Porn Is a Trust Problem, Not a Lust Problem — What Sin Really Is (Part 1)

Most Christian men have been handed a definition of sin that sounds like this: sin is the bad things you do. A list. A rulebook. A scoreboard. 

So the whole Christian life becomes a losing game of whack-a-mole — swinging at the behavior that popped up this week while something deeper keeps generating the next one. 

In this episode, Michael and Nick unpack a definition of sin most men have never heard: sin is living in a state of reactive mistrust. Not a behavior problem. A trust problem. A soul quietly convinced that God isn't safe, isn't good, isn't enough. 

Porn isn't the sin under the sin. Mistrust is. Porn is the fruit, not the root. 

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Part 2 unpacks what it looks like to walk forward in trust.  

Take the free Pressure Assessor™ — rscky.com/pressure

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Hey, welcome to the Restoration Soul Care podcast, where we have honest conversations about faith, neuroscience, and hope. I'm Michael Camber, a relationship and recovery coach.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

And I'm Nick Buda, a mental health and relationship coach. If you feel stuck in shame, addiction, or pain, you don't have to face it alone. Join us for some real stories, real tools, and a real path forward. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Hey, welcome back to the Restoration Soul Care Podcast. My name is Michael Camber. As always, I'm joined by my best friend Nicholas Buda. Hi, Nick. How's it going, Michael? Great. We're back. We've had a couple uh weeks off. We had spring break. I had a couple uh friends on. We did uh a great episode with Jenny. Yes, a certified sexologist. Thanks for watching. Stuff that we're too afraid to Google. Listen, I don't know about you, but I've got a long list of things I'm too afraid to Google. So Jenny's gonna come back and we're gonna keep talking. We're gonna do it. We're gonna do it. Before we dive in today, um I built something. As you know, I am a tinkerer. Not in real life, like I tinker with like websites and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

You are Santa Claus of the soul care world. So I'm bringing gifts. To all the good children.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

One day a year, I bring you gifts. Uh I built listen, sometimes it's helpful to get your bearings straight and what what you're actually up against. And that's a lot of the work that we do in real time with people, is sort of helping figure out where you're actually at on the journey. Because like we've talked about, some people come to us and say, I have a porn addiction. We start talking, asking questions about frequency and behavior and ritual, and it became it can become apparent, like, okay, you don't actually have an addiction. Problematic behavior, yeah, let's work on that, but it's not an addiction. So there's also elements to this where we're like on the journey of recovery on the way out, what are the things we actually need to get specific and work on? So to that end, uh I have created what I call the pressure assessor. It's an online assessment. It is totally free because, again, we want to offer as many things as we can to help you. It is going to measure uh what we call your endurance. And this is all based out of James chapter one, starting in verse two. But uh the idea of endurance, I like to say it's made up of four skills resilience, tolerance, adaptability, and stability. And depending on where you're at in each of those categories, it can dramatically influence, either in a helpful way or an unhelpful way, of how your recovery journey is going to go, how difficult it will be for you specifically, or how I won't say easy, but like what tools you have in your toolbox to pull that and work on this thing as we're going along. So uh that's free. You can go take it online right now, rscy.com backslash pressure. It's uh it's very short. It'll probably take you less than five minutes. It's 16 questions, a four per each of those categories, answer those. It's not just gonna tell you what you scored in, it's gonna give you a full uh profile report that you can, I think you can print, you can print it out, or download it, whatever you want to do with it. It's gonna show you where your score, where your weakest part of that is, and then how to move forward. It's got some really helpful functional steps that you can take today, right now, to get some help. Um so if that's you and you want to know where you stand in those categories, go check that out. Again, rscky.com.com backslash pressure. Pressure.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Coming down on me. Yeah, we're excited about this, and I'm so proud of Michael for the ongoing work here. I know that one size does not fit all for even the specific struggle of pornography. So we are proud to offer something that helps customize and clarify what needs to be approached and what needs to be given attention to in the recovery journey. So goodness, and it's free. It's free. Free.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

I also want to call attention to this morning before we sat down to film. I hadn't seen Nick in probably a week or so. And the first thing that he did when he saw me was lift my pant leg up to do a sock check. And he caught me. I don't have uh turtle socks on today, but guess who does?

