Feature Writer: Anonymous

Feature Title: I have a problem with masturbation

Published: 21.02.2006

I have a problem with masturbation

For the last six years, I have sought to rid myself of this habit, but have been unable to do so. I wrote this article in an effort to describe, and find solutions to, a problem that has held me captive for so long.

I would like to tell you of the reality of Satan. Much to my dismay, I have come to see that I allowed myself to become his good friend. Satan has wanted my eternal destruction since before I was born. But it was I that allowed him to have such a stranglehold on my life. It is because of my apathy towards him that he has been able to blind me and keep me in this destructive cycle of sin.

A paradigm is the way you see something.

Imagine for a moment that I could make a pair of glasses that would make a stinking, festering swamp seem like a clean, cool, refreshing spring. I put these glasses on you without your knowledge. As you go about your day, you find yourself getting desperately thirsty, and you long for a quenching drink. You see the cool water of the spring. You run to it, bend down, and drink deeply from its banks.

It satisfies you and you go on your way. As you travel along you start to feel sink inside, but you ignore that. You become thirsty again. And so you make it back to the sparkling pool and drink from it again. It quenched your thirst once, why not again? As time passes you become increasingly sick until one day you die from the horrible illness contacted from the stagnant swamp–the water you thought was as clean and pure as crystal.
This simple analogy illustrates how Satan can blind us and bind us to our destruction by controlling how we see things.

“Satan…is the master of illusion. He creates illusions in an attempt to detour, dilute, and divert the power and the attention of the Latter-day Saints from the pure truth of God. He is particularly effective at creating spiritual illusions that cause a counterfeiting of spirituality … to lead them into sin and away from God.” (Gene R. Cook, Ensign, May 1982, p.25)

Satan’s mastery of illusion is not employed through magic glasses, but through his skillful whisperings to our minds. “And behold, others he flattereth away, and telleth them there is no hell; and he saith unto them: I am no devil, for there is none—and thus he wispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance.” (2 Ne. 28:2)

We should be on guard always to resist Satan’s advances. He has power to place thoughts in out minds and to whisper to us in unspoken impressions to entice us to satisfy our appetites or desires and in various other ways he plays upon our weaknesses and desires. (Answers to Gospel Questions, Joseph Fielding Smith, Jr., vol. 3:81)