Below is Blake Williams' (PLA Executive Director) talk from this year's benefit dinner.

Galatians 6, Paul talks about the need to carry one another's burdens. But in the same section he also says that each person has to carry their own load. People wrestling with the effects of sexual sin need to carry their own load – as individuals they have a personal responsibility to get help for themselves by seeking God and finding healthy community. But people wrestling with the effects of sexual brokenness have another need – they need me and they need you to help them carry the burdens that are too heavy for them to bear alone.

For the next 1/2 hour or so, I'd like you to keep this question on your mind, "Is God calling me to help people affected by sexual sin?" Is He calling me to come alongside people to help them with their heavy load…is He calling me to help people affected by sexual sin?

I want to introduce you to a family. A family that from the outside looking in appears normal, healthy, well adjusted...an every day kind of family. All through the room this evening, you've seen pictures of them. On the registration table, little wallet size pictures wrapped around your silverware. In fact if you look in your program, you'll see pictures of them scattered throughout.

I don't want to mislead you, they are not a real family, but tonight they will serve as an example of sexual brokenness as we examine what sexual sin does to the family. And more than that, tonight they serve as a living illustration of the people God has called Pure Life Alliance to impact for Him.

When I'm through we're going to play a music video for you. It's a video for the song "Slow Fade" by a group called Casting Crowns. It tells a story of relational destruction when sexual sin is put first in someone's life.

There are six characters I want to introduce to you before you see them in the video. I want you to be able to see the heartache and the woundedness, but more than that...I want you to feel a great sense of hope for people who are living this story. When you leave here tonight, I want your hearts to be encouraged. Yes we're dealing with a painful topic, but there are answers for hurting people and Pure Life Alliance offers solutions for families. And we long to do more and more for the family and their purity.

One of the great artistic elements of this music video is that it plays the story of the family in reverse. A shattered picture knocked to the floor reassembles and flies back up into its place on the fireplace mantle. The second hand on a clock ticks backward...slowly erasing or perhaps making right, destructive decisions to sin.

The Church
The first character I want to introduce is the Church. Throughout the video the band – Casting Crowns – is performing in a church. But it's a destroyed church. Stained glass windows have been shattered, the roof is partially torn away, lights and piano have broken apart on the floor – all of this symbolizes the deterioration of the Church because of sexual sin.

PLA is an intra-church ministry. This week I received an email from another local church. As a small church how do they address purity, but also offer the anonymity people need when getting help with this issue? As an intra-church ministry we have a great answer: any group in the PLA purity network is available for your people. Being a part of an intra-church purity ministry means your people don't have to attend a group that meets at your church. They don't have to be embarrassed to admit to their church friends that they're attending a sexual addiction group. One of the first difficulties in getting help is pushing past the shame and PLA's purity network offers a powerful solution.

Pure Life Alliance is made up of small group leaders leading groups every week in their own local church. These leaders are PLA, they are this intra-church network of purity. We currently have 19 partner churches on the Westside of Portland; with somewhere between 30 – 40 churches represented by our group members. Two hundred people attend PLA groups in the local church, on a weekly basis. If you were wondering why we call ourselves "Pure Life Alliance"...now you know. We believe there is greater effectiveness when churches work together for purity.

Here's a quote from one of our partner churches: "I've seen the effect sexual addiction can have not only on men but on their entire family. When men finally come to grips with the destruction that pornography is having in their lives it's important to have some knowledgeable and caring people come alongside to help guide them out of the chasm. I've found PLA to be a great resource for our church. ... Unless you are trained in how to combat this plague on the men of our country, I would strongly recommend partnering with PLA."

Sexual brokenness is rampant in our society. Statistically there is no difference between the church and culture. In this video tonight the church is symbolically being remade as time ticks backward...it's being restored. And in real life, God is using Pure Life Alliance to help remake a broken down church.

Son
Well the next character to introduce you to is the teenage son in this family. Our first view into his life shows him in a situation that is all too common for teenagers these days. While partying with friends he falls onto the ground – drunk. And the bottle in his hand shatters as glass and alcohol spread over the street. He's hooking up with a teenage girl and the look in his eye is already one of desire and given what we know of his father, that look is most likely sexual lust.