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Come on. Whoa, I almost threw coffee on you. I was faithful. You know, everybody makes mistakes, and that's why today we're gonna talk about what is sin. Specifically as it pertains to your sock game. Yes. Not wearing Ninja Turtle socks on your podcast recording day is probably the greatest picture of sin. Uh I'm kidding. Yeah, I was gonna let you see. I don't know what I'm saying. I don't know where I was gonna go with that. I could draw that out a little bit. It hurts other people, it's a violation of it's embarrassing. A lot of shame around it. Your kids are disappointed in you. In all seriousness, I think for those of us who have lived in the church and we hear the idea, the term sin and we feel this very heavy thing called shame, it's hard to live in the in-between. To say, okay, how do I actually download this thing that's important and real that scripture talks about called sin, but also not completely uh be just crushed to the point of hiding, to the point of almost depression. Yeah. Right. So how do how do I process what is sin biblically? And and then also why this conversation is important is by knowing what it is, it gives us actually encouragement, it gives us a drive and sometimes even a roadmap to break down sin in our life, which is what we call repentance.

SPEAKER_02 5:27

Yeah. And the underlying question I think we're getting at is why? Why does this matter? Because we talk a lot about neuroscience and a lot about how we um deal with addiction and recovery and address behavior because the behavior is problematic and how it affects your life. But there's an underlying why, because so what if you quit using porn? Yeah. So what if your life improves with it? Like what's the big picture point of all this? And uh, I think what we would say is that is your relationship with Christ, your participation in the life that God has for you, for his glory and what the Bible says for your joy. And so uh the reason that that's important is because when the Bible calls us to repentance, calls us to deal with um what we call sin, problematic behavior, things that dishonor ourselves, others, and especially God, um, the Bible tells us we we got to deal with that. But thankfully, it's not just on us to sort it out, right? That's why uh Christ came and died, uh, lived a perfect life and died for us. So, but big picture, the Bible gives us a framework that we hang this on, and that's repentance. And we're not going there this week, we'll talk about that later. We will. What we want to do today is really get in the weeds of what is sin, what do we do with it, why is it important to address it, and it might not be in a way that you have heard this, heard about it before or talked about sin before.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Yeah, and honestly, I'd love to speak to the listener who would say honestly, I don't really know where I am with faith. Uh I've experienced church, I spirit Christianity, and it's actually not been great. And so I want to speak to that person and just say, I I acknowledge, we acknowledge that the conversation of sin has sometimes come out in very harmful ways. Yep. Uh it's been a means to uh really denounce a person instead of um we'll get to this, a thing in the world, and also be a source of just absolute uh destructive condemnation. Yeah. And so what we're trying to say is hey, let's get a better view of what sin is, let's let God define it through scripture and then apply it towards this specific journey of recovery.

SPEAKER_02 7:26

Yeah. How uh how have you heard or experienced, I mean, even from your own story, Gus, because we've got we've got the baggage too. Uh how have you traditionally approached the idea or the category of sin as it pertains to pornography use? Like what has that looked like?

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah. So I was actually I was born and raised in church, and the the church I first grew up in, my experience of it, let me let me be careful, because uh I'm not saying this was necessarily intended, but my experience of it was I associated sin with this abstract list of standards of behaviors that if you're a good Christian, this is what you need to do. Okay. Uh and so for me, sin was this constant reminder of I'm never measuring up, I'm really messed up, and I I can never strive to hit all these behaviors, okay, or these standards. And so for me, sin was this very oppressive, um, discouraging reminder that I just don't measure up, that I'm not a good Christian.

