~ The following is an excerpt from my most recent book (Harvest House) due out around the first of the year. It is a collection of essays written to my sons entitled, “What Every Man Wishes His Father Would Have Told Him.” ~
Innumerable theories exist as to where the struggle with pornography comes from. (Honest answer? Who really knows? Simple answer? We’re sinners.) Some well-respected preachers have suggested deep psychological reasons such as profound loneliness, or emptiness brought on by the idolatry of our culture. Others have pointed to low morals and insufficient levels of fear towards God and sin’s consequences. Some point to the curse and its gravity-like effects on the male libido. None of this, however, can supply an answer sufficient to account for the epidemic struggle with porn we’re facing.
Ultimately, the reason so many Christian men struggle with porn is due to a vacancy in their character. When it comes to their makeup in the particular area of sex they’re a shell. Their person cannot handle the weighty responsibility of sexuality because they’re completely unprepared for it. Due to the absence of any training in this area they react as if they are perpetually stuck in their childhood. Their unsupervised adolescence comes back to haunt them when they’re twenty-five. Inside they’re little boys. Basically, these men are stunted and immature. I wish it were more complex than this, but it’s not. Lust overwhelms them and they lack the self-control to push it back.
In Ephesians 4 Paul identifies it as a lust of “deceit.” This is the best description of it you’ll ever find. That’s because deceit is the prime source of lust’s power. By this Paul did not mean that we are lustful deceivers (although we are), but that lust is deceitful by nature. Or to put that in the vernacular, lust is a bald-faced lie. It guarantees us that unbridled hedonism is the ultimate aim of life. It creates and then feeds on the unmet desire of our flesh. This is why most everyone who struggles with porn also has a vein of discontent running through his life. (It’s the same reason why apparently happy husbands up and leave their wives when their wives’ physical appearance diminishes with age.)
Lust promises that physical pleasure can deliver a deep unequaled and sustainable satisfaction. But it always delivers something else – heart-wrenching dissatisfaction. That’s because it’s a liar. Never delivering what it promises. It results in the exact opposite.
Lust is a master deceiver and porn is its masterpiece. Porn is lust in its most tantalizing form. It leaves nothing to the imagination. As such, porn is the most blatant of all lust’s lies. It’s a hideous beast, which mercilessly pummels its victims. Like lambs to slaughter it turns otherwise strong, smart and successful men into idiots. Men who risk careers, reputation, incomes and family to sneak peeks on company computers that they know have filters and tracking software, or fall headlong into binges of visual excess while on a business trip charging porn to credit cards they know have records.
It’s all a lie. We know it’s not real. We know it will never deliver. We know too well how it destroys people and marriages. Yet we believe what it says. Every time we do it mocks us for our stupidity. No wonder the father in proverbs confronted his son with a similar warning, “For on account of a harlot one is reduced to a loaf of bread, and an adulteress hunts for the precious life.” Or, again in the vernacular, “Hey Moron! Don’t be stupid!”
None of it’s true. Just step back and look at the insanity for a moment. That ubiquitous billboard is not true. Those lyrics about the joy of a “no strings attached” sexual escapade are not true. Those women are not in ecstasy. They are in agony. They are the collateral damage of a negligent father. A daughter formerly in pig tails now being used in fiendish ways never having found male affection in any other context.
Those men are not the happiest people on earth. They’re morons to whom no real woman would actually give the time of day. They’re lonely shells.
Those people in gratuitous sex scenes in movies who collapse madly in love don’t exist. They’re actually self-absorbed actors whose own lives are disasters. Shallow narcissists on their fourth or fifth marriage.
Hugh Hefner is a perverted old man who used his position and power within the industry of pornography to secure sexual conquests. At present, he’s at the end of his life. Those people at his parties aren’t his friends. Those women around him keeping the king warm in the cold of his twilight could care less. They’re only there because of his money and power. The same reason any of them has ever been on his arm. He knows it. The charade is over. He’s going to die alone and lonely. And every time you ogle some other man’s wife with your eyes or gratify yourself with an image you’re just like him. Ridiculous.