Of all the people in this story, he is the least relationally tied to his family. Instead connection with and value for his friends has resulted in the blind leading the blind. One of our partner ministries, AWARE, Inc., helps kids make healthy choices regarding sexual activity. Their website says, "Among many high school and middle school students, sex has become a game. We're not just talking sexual intercourse, here. Oral sex and anal sex are popular activities even amongst eighth graders."

I don't know about you...but I'm not OK with that! Has God called you to help people affected by sexual sin?

During this last year, we kicked off a new ministry called Parents 4 Purity or P4P (We always need an acronym...;^). For a number of reasons it's having a tough time getting off the ground. Our hope is to give parents and teens better ways of navigating through a culture that is hell-bent on destroying our kids sexually.

I want to read a quote by someone positively impacted by our Parents 4 Purity ministry. But I can't...because I don't have a quote yet. And our lack of financial resources is one of the key reasons why this is true. We can only do what we can afford to do.

Husband
One of the main characters in the video is the husband, the father, the adulterer. As I've said the title of the song is "Slow Fade". His worst behavior has come out of incremental choices toward this act of adultery.

He doesn't wake up one day and just decide to have an affair. No one does. Moving from behavior "A" to behavior "M" would be a shock to your conscience. But "A" to "B" doesn't seem so bad. "A" to "B" is a second glance at a low-cut blouse. For a man "B" to "C" is complementing a co-worker on her new haircut and getting that little adrenaline kick from her smile of thanks. Sooner than one can imagine a man is at "K" and "L"...having long emotionally connected conversations by phone and secluded luncheons in out of the way restaurants.

Extra-marital affairs are just one-way men use sex in destructive ways. There are many others...online pornography, strip clubs, prostitution, masturbation. All of these are very real elements of sexual addiction and sin.

I want you to listen for a very powerful line in this song. Part of the chorus regularly includes the line, "People never crumble in a day." They're saying it takes time to make a mess of your life. Here's the line to listen for, "Daddies never crumble in a day."

The men who attend FMO know what it means to crumble. They know what it means to crash and burn. And here's what's true about a man in FMO: he has come to a place where he admits he cannot solve this problem on his own. He needs help. And Pure Life Alliance's FMO groups offer help to men who have crumbled into sexual addiction.

Very conservative statistics say that 50% of men – Christian or not – are dealing with sexual addiction. In Washington County alone live 265,000 men. Let's exaggerate and say 2,000 men are getting help. That's still less than 1% of men and their families getting the help our church and our culture needs.

Can you see? Can you see...this is an everybody issue. Whether you're aware of it or not, everyone of you knows a family that is crumbling from the inside out because of sexual sin and addiction.

Her the words of a man strongly impacted by our For Men Only groups. "I knew I needed help long before I was ‘caught'. My acting out was putting my marriage, family and ministry at risk, but I was too scared and ashamed to let anyone know about the horrible choices I was making. The internal struggle between the person everyone saw and the ‘real' person inside added to my shame and self-hatred. PLA has given me a safe place to heal, recover, and talk openly with people who ‘get it'. Without PLA, I'm not sure I would still be married. We need the help and encouragement these ministries have given to my wife and me." There is much to be done, but there is much that has been done. By God's grace men are being set free in our FMO groups.

The Other Woman
My next introduction is to an individual who is not a member of this family. She is "the other women". While she isn't a member of this family, she is a much loved member of another family...her own. She's someone's sister or daughter, maybe even a wife or a mom. What's true of her is that she is a wounded woman. She is a woman who believes there are answers for her heart in illicit relationship.

When she talks with him, she feels special. She loves the smile he offers her. She finds both thrill and some type of security in his arms. While the sex may be good, for her it's far more about feeling loved and cared for and valued. She may even believe the lie that she has found her soul mate.

