You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan continues his conversation with Jay Stringer about sexual brokenness

and the need to engage the particular stories that inform how we view ourselves and how we relate to others.

It's an honor for me to be back with Jay Stringer, author, of a phenomenal new book, Unwanted.

And as we talk the first time, Jay, the new conversation that you're inviting us to invites us to see that, yes, every addiction, every struggle with sexuality certainly involves

desire, involves lust, but there are other issues, and you captured them so well, but I just

wanted you to give our audience another glance at that, and then begin to take us into the question of why why do we remain?

Yes. So what my research on nearly 4,000 men and women found was that our unwanted sexual

behavior, be that the use of pornography, an affair, buying sex, are actually not random at all. They were a direct

reflection of the parts of our story that remained unaddressed. And so the implication that we can

take from the research is that if you want to find freedom, that freedom begins by identifying

the unique stories and dynamics that bring you to it in the first place. So

just so many recovery ministries out there, be that around sex addiction, just trying to

curb lust or stop unwanted sexual behavior, almost always do it through the lens of

accountability or just kind of phoning a friend when you're

experiencing lust. But they fail at the critical task of inviting people to make meaning out of

their sexual choices. And so what the data showed was that there were things in our childhood,

the families that we grew up in, the experiences like sexual abuse that we went through,

that go on to shape the sexual choices that we make as an adult. And so one of my core

premises is that God is not ashamed of our unwanted sexual behavior, but understands it to be the

stage through which the work of redemption is going to play out in our lives.

And so so often that present sin is such a doorway into the wider work of the gospel to bring healing to the wounds and stories of our past.

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