Welcome to the husband material podcast where we help Christian men quit pornography so you can change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship. My name is drew boa and I'm here to show you how. Let's go.

Today's episode, we're talking about what do you do when you see somebody so attractive, they knock your socks off. You could just look at them all day. This comes up again and again with my clients, so I'm happy to help. If you have had this experience of being like, wow, that person's amazing and not really knowing how to handle that because maybe later on you're tempted to think about them. Maybe later on that leads to porn. Don't worry. We will figure this out today. I'm giving you my three part formula for how to handle those situations and a simple prayer that you can say every single time you see somebody who just looks amazing. Here we go. Now I wish somebody else had given me this information when I was younger because when I was a teenager I was so immature in the way I related to girls. On the one hand I had the attractive ones who I worshiped and therefore was mortally afraid of and never talked to. Now, on the other hand, I had the unattractive ones who I was really snobbish too and who I shunned and so I never talked to them because I didn't care about them. My parents never gave me a mature way to understand my sexuality or how to relate to girls. The only thing that I got, I remember one time was a little book called every young man's battle that showed up on my shelf unexpectedly. My mom didn't even tell me about it. It just put it on my shelf and I read that book and it told me to do one thing. When I saw somebody who I was sexually attempted to lust after it said, balance your eyes like if you see them look and just bounce right off of them. First of all, this didn't work because my willpower wasn't strong enough and second of all, it didn't teach me how to relate to girls. I am going to teach you now exactly how I've learned to do it and how I teach my clients to do it and it starts with this simple three part framework, celebration, appreciation and gratitude and compassion and all of that is in this little prayer that one of my clients came up with. To summarize it, he says this every single time he's walking to class and he sees beautiful women on the sidewalk. He says this, Lord, she is very beautiful. You created her. Please draw her to yourself. Celebration, appreciation, compassion. Lord, she's very beautiful. It starts with celebration. This is acknowledging that sex is good, my sexuality is good. The fact that I can appreciate beauty comes from God and her sexuality comes from God. Even if you're looking at a man, his sexuality comes from God. This is liberating. So much of the failure of Christian sexual education has come from this purity culture that says sex is bad and we just need to avoid it. Celebration is the opposite of that. It's saying, no, God created it. It's good. It's to be enjoyed. Some of you might be thinking, really? You're telling me to enjoy the beautiful person in a way? Yes. If you go into a museum and you see a beautiful painting on the wall and you say, wow, that's a beautiful painting. That's not a problem, is it? The problem is when you think, I wonder how I could take that painting home with me, wonder how I could capture it and use it for my own purposes. That would be something similar to lust. Love is the opposite of lust, and so actually appreciating somebody and seeing that, Hey, they're beautiful in a little way is loving. It can be if you move from celebration to the next part of the prayer. Gratitude. Lord, she's very beautiful. You created her. This is acknowledging that the other person is a human being made in the image of God, worthy of dignity, honor and acceptance, saying, you know what? You're not an object to be used. You're not just a sexual object that I can lust after or bounce my eyes off of. Nobody wants to be treated that way. No, you're a person who's worthy of love and God created you. So I'm going to thank God for doing a really good job in creating your body and making it awesome, but it doesn't stop there because at this point, it's still just about us. We need to move from celebration to appreciation to compassion. That's where the last part of the prayer says, please draw her to yourself. The saying, God, not only did you create her, but you love her and you made her for yourself, so bring her back to you. What a powerful little prayer you can say to someone. This takes the focus off of you, off of your sexual purity, off of your moral superiority and says, I want to bless this person. I want to love this person just a little bit in this moment. So God, would you help her? Would you love her? Would you draw her to yourself today? Lord, she's very beautiful. You created her. Please draw her to yourself. This little prayer is something that rewires my brain with good theology, with good spiritual practices, and with healthy sexuality misses something that I say to myself all the time and it helps me relate to the other person. It helps me not live in fear of the other person. It helps me to appreciate them without lusting after them and following on that path towards sexual addiction and watching porn pro tip, always maintain self-awareness. Sometimes running away from this person is the wisest option. No thyself. So I would love to know what are your methods for relating to extremely attractive and beautiful people? Let me know[inaudible] if you really loved that prayer and you want this all written out, I created a free prayer guide for you, which you can download at the link for this episode. Until next time, never forget, you are God's beloved son and you. He is welcome.

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