She and women like her need our help. They have listened to the lies of the world and the enemy for far too long and they need our help. As an organization, we've tried to start a program that would minister to women addicts. Twice we've sat down with potential leaders for this increasingly needed program. We've even crafted a name, a mission and a vision. Women Restored...or if you like the acronym "WR". But, twice now we've had to set it on the back burner.

In terms of how PLA impacts women's lives, this is an area I feel at odds with God on. If I can see the need...can't He? We are so behind in serving hurting women! Why hasn't more been able to be done?

The main reason we haven't been able to do more is our lack of financial resources. We cannot afford a director of women's ministry. And so the "other woman" goes it alone. For the record, I'm not OK with this either. I'd love to read a quote from a woman who has been changed by PLA's Women Restored program. But I can't, because we don't have the program yet, because we don't have a Women's Director, because we don't have the financial resources to hire more needed staff.

Wife
Our Hidden Hurt ministry touches the life of our next character. She is the wife of a man living a lie. She has had great hopes and dreams and joys for both the present and the future. And what you'll see in a few minutes is her personal experience of watching these slip through her fingers...out of her grasp or control.

She's discovered that her husband is having an affair. He's been with another women in a way that he vowed he would only be with her. She wonders where he's been with that other woman, what she looks like, where they've gone for dinner, what intimate things he's shared with her – both emotional and physical. Emotion and feeling threaten to undo her; she is caught in panic, rage, feelings of betrayal. Her world is instantly out of control.

She has done nothing to deserve this. But in order for her to grasp a greater grace and forgiveness, she must engage in the hurt, in her own personal journey and in a mutual healing process with him. Wives must know they are never responsible for their husband's sin. But they also must know, they cannot run from this tragedy and still benefit from what God wants to teach them through it.

The hurt a woman experiences is not substantially different between an affair and other sexual behaviors. Yes, there are greater consequences both in terms of boundaries and the results of being physically intimate with someone other than your spouse. But it's the betrayal and lies that tear at a women's ability to trust and they undermine her sense of safety and worth.

Listen to the words of a woman who knows this very personal journey. "Shocked, embarrassed, furious, sad, lied to, hopeless. These words describe how I felt as my husband revealed that he would likely lose his job because of behaviors he had hidden for years – a sexual addiction to pornography. My involvement in PLA has helped me validate, work through, and release these feelings. In my marriage I have learned to recognize codependent behaviors, rebuild trust, and better communicate about everything from the laundry to sexual intimacy. For me, PLA was a safe place to sit with other women feeling the same emotions, going through similar situations, sharing, learning together and knowing I was not alone."

More wives need to know the effectiveness of connecting with our Hidden Hurt groups. There is healing, there is hope and there is help available for them.

Daughter
"Be careful little feet where you go..." Casting Crowns uses this familiar nursery rhyme as a lyrical structure for their song Slow Fade. They follow that line with this one, "For the little feet behind you, are sure to follow."

The daughter in this family is a little girl. The video both starts and ends with her. She wakes up to her parent's loud argument, not knowing quite what to expect. She quietly treads down the stairs as the shouting continues and there she stands as her mommy and daddy scream at one another.

As a little girl, she too has done nothing to deserve this. So as she experiences what a little girl's heart is not equipped to bear, a certain panic and desperation set in. She is beginning to know the effects of a broken family because of sexual sin.

What are the answers for this little girl and her teenaged brother? We believe the best solution for children is that their parents deal well with issues of purity. It's not the government's responsibility; it's not the youth pastor's responsibility...it's parent's responsibility to train up their children in the way they should go. This is a family systems issue. If we invest in the parents, we're investing in their children: Pure Life Alliance's Parents 4 Purity ministry.

Closing
Remember the question we started with? "Is God calling me to help people affected by sexual sin?" I want you to hold that question in your mind as we watch the video.

I don't want you to miss the opening lines between husband and wife... wife: "I support you in everything you do!" husband: "It's not all about you!" wife: "You know what, it's not about you. This is...this is a need? A need? Another woman? You make me sick." husband: "Well, you make me sick too!"

...and the story begins from there.

View the Casting Crowns video: Slow Fade at: