I Hate Porn

Pornography is a problem.

Porn is like a narcotic, it hijacks the brain, it redefines human sexuality, and in the meantime ruins lives, destroys families, and destabilizes ministries. 

And honestly it’s a problem that makes me tired — tired of the devastation Satan is causing to children, women, families, pastors, churches, and the world with this tragic evil.

Porn became a problem for me when I was only six, and by the grace of God that problem ended when Jesus saved me at age seventeen. 

But I know it rarely happens so cleanly. It is still a temptation, yes; temptation abounds living in the city I do, and with the heart I have, but grace abounds all the more in Jesus Christ.

Friends, I hate porn. And here’s why.

I hate porn because it is a perversion of what God created in man and woman.

I hate porn because it exploits women made in the image of God into an image made for a man’s lust.

I hate porn because it objectifies women into a consumable product instead of a glorious image-bearing creature of God.

I hate porn because I love women — in particular my wife and three daughters.

I hate porn because it takes the soul satisfying experience of sex with a covenantally-committed spouse and turns it into a twisted soul shrinking experience of self-sex.

I hate porn because it turns sons and daughters of God into slaves of sex.

I hate porn because it turns potential missionaries into impotent Christians.

I hate porn because it destroys marriage, many before they even begin.

I hate porn because it extends adolescence and keeps men boys.

I hate porn because it lies to men about beauty and leads men to look for a porn star instead of a woman who fears the Lord.

I hate porn because it robs men and women of the full joy of obedience.

I hate porn because it fractures trust between a husband and wife.

I hate porn because it is a diabolical, satanic activity that is subtly leading thousands upon thousands to hell.

I hate porn because it leads to disqualified pastors and impotent churches. (Pastors, if you are addicted to porn, you are disqualified, and you are killing your church!)

I hate porn because I suspect it’s the most significant reason we are not planting more churches and sending more missionaries.

I hate porn because it disqualifies gospel preachers who could fill the empty church buildings in my city and so many others.

I hate porn because of the disappointment children have to go through when their dad tells them why they lost their job or opportunity to lead in the church.

I hate porn because it teaches a distorted view of sex to children before it can be explained by loving parents.

I hate porn because I am tired of sitting in my living room with sobbing, confused, devastated wives and broken, embarrassed, condemned men who got caught.

I hate porn because it leads to rape, molestation, and perversion that can devastate people for the rest of their lives.

I hate porn because it turns men inward and suffocates a man’s ambition to make God’s name hallowed.

I hate porn because it says sin, Satan, and the world are more satisfying than our Triune God and his grace.

I hate porn because I hate ungodly guilt and condemnation.

I hate porn for the fear it induces in the hearts of parents everywhere that their child could stumble upon a sight and get addicted.

But I love Jesus.

I love Jesus because he loves people with porn problems.

I love Jesus because he is powerful to free porn-enslaved hearts.

He who knew no porn addiction became porn addiction so the porn addict might become the righteousness of God in him.

He who had no sin became sin for you so that you may become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).

In that one brilliant sentence, Paul puts an end to the porn problem.

Friend, you are no longer in Adam but in Jesus. 

Jesus became a substitute. 

It was as if he became the porn addict, by receiving the just penalty due for our perversion, and you became the righteous son or daughter of God with all its benefits.

Friend, in one act of Love and Justice, in the cross-work of Jesus, through faith in him, you are now clean, holy, accepted, forgiven and free. 

Let me say it again . . . free!

I love Jesus.

by Eric Simmons 

A Reason to Be Really Offended

by David Mathis

Our message is not you can do it.

 

It’s not you’re good enough, smart enough, and people like you.

What we preach is that you are a glorious creature gone tragically bad, that you have rebelled against the God who made you, but that he did the most difficult thing imaginable to win you back and lavish you with his eternal goodness.

It is wondrously good news. 

But unavoidable is the offense, that insulting supposition, that bad news that sets up the good. 

Did you catch it? 

You’ve gone tragically bad. 

You’re a foolhardy rebel against the most powerful person in the universe. 

There’s nothing you can do to save yourself, earn God’s favor, or get yourself out of the cosmic pit you’re in — the pit you dug and can’t climb out of.

The offense is that the magnitude of God’s solution — the slaughter of his own Son — shows the magnitude of our wickedness and frailty and utter inability. 

Yes, the gospel says you’re more loved than you ever could have dreamed, but as Jack Miller and Tim Keller have noted, at the same time it says you’re more sinful than you ever imagined. 

And that’s repugnant to the natural palate.

If you’ve never tasted the cross as offensive, you’ve missed something essential.

Why the Cross Offends

Talking about the cross as an “offense” comes from Galatians 5:11: “If I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed.” 

Why it is that the cross would be seen as an offense? What’s offensive about the crucifixion?

The cross declares how dire is our condition apart from Jesus. 

It announces how deep the sin goes, how profound the rebellion is, how impossible is our plight apart from Help from the outside. 

There’s nothing we can do, no effort we can exert, no law we can follow.

The message of Christ crucified says you’re an absolute failure in relation to what’s most important. 

The horror of killing the Son of God points to the horror of our condition. 

The badness of Good Friday is a tribute to the badness in us.

The cross embodies some of the most offensive things possible you could say about someone in relation to God and eternity. 

This gruesome death Jesus died, you earned it. 

The hell Jesus endured, you deserved it, forever. 

The shame he underwent, the scorn, the disrespect, the hurt — all these are as suitable to us sinners as they’re unsuitable to the sinless one.

God’s Offensive Plan

And it’s not that it just turned out this way, but God planned it. 

He designed the offense. 

Seven hundred years before Jesus, the prophet Isaiah called it — he will be “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense” (Isaiah 8:14). 

And such he was, and continues to be. 

Both Peter and Paul pick up on the theme (Romans 9:32–33; 1 Peter 2:7–8).

Jesus himself, in John 6, challenges his disciples with the offense. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). 

You can’t do it. 

You’re not good enough or smart enough. 

And perhaps most offensive of all: You are lifeless. 

“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).

The offense is not mainly his mention of eating flesh and drinking blood, but the accusation of deep depravity and spiritual inability. 

As the crowds retreat at his forthrightness, Jesus asks his disciples, “Do you take offense at this?” (John 6:61). 

More unnerving than taking his plainly figurative language in a literal sense is hearing that you are powerless and lifeless where it matters most. 

This is as offensive as it gets.

Remember the Right Offense

Typically we get antsy about speaking the gospel to someone who doesn’t already believe. 

Some of our fear, of course, is unwarranted. 

But some of it is for good reason. 

In communicating the gospel, one of the essential things we must at least imply, if not make explicit, is the most offensive truth possible: you are powerless precisely where it matters most. 

You are dead to what truly is life.

Don’t take it too far. 

We don’t gloat in giving offense. 

We labor to remove every possible barrier. 

May the offense not be our personality or carelessness or quirkiness or arrogance. 

Like Paul, let’s “endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:12). 

Let’s strain to “become all things to all people, that by all means [we] might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). 

Let’s do everything in our power to “give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10:32).

But this one offense — the offense of the cross — we cannot remove. We dare not.

Fake Love, Fake War: Why So Many Men Are Addicted to Internet Porn and Video Games

by Russell Moore 

You know the guy I'm talking about. 

He spends hours into the night playing video games and surfing for pornography. 

He fears he's a loser. 

And he has no idea just how much of a loser he is. 

For some time now, studies have shown us that porn and gaming can become compulsive and addicting. 

What we too often don't recognize, though, is why.

In a new book, The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, psychologists Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan say we may lose an entire generation of men to pornography and video gaming addictions. 

Their concern isn't about morality, but instead about the nature of these addictions in reshaping the pattern of desires necessary for community.

If you're addicted to sugar or tequila or heroin you want more and more of that substance. 

But porn and video games both are built on novelty, on the quest for newer and different experiences. 

That's why you rarely find a man addicted to a single pornographic image. 

He's entrapped in an ever-expanding kaleidoscope.

There's a key difference between porn and gaming. 

Pornography can't be consumed in moderation because it is, by definition, immoral. 

A video game can be a harmless diversion along the lines of a low-stakes athletic competition. 

But the compulsive form of gaming shares a key element with porn: both are meant to simulate something, something for which men long.

Pornography promises orgasm without intimacy. 

Video warfare promises adrenaline without danger. 

The arousal that makes these so attractive is ultimately spiritual to the core.

Satan isn't a creator but a plagiarist. 

His power is parasitic, latching on to good impulses and directing them toward his own purpose. 

God intends a man to feel the wildness of sexuality in the self-giving union with his wife. 

And a man is meant to, when necessary, fight for his family, his people, for the weak and vulnerable who are being oppressed.

The drive to the ecstasy of just love and to the valor of just war are gospel matters. 

The sexual union pictures the cosmic mystery of the union of Christ and his church. 

The call to fight is grounded in a God who protects his people, a Shepherd Christ who grabs his sheep from the jaws of the wolves.

When these drives are directed toward the illusion of ever-expanding novelty, they kill joy. 

The search for a mate is good, but blessedness isn't in the parade of novelty before Adam. 

It is in finding the one who is fitted for him, and living with her in the mission of cultivating the next generation. 

When necessary, it is right to fight. But God's warfare isn't forever novel. 

It ends in a supper, and in a perpetual peace.

Moreover, these addictions foster the seemingly opposite vices of passivity and hyper-aggression. 

The porn addict becomes a lecherous loser, with one-flesh union supplanted by masturbatory isolation. 

The video game addict becomes a pugilistic coward, with other-protecting courage supplanted by aggression with no chance of losing one's life. 

In both cases, one seeks the sensation of being a real lover or a real fighter, but venting one's reproductive or adrenal glands over pixilated images, not flesh and blood for which one is responsible.

Zimbardo and Duncan are right, this is a generation mired in fake love and fake war, and that is dangerous. 

A man who learns to be a lover through porn will simultaneously love everyone and no one. 

A man obsessed with violent gaming can learn to fight everyone and no one.

The answer to both addictions is to fight arousal with arousal. 

Set forth the gospel vision of a Christ who loves his bride and who fights to save her. 

And then let's train our young men to follow Christ by learning to love a real woman, sometimes by fighting his own desires and the spirit beings who would eat him up. 

Let's teach our men to make love, and to make war . . . for real.

Pornography: The New Narcotic

by John Piper

The new narcotic. 

Morgan Bennett just published an article by this title. 

The thesis:

Neurological research has revealed that the effect of internet pornography on the human brain is just as potent — if not more so — than addictive chemical substances such as cocaine or heroin.

To make matters worse, there are 1.9 million cocaine users, and 2 million heroin users, in the United States compared to 40 million regular users of online pornography.

Here’s why the addictive power of pornography can be worse:

Cocaine is considered a stimulant that increases dopamine levels in the brain. 

Dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter that most addictive substances release, as it causes a “high” and a subsequent craving for a repetition of the high, rather than a subsequent feeling of satisfaction by way of endorphins.

Heroin, on the other hand, is an opiate, which has a relaxing effect. 

Both drugs trigger chemical tolerance, which requires higher quantities of the drug to be used each time to achieve the same intensity of effect.

Pornography, by both arousing (the “high” effect via dopamine) and causing an orgasm (the “release” effect via opiates), is a type of polydrug that triggers both types of addictive brain chemicals in one punch, enhancing its addictive propensity.

But, Bennett says, “internet pornography does more than just spike the level of dopamine in the brain for a pleasure sensation. 

It literally changes the physical matter within the brain so that new neurological pathways require pornographic material in order to trigger the desired reward sensation.”

Think of the brain as a forest where trails are worn down by hikers who walk along the same path over and over again, day after day. 