SPEAKER_02 8:27

Yeah. Yeah, mine uh was similar. I grew up in a really small church, and what I what I picked up on early on, again, not an indictment toward any uh denomination or religious system or anything like that. It's more my experience. Like this is what I learned um with nobody necessarily setting me down to teach me, right? Which is important because we all have our own experiences of what that might be. But what I learned was that if there is something that is sin, uh it's bad. And if it's bad, we don't do it, and we don't that we don't just don't do it. We don't talk about it, we don't get into the specifics, we just label it sin, we shut it down, and we move away from it. Which is fine until it becomes a thing, uh the the phrase that was used uh with me when I was younger growing up was it's a besetting sin. AKA a sin that you struggle with ongoing for the rest of your life, probably. And it was tied to this verse in uh was it first Corinthians? Paul, where he says, uh I have a thorn a thorn in my flesh. Yeah, I think it's 2 Corinthians 10 or 12, one of those two. Somebody fact check it. Bonus points if Nick gets that right. Bonus points. Kit Katz for everybody. Kit Katz. Um But yeah, just the idea that there's this thing that you gotta deal with for the rest of your life, and that you settle into it, which means you probably stop trying, you probably stop caring to a certain extent, and you really just sort of make carve out space for this thing in your life and just sort of let it be. Uh, which can feel really hopeless. I mean, that's how it felt for me. There were multiple times over, you know, in my story, like we've talked about, where I wanted to get rid of this porn thing because I knew it was destroying me internally. I didn't know what to do with it, and I was terrified to bring it to somebody because of in my experience, uh, when people brought those things out either intentionally or unintentionally, there was a lot of shame and condemnation around it, and it wasn't like, oh, let's get you help. It was like, oh, you're a terrible person and you can't be at our church anymore, kind of thing. And so nobody wants to get cast out of their community or rejected. So what do you do with it? You hide it. Yeah. You push it down, you create this uh false version of yourself that you think people will love and accept, and you keep all the bad stuff sort of tucked away, and like, yeah, well, we'll deal with it.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

I I heard one person say, and I can identify with this even throughout my story too, that I downloaded the message that at my very core, my primary identity was I'm a sinner. There is some biblical um truth to that, but at the same time, what I took with that is at my core, I am a piece of crap. Uh I'm just this piece of trash that's uh, you know, there's even the hymn we sing such a worm as I, like that. You you you go down and you're just you're downloading this message when in reality um my primary identity, even though I am deeply infected with and and compromised by sin, is that I am created in the image of God and delighted in by him. Yeah. Um so it's like let's yeah, let's go to the let's jump into the application or not application, the the better definition of this.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

Yes. Here's uh my favorite definition of sin, and I didn't come up with this. This comes from CrossPoint, you've heard us talk about them for Crosspoint Ministries.com. Crosspoint ministry.com. Singular. Singular. Okay. Yeah. Uh the definition is of sin is this it's living in a state of reactive mistrust. Living in a state of reactive mistrust.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

What comes to mind when you hear that? I quickly go to this thing of like when I think of trust, I think relationship. So what I'm downloading, even when I first heard that, and you and I have learned from similar mentors and and CrossPoint has been a huge blessing to us, is that at its core, sin is inherently relational, whether we see that or not. And not only is it relational, but it's destructive relationally. Yeah. So we've talked about this before. Like, you know, one of the greatest measures of or the currency of relationship is trust. If you don't have trust, you don't really have a really deep relationship. That's right. And and the opposite's true too. Deep deep, thorough trust is signifying deep relationship. So if sin is reactive wait, say it again, the phrase. Living in a state of reactive mistrust. Reactive mistrust. Then what I'm the picture I get of sin is it's not so much the list of rules and standards, it is a way of operating that of a relational breakdown. Yep. Which really grieves God's heart.

SPEAKER_02 13:11

Yeah. And the the idea of this is all over Genesis chapter three. If you sort of slow down and you spend some time with there looking at what takes place when the serpent comes to deceive Eve, what he like in the question is like, did God really say? Yeah. What he's attacking there is God's trustworthiness. Can God really be trusted? Is what he said true? Or did he lie to you and tell you that you couldn't have this thing that's actually really good for you?

