I've had people say the same thing about going into bookstores, going into you know, places where they sell magazines and airports and whatever. And you just kind of learn there are some places where demons like to hang out because they've been given so much permission to be there through time. And so, what we do is in our own lives, go, have I done, have I given permission? And I want to keep short accounts on that. So as soon as I fall, I'm like, God, I confess that I did this. I I ask you to cancel any permission this is given. And in Jesus' name, I command the demons that leave and take their works and effects with them. You know, get out of here, go where Jesus sends you, kind of thing. And deal with it quickly. Like, spiritual warfare doesn't have to be a long, drawn-out, six-hour process, right? It can be a 30-second prayer sometimes, but it's things that we have to deal with.
SPEAKER_00:And our founder would say, Alan Mediger would say, there's no harm in casting away a demon if it wasn't there. In fact, it it you might just feel a little silly in your own heart, but like if if it's not actually your flesh leading to the temptation, there very well could be something where, or at least the enemy might even be just encouraging it or inflaming it, right? And so I I can't tell you the amount of times I've prayed that Marcus, that 10-second prayer. If there's any unclean spirits impacting me, be gone in Jesus' name, whatever it is, and how sometimes that shifts the atmosphere, sometimes dramatically, sometimes just a little bit, sometimes maybe not at all, but there's no harm in it.
SPEAKER_01:And I'll say too, this guy of the people that I've worked with in my life, the the two who had the deepest addiction were women, and they their addictions were in a lot of sexual trauma in their lives, yeah. And there did come a point at battle after battle after battle where Jesus kind of said, All right, this is done. We have, you know, this is done. It took a few years for most of both of them, but it's different for everybody because it kind of depends on where you're at with your capacity when you begin. But I was just pointing, my just pointing out that there's a very real element to this. What the myth about it is that all I got to do is cast out the demon of pornography and my problems are over. And I've never found that to be the case. But getting rid of anything demonic makes doing all the other work easier.
SPEAKER_00:Mm-hmm. All right, we have two more, and I'm I'm conscious of time, so we're gonna try to move relatively quickly, especially through this next one. Live by the spirit. I love how you said earlier that growing in our relationship with God, learning to abide or walk in the spirit. There's so many different metaphors in scripture for walking in close relationship with God and intimacy, yada in in Hebrew. I'm probably saying that wrong. You would you would know better, but but living by the spirit, okay, awesome. Well, that that's that's what your doctorate's in, right? You got the you studied Old Testament, so that's awesome. But I love how you say in this chapter that repentance is changing the way we look at things. And so, how do we get that God mindset, Marcus? Like, how do we over time develop more of that almost like a repentant posture instead of it just being like a I said sorry for this? There's something higher you're calling us to, I think, with with the word repentance.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the idea of repentance comes from again that Greek meta to change and noia mind, right? So the the it built into the root of the word is this idea of changing how I think about things. So when Jesus came and said repent for the kingdom of heaven is hand, he meant stop thinking like a worldly person and start thinking like a kingdom person. Like get your values lined up with the kingdom of God and get your values out from being driven by the world. That's the core of repentance. How do I how do I move my value system to being that of the kingdom? Now, beliefs and emotions are a two-way street. And what I find is that what I believe will drive emotions, but also what I feel will drive what I believe. And so there are six primary negative emotions that I think we all have to kind of come to grips with in this arrangement is shame and anger and fear, disgust, despair, and sadness. And what happens, and I'm sorry to bring up such a big topic with little time left, but that's all right. For a lot of us, what happens is we need to learn how to do to stay relational with God and with other people in all six of these emotions. And for for each of us, what tends to happen is there are a couple of emotions that just get us every time. Like when we feel shame, it's over. We have no capacity to handle shame, or when I feel anger, it's over. I have no capacity to handle anger, and different people, it's different emotions. So, one of the things you want to do is identify which emotions tend to be your downfall, which emotions tend to overwhelm you, and um let's work on a connection with God in that emotion by inviting him into it. And so, you know, before I feel the emotion, what do you want me to know about this? How do you want me to think about that emotion? And then when I'm having the emotion, saying, Jesus, I don't want to leave you out of this, I don't want to go and self-medicate again. I want to, uh I want to invite you into this. So part of living by the spirit is learning to invite Jesus into the hard parts of our lives. But then when we're not in those hard parts, we're practicing inviting him into everything else.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and that's that's a perfect segue into the the E, expanding your maturity, part of maturity, part of being an adult parent or elder, which are those latter three stages of maturity, first to our infant and child. We'll come back to those in a second. But part of being an adult, you you guys talk about is being able to return to joy when you do feel shame or anger or sadness or despair. And then even further, I think, is like you just said, being able to be sad and still be in joy, being able to feel shame and still be glad to be with people, which is how you and Dr. Wilder define joy, that sense of relational connection, right? So the goal, part of the goal here that I understand is instead of taking our anger or shame, two of the biggest emotions we take to pornography or fear, which was a huge one for me, instead of taking those to pornography, which is not a savior that can actually bring any redemption in your life, learning and growing in maturity to take it to God more effectively, to bring in others more effectively. Anything else you want to say about that?
SPEAKER_01:It's a good way to put it. You know, the the statement that you know Dr. Wilder made that first kind of he likes to make these shocking statements to get you to think the first the it was that addiction is the result of a catastrophic failure to attain maturity.
SPEAKER_00:I have that quote right here. I was gonna bring that up. That is so powerful. Addiction, can I just say it again? Yeah, addiction is the result of a catastrophic failure to attain maturity.
