Why I Wrote Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing
I wrote Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing for people struggling with unwanted sexual behavior, be that the use of pornography, an affair, or buying sex. The statistics associated with it are alarming. Pornography sites receive more traffic than Netflix, Twitter, and Amazon combined. About 57% of our pastors and 64% of our youth pastors struggle or have struggled with pornography. And roughly 1 in 5 spouses will admit to cheating on their partners.
As a counselor and minister, men and women were arriving in my office with almost no understanding of what freedom from sexual brokenness involved. The primary messages they’d received instructed them to stop lusting, dart their eyes, and pursue accountability. But as the years and decades rolled on however, these approaches failed to provide pathways to the freedom they desired. I realized that unless we change the conversation, we will continue to consign men and women to a lifetime of futility with sexual brokenness.
Listening to and studying our sexual brokenness is a paradigm shift for the church and that’s why I couldn’t be more honored to have the support of NavPress on this project. NavPress is one of the rare publishing organizations that believes the Spirit of God is alive in our world. And because of that, they are on the lookout for the new ways God is doing what God has always been up to: bringing freedom to the captives.
NavPress recognized that while Unwanted is a “new” approach, it echoes something we consistently see in the Scriptures: the curiosity of God. Have you noticed how God is always asking questions to people who find themselves in distress? God says to Adam, “Where are you?”, To Jacob, “What is your name?” To Hagar… “where do you come from and where are you going.” If God is curious about how our sin and sorrow came to be, I believe we can be too.
-Jay Stringer, author of Unwanted