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Yeah, and I love that picture because it wasn't so much about the fruit thing and God said not to eat the fruit. I mean, that's that's played in those dynamics, but Satan's tactic is big picture. How do I undermine the relationship you have with your creator? And and specifically, how do I undermine this intimacy of warmth, of care and dependence that you have with your Heavenly Father? And start to like just question it, right? Twist it. And so that is a good picture of sin. Yeah. It wasn't so much when the when the bite happened and it's like, oh, I broke the thing that you said not to do. It was like, oh goodness, my relationship has been compromised.

SPEAKER_02 14:17

The eating of the fruit is the outworking of the symptom of the damage that had already been done. Right? It's the evidence. That's a tweet. If there was tweet anymore, nobody tweets it. Xing. But I mean that like that's today, like that's porn. Yes. Porn is the eating of the fruit. It's not the thing that's killing us, it's the symptom of the thing of the damage that's already been done.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

That's right. What was the result of sin? Right. So there's that hiding. It says when Adam and Eve were heard God walking in the garden, what was once a source of intimacy and warmth and I'm treasure being together, suddenly there's this instinct saying, I I don't want to do that. I don't want to be in that space. Yeah. Which man, that's that's sad. Like that's uh I I think if my my girls, my wife ever felt that they were trying to avoid my presence, uh of course I'd say that's not good, that's bad, but I would just feel like that heaviness, right? Of like, oh yeah, but then it wasn't just hiding. Right. Right. So then it goes on to uh there was this blaming game, right? Going on of like, well, it's not me, it's it's them. So then the relationship's breaking down horizontally. Yeah. Uh and then you go on too with um the effects from there and how it impacted just relational patterns.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

The real the relational the the relational damage is is the big thing that that's playing out. Even thinking about the idea of having to clothe yourself. Now it's not like I'm naked and unashamed, it's like I'm naked and I'm a problem. Yes. I'm bad. Yeah. I gotta fix myself. So problem one, the the the uh internal disruption of the relationship with your with yourself, with your own body. Two is the disruption, like you said, with Eve, relationships with other humans. Yes. You're the problem. If I take the focus off me and I make you the problem, then I don't have to deal with my own sin, consequences, actions, behaviors. And then ultimately, right, disrupts our relationship with God because we say, well, he actually hates me and he's he's not for me, and so I have to hide myself from him because if he sees me and knows what I did, he's gonna see me like I see myself, and he's gonna think of me like I think of myself, rather than what I'm getting ahead of myself. What the gospel inverts that, which is invites us to see God how he sees us, yeah, which is good.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

And I it's taking a step to pause and then take a step backwards. This is why I'm saying, okay, this makes more sense why God has a hatred of sin. Yeah. Right? Uh, it's not because he's so self-centered and that he just said, This is the way I designed it, and if you don't abide by that, then yeah. It's this, do we see now what sin is? It's this ugly, destructive corruption of something absolutely beautiful that I think, regardless of your worldview, you can agree. When relationally people are connecting and edifying each other, when there's trust, when there's mutual uh dependence, there's beauty in that. I think anybody in the world can recognize that. And so sin at its very core is the inverse, the breakdown of that. And that's why God's hates it. And also why he's so passionate about uh ridding it from our lives, and also why he's perfect in justice is because just like us, when we feel a relational breakdown, goodness, you don't have to teach even a two-year-old to say that's not fair, right? Right, that like and them get angry. There's something hardwired into our humanity that also is angered by sin and and the relational breakdown, whether it be our relationship with ourself or with somebody else and with God. And so for me, this just reinforces this reminder. All of us when we understand sin this way for what it really is, this breakdown of relationship and of God's design, it's like all of us have energy to hate it. Uh, but I guess then too, it it goes back to the conversation of we are constantly led into the world we live in to rationalize it or to just say, like, well, that's not really a breakdown relationship. It's it's furthering my idea of how relationships should go. Right. Um, which is another conversation. But man, that's good.

