The Game Plan: The Men’s 30-Day Strategy for Attaining Sexual Integrity is Joe Dallas’s thirty-day program for men trying to get free of pornography or other sexual sin. Thomas Nelson published it in 2005, and Dallas wrote it out of seventeen years of counseling practice.
Start with the date
2005. That is the single most important fact about this book and the old version of this review never mentioned it.
The iPhone did not exist yet. Streaming video barely did. A man’s exposure to pornography in 2005 usually meant a desktop computer in a room in his house, which meant location itself was part of the accountability. None of that is true now. The device is in his pocket, it is with him at 2am, and the filtering and accountability advice from that era is largely obsolete.
This does not make the book useless. It makes it a book about the interior work, read alongside something current for the practical side. Go in knowing that and it is still worth your time. Go in expecting up-to-date guidance on apps, filters, and accountability software and you will be misled.
What the thirty days actually cover
Dallas builds the program on the acronym ROUTE, and each letter gets a stage of the month:
- Repentance, meaning an actual break rather than an intention to do better
- Order, putting structure back into a life that lost it
- Understanding, working out what the behavior was doing for you
- Training, building the habits that hold when the feeling passes
- Endurance, staying free after the first month ends
The Understanding and Endurance sections are the strongest. Dallas has sat across from enough men to know that the crisis-driven cleanup lasts about six weeks, and he plans for the relapse instead of pretending it will not come. That is the mark of a counselor rather than a motivational writer, and it ages better than the technical advice does.
What we removed from this review
The previous version of this page carried a sentence in quotation marks attributed to Dallas, a testimonial from an unnamed reviewer, and a paragraph about what “men in our community” had experienced with the book. None of that could be verified and it has all been taken out. The ROUTE framework, the 2005 Thomas Nelson publication, and the seventeen years of counseling are confirmed and stay.
Who it fits
A man who has admitted he has a problem and wants a structured month rather than a book of principles. It is direct, it is written for someone who is already motivated, and it does not spend chapters convincing you that pornography is harmful. If you are still at the stage of arguing with yourself about whether this is a real issue, this is not the book that will settle it.
It also works better with another person than alone. Dallas assumes accountability throughout without building a formal group structure into the text, so a reader who wants a ready-made small-group curriculum will need to supply the discussion himself.
One pastoral note
Books in this category can leave a man feeling like the sin is the whole story about him. Read this one with the gospel firmly in view. The repentance Dallas calls for only holds up when it is grounded in what Christ has already done, not in a man’s success at a thirty-day plan. Any month that ends with you more confident in your own discipline than in grace has gone somewhere the book did not intend.
Freedom here is usually slower and less linear than a thirty-day frame suggests. If you finish the month and are not fixed, you are not a failure. You are normal, and the Endurance section exists precisely because Dallas knows it.