3 Keys to Using Prayer to Overcome Pornography

I’d like to take you back to general conference a few weeks back. I loved listening to President Nelson as he spoke about how to keep spiritual momentum.  If you don’t recall the talk, he offered 5 ways to Maintain positive spiritual momentum.  The five were Get on the covenant path and stay there. Discover the joy of daily repentance. Learn about God and how He works. Seek and expect miracles. End conflict in your personal life. I’d like to talk about number 3 tonight and discuss an issue that I find keeps my clients from being able to successfully employ prayer in their quest to overcome pornography.   I’ve made a study of prayer over the course of my life and find, sometimes, our prayers are ineffectual because we approach the act of prayer and the requests in our prayer in ways that do not conform to the purpose of prayer.   As I struggled with pornography I often found myself praying earnestly to Heavenly Father.  When I drove was the time I often felt most able to pray out loud and listen for the answers.  As I drove I would pour out my heart and plead for things that I was certain Heavenly Father would want to give me.   It was a time of deep frustration because, no matter how hard I prayed, I never received the answers or blessings that I felt like I was asking for.   It took many years of work to get to the point where I am now.  And I see prayer very differently than I did when I was a 19 year old working to get on my mission.   In thinking back to that time, I want to share 3 ways that you can change your prayers to become more effective at engaging with our Heavenly Father in ways that, I believe He will be more able to answer you, bless you, and help you become the person you are trying to be.   The three ways to improve your prayers to overcome pornography are: Seek Understanding Maintain Agency  Be Willing to Try Whether you are talking about a pornography addiction or just in general, these lessons will hopefully give you meaningful ways that you can utilize prayer more effectively to overcome pornography.   Seek understanding The first thing that I think we need to do differently is to seek understanding from our Heavenly Father.   That might seem obvious.  But I promise, it wasn’t obvious to me and when you hear what I mean, it might not have been the obvious answer to you either.  One of the things that I often did in my prayers was to ask my Father in Heaven to give me the strength or make my burden light, both phrases that we hear in the scriptures as important figures seek the blessings they want and need.  In asking for these things, it felt like there should have been some inexplicable moment and then poof, my issues were gone.   What has changed for me is that I believe that growth is our most important activity here and growth is hard to come by when poof your issues are resolved by heavenly intervention.  While I’m not discounting the times that divine shifts are made on our behalf, I also don’t believe that the Lord is going to move mountains that we are meant to climb.  In that spirit, I believe most of our prayers must center around learning, growing, and understanding. I also believe that words matter, what we ask for is what we ask for and we won’t be offered something else.  The Bible dictionary touches this point by saying, prayer is part of the process of getting the blessings that our HF is willing to grant but that are made conditional on our asking for them.   So, asking for God to lighten our burden when that burden is the one that will grant us the empathy we need to become something more, He’s not going to say, “Well, you asked for your burden to be lightened, so I’ll give you something else instead.”  I think the...