SPEAKER_01:So at first I feel shame when I hear that. Like, oh, you know, yeah, I have a catastrophic failure in my life, but then you understand that what's under that catastrophic failure is unresolved trauma. I haven't resolved the bad trauma that's happened to me, and I'm I haven't yet developed the skills that I missed because of the a trauma and the absence of the good things that I need. And so what happens is that until those two things happen, right? Until there is resolution for the bad things that have happened in my life, and until I build the skills that I missed out on, I'm going to stay immature. That's how you grow maturity, is through heat emotional healing and through the development of new habits.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So those two things work work hand in hand. And as we all know, the best way to build a new habit is in community with other people and not just through sure willpower.
SPEAKER_00:Especially as Dr. Waller would say, when that person, when people in that community have strengths in those areas. That's actually something I was curious about, Marcus, as I've read several of these different ways you guys have talked about developing maturity. I don't know if I've explicitly heard it said that we could be an adult, I'm I don't have kids, so I could be an adult level maturity in certain areas of life, but perhaps not in others. Is that is that a correct way to think about it?
SPEAKER_01:It is a correct way to think about it. So, for example, there is something that is called upside down maturity, and upside down maturity happens when a child is forced to be the parent in the home, and so like mom is strung out on drugs and dad is off at work, and the one of the children steps up and kind of becomes the parent and parents to parents as well as parenting the other kids. Yeah, and so they look super mature, and they developed a lot of skills that a lot of other people don't have, but they have upside down maturity, and that is that they have one layer of skills that are well developed, but at the emotional relational area, they're a they don't know how to take care of themselves, and so that's what now that Marcus is done reading my journal.
SPEAKER_00:No, but many of us have experienced that because we look we look mature, but part of how I looked mature, Marcus, was I went to pornography as my place to take all my emotions, so I might have looked like I had it together on the outside, but but I was still going to this place with with my maturity.
SPEAKER_01:I came to the conclusion, you said it well, it can't save us. And that is I look at pornography as a form of idolatry. And in specifically in Old Testament terms, it's like Asherah, you know, the goddess Asherah. And that I almost have to think, am I gonna take this emotion that I'm feeling and this problem that I have? Am I gonna take it to Yahweh or am I gonna take it to Asherah? Wow. And it's it's really that distinct. It's like, who do I think is going to save me? Who do I think is gonna offer me the most help right now? Is it Yahweh or is it Asherah? And when you put it in those terms, it gets a little clearer that you know what it does work at some level, or we wouldn't keep doing it. It's just that it creates more problems than it solves.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I I want to spend so much more time pressing into maturity, but friends, you're just gonna have to buy Marcus's book because this five stages of maturity that he talks about here in Slaying the Monster, him and Jim Wilder talk about in Rare Leadership. And then Jim actually now has an updated three-part book series. It used to be called Living with Men, and now it's building a more human community, I believe. And he literally breaks down the five stages in in a lot more detail than what we barely scratched the surface today. So, this is such a great concept for you who are struggling, you who are navigating betrayal or parenting. Like God actually wants to fill in these areas. He wants to develop a better grace foundation that you didn't get as an infant. I love that term. I'm pulling that right from your book. He wants to develop wisdom in the child. He he wants you to be yourself in groups, and there's so much that he wants to do and go back and do with you in these stages of maturity. So, yeah, we do have to close out. Um, Marcus, I want to give you the last word in just a moment if there's any kind of closing thoughts and then just briefly praying over us. But I just want to first mention that we do have our upcoming retreats for women, so sacred by design retreat, and and we have upcoming groups for women, both women who have experienced betrayal trauma and women who are dealing with unwanted sexual behavior. The retreat is for both. That's on November 7th. And then we have a wives growth group starting November 11th for wives who've experienced betrayal trauma. And then we have strong like water for women dealing with unwanted sexual behavior, kicking off November 10th. So if you're a woman dealing with either of those challenges and wanting to grow in your identity and in community and in healing, these are great opportunities. I heard last year's retreat was so beautiful and powerful. So please consider those. But Marcus, any anything you want to say is kind of the last word here?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. I heard Dr. Waldo say one time the only thing that we really fear is an emotion that we can't handle. And what happens is most addiction gets triggered by emotions we can't handle. And then we develop an avoidant lifestyle because we're afraid of certain emotions in our lives. So the more that we can do to learn how to face those emotions and invite Jesus into those emotions, that's probably the most certain path to maturity development and to overcoming addictions, is identifying the emotions that overwhelm you and facing them with Jesus' help and with the help of people that love you.
SPEAKER_00:And is there any, is there any, besides getting the Slaying the Monster book, anything else related to these topics that you'd want to mention that you guys offer?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, ddboard.com is our website, and we have a ton of resources. A bunch of them are free. And but we also have things you can buy, like we have a freedom course uh that you can purchase that'll go through 10 lessons with three hours of videos and a lot of worksheets and things like that that'll walk you through a lot of the freedom issues. Then we have an identity course that you can take. We've got a new course coming out next month on walking in the spirit, you know, and how you do these things. So if you're looking for more training and deeper training on some of this stuff, deeper walk probably has it.
SPEAKER_00:And I I by the way, I listen every week to your on the trail podcast. Fantastic. You and your daughter, and just you guys unpack a lot. And and I get to listen every Monday when I'm when I'm at the gym. So highly commend the Deeper Walk on the Trail podcast. But yeah, Marcus, would you just would you pray for for our listeners?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. Father, we come to you because you know, the apostle John told us God is love. And we come to the most loving person that we know to bring all of our cares, all of our concerns, all of our worries and fears, all of our shame, all of our hopes and aspirations. We just bring it all to you. We lay it at your feet. We ask you for your shalom and uh for an increased dose of wisdom and for victory in the battles that we face. In Christ's name. Amen. Amen.
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