SPEAKER_02 18:20

That's really good. Yeah. There's two two things, two ways that I think that's helpful to break down like the idea or categories of sin in ways that we react to with mistrust. So there's what we might call uh lowercase sins. Those are the day in, day out behaviors, the lying, the cheating, uh, the rage, the pornography use, the s the symptoms, if you will, the fruits. And then there's the capital S sins, the big picture, those are the ways that we mistrust uh like under the surface. And uh here's a question that I think I I really want to tie to this, and maybe you can help me out with this. Where does our capacity for mistrust come from? Where does that originate in our in our own stories?

SPEAKER_00 19:09

I don't know if I'm gonna go in the direction that you're thinking. Well, so you you volley back. When I think about that, I think of what's uh I'm just kidding. Strike. No, spike. I'm gonna spike it. Uh what I think of is the truth that sin is not just a decision, like we said, it it's uh an outworking of how we live in that mistrust, but it's actually a force, a a presence that is actively on the move and and working in our lives. So where that force began, where it where we were originally infiltrated and compromised by this force was Genesis 3. So uh as all humanity has, we believe, been born from this single pair, um all of us have been infiltrated, have been infected by this disposition towards mistrust. So I don't know if that's too huge of what you were thinking. I think that's fine, but now yeah, keep it. To simplify it, instead of my heart being born where I am inclined to trust God and inclined to be trustworthy with others, it's actually the opposite. From birth, David says Psalm 51. And in sin I I then lived. So like uh I am bent towards, I have a uh inclination towards mistrust. Yeah, that's what came to mind. But what were you gonna go with that?

SPEAKER_02 20:41

Uh I was just gonna take that to uh every everybody's story is unique and different. So when we talk about different categories of mistrust, yours might be different based on your foo. Family of origin.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Oh not to be confused with the foo fighters.

SPEAKER_02 21:02

Correct. Okay. Which is a British slang term for UFOs. Are you sure? Well, not anymore, it's UAP, but I'm gonna Google this later. That's fine.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Tell me more about that. So you're saying our specific inclin uh are the specific ways we will act in mistrust. Yeah. Is guided by our story. That's correct. And our family of origin.

SPEAKER_02 21:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like we talk about all the time, all of life is relational. Yeah. God's a relational being or created in his image, into, for, by relationships. So when you're born into the world, you're born into a family. You're born into maybe it's not your biological family, but you are um raised in a set of relationships. And depending on your and we usually Attachment to your primary caregiver, again, whether that's your biological parent or biological family member, I don't know. But you you are learning ways of operating in relationship from a very, very young age, even before your your uh you know your prefrontal cortex is fully online to where you can think critically about what's what you're experiencing. So before you can walk, before you can talk, before you can think, before you can say, Hey mom, don't yell at me. Yeah, you're learning how to operate and be present in relationships. And you know, uh I love one of the things that Thomas Merton says is no man is an island, and so no person is an island raised or created in isolation independent of any other relationships. So the primary caregivers that exist in your life from an early age are having a dramatic influence on who you are and who you are becoming. Yeah. Um another thing that I got from Cross Point is they say our uh Rich says, our souls are permeable. Who I'm with, who I'm around, I will take on some of the elements of these people, which is why choosing your friends, choosing your community is incredibly important. It doesn't mean you're stuck or that you can't change, but it does mean on some level, a level that you're probably not presently aware of, you are being influenced by those people. So um think even if you know if I'm encouraging you to think uh you know for a minute about your own story, what were the circumstances like in your family when you were growing up from a young age? What was the um I'm trying to think of how uh Rich put Rich puts this your the temperature in your home, the relational thermometer? Was it running hot? Was everybody sort of amped up, anxious, high energy, a lot of yelling, or was it like really cool, everybody was pretty lethargic and indifferent and nothing mattered? Or was it sort of, you know, just in the middle and everything was just kind of kosher or not? I don't know. But like even taking a moment, just recognizing what did I get from that, and how is that still playing out in some way in my current relationships and how I relate to myself, how I relate to other people, and ultimately maybe how I perceive that I relate to God, or maybe even how I think about how God relates to me, all of those things are really helpful digging into figuring out or answering the question, how do I mistrust?

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's important to say that when we consider those things, the way that our mistrust was guided and formed, what we're saying, what we're not saying is, well, you didn't really have a lot of control over your family of origin, so it's your parents' fault. Right. Or you know, your porn struggle or the way that you hurt other people through your actions, it's not it it's these things. Uh it's it's because of that. We're not saying that. Just because you didn't have uh sometimes a choice um doesn't erase the fact that sin was already in you. Uh you're still culpable. Yeah, it it just gave a scaffolding to how it would eventually come out. That's right. I think of like this image of a play-doh mold where it's like the the sin, the play-doh is in you, and then you just pushed it through that little lever and it came out like a star shape, or it came out in the shape of pornography, or it came out in the shape of manipulation or lying or self-centeredness. You know, you you fill in the blank. Um I think it's helpful to say that, okay, still my responsibility, still my story, my sin. Yeah. Uh, but when I think about the factors that put it in place, that helps me identify then the areas of my heart that I need to bring uh to relationship, like to the Lord to receive his grace and to others. Because just like we say over and over, yes, we are wounded in relationship, our sin is molded in relationship, but it's also healed in relationship too. We're not stuck in that scaffolding or that mold. Right. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Which is great news.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Uh yeah, it's uh it's the best news. Um, okay. So if sin is living in a state of reactive mistrust, it sounds like if we just reverse engineer that statement, we could get to what sin is not.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Yes, and that's why we're gonna tee it up for part two next time. So we're gonna unpack uh what is the opposite. So, and then we're gonna talk a little bit about not necessarily give me the five steps of repentance. We're gonna talk about what does it look like to uh fight against sin, to break down sin by walking forward in trust. And big uh spoiler too, uh the great commandment, right, is the opposite of react to mistrust. It's loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and growing in love to love your neighbor as yourself, loving others as yourself. But that still doesn't say, okay, well, give me more I can grab on to. Help me unpack that. So we're gonna do that. We're gonna do that. Part two. Part two. Please stay tuned.

SPEAKER_02 27:02

Stay tuned. Thanks for joining us today. I hope this was helpful. Uh, the best thing you can do is share this with somebody who needs it, because our again, our goal is to help as many people as possible. And I again I'm learning this as I go because I'm not a marketing expert whatsoever. So it helps us, people find us when you like and subscribe to the YouTube channel. It does. Or if you're on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, wherever you're listening to this, if you like the show, follow the show, and even leave a review, which feels strange to ask for. But let us know what you think about the show. I read every one of those, and then I send screenshots to Nick to either share some excitement that somebody said some nice stuff, or like, oh gosh, we should work on this thing. Yeah. Um, but all that to say, we want to hear from you if you need our if you need if you want our help or you want to talk more, go a little deeper, you can find us at rscky.com.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

Rsc Y dot com.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

Don't sue us. All right. Uh we should you know what? We should just work at a sponsorship deal.

SPEAKER_00 28:00

We're gonna do insurance and soul care.

unknown 28:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Isn't soul care a form of insurance?

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Check out our website. Go reach out to us, let us know if uh coaching or a discovery call is something that would be helpful for you. Again, our all our discovery calls are no charge. We just want to help you find the next best steps. Um, find us on socials and we will look forward to seeing you next time. Deuce us.

SPEAKER_02 28:29

Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you found this helpful, do us a huge favor and subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast app. Or better yet, send this to someone who needs encouragement.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

For more tools, resources, and information about our coaching, check out rsdky.com. Keep showing up. Yeah, we'll catch you next time.