The exposure to pornographic images creates similar neural pathways that, over time, become more and more “well-paved” as they are repeatedly traveled with each exposure to pornography. 

Those neurological pathways eventually become the trail in the brain’s forest by which sexual interactions are routed. 

Thus, a pornography user has “unknowingly created a neurological circuit” that makes his or her default perspective toward sexual matters ruled by the norms and expectations of pornography.

Not only do these addictive pathways cause us to filter all sexual stimulation through the pornographic filter; they awaken craving for “more novel pornographic content like more taboo sexual acts, child pornography, or sadomasochistic pornography.”

And it gets worse:

Another aspect of pornography addiction that surpasses the addictive and harmful characteristics of chemical substance abuse is its permanence. 

While substances can be metabolized out of the body, pornographic images cannot be metabolized out of the brain because pornographic images are stored in the brain’s memory.

“In sum,” Bennett writes, “brain research confirms the critical fact that pornography is a drug delivery system that has a distinct and powerful effect upon the human brain and nervous system.”

None of this takes God by surprise. 

He designed the interplay between the brain and the soul. 

Discoveries of physical dimensions to spiritual reality do not nullify spiritual reality.

When Jesus said, “I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28), he saw with crystal clarity — the way a designer sees his invention — that the physical eye had profound effects on the spiritual “heart.”

And when the Old Testament wise man said in Proverbs 23:7, literally, “As he thinks in his soul, so is he,” he saw with similar clarity that soul acts create being. 

Thinking in the soul corresponds to “is.” And this “is” includes the body.

In other words, it goes both ways. 

Physical reality affects the heart. 

And the heart affects physical reality (the brain). 

Therefore, this horrific news from brain research about the enslaving power of pornography is not the last word. 

God has the last word. 

The Holy Spirit has the greatest power. 

We are not mere victims of our eyes and our brains. 

I know this both from Scripture and from experience. 

Does Success Start on Sunday?

by Jonathan Parnell 

October 6, 2013

In the outskirts of the city, on a road that’s walked as much as driven, a typical car brakes at a red light.

It is the kind of car so typical that the actual model stays blurry in memory. 

It is the kind of braking so natural that the driver must know this block. 

Everything in the scene fits: the worn road, the red light, the common car, but not the bumper sticker. 

That is a different story, with its weathered corners and sunbaked background accenting a phrase in all-caps Comic Sans: “Success Starts on Sunday.”

There is also a church name, one as typical as the car, listed below the slogan in smaller letters. And now we get it. Said straight, the shiny message on this tattered sticker goes:

If you want success then go to church.

We’ve seen this before. Whether the devil’s out to get us or that big promotion needs reeling in, the most necessary thing for us to do, as this initiative would say, is to be at church today. 

Prophesying peril is one way; promising prosperity is another — and it’s actually more insidious.

A lot more folks like the sound of success over the sensationalism of Satan-talk. 

Whole movements are built on that, in fact. 

And even if we’re not driving to a basketball arena this morning, there’s still a chance we’ll be gigged by that gimmick. 

Does success really start on Sunday? Does it?

The real question is, “What do we want?”

If what we’re really after is to drive a nice vehicle or wear tailored suits or pad the 401k or grow business clientele or raise healthy kids or feel good about ourselves, then church attendance is not our problem. 

Idolatry is.

And if idolatry is our problem, we don’t need success, we need dust and ashes. 

We need to be made alive. 

Sunday, indeed, brings us hope for that, but it’s not this Sunday. 

It was a Sunday two thousand years ago when the earth shook and a large stone was rolled away. 

Jesus Christ, our Savior, crucified for our sins, dead in our place, was raised in power to overcome every obstacle to our everlasting joy in God.

Truth is, success doesn’t start on Sunday. 

Victory was accomplished on Sunday, and therefore we worship God alone, today and every other day of the week.

She Yelled and Called Me Names

by susanmcneil

by susanmcneil

Pulling my car into the drive-thru line at Starbucks, I wondered why it was a dozen people deep. It wasn’t raining, yet it seemed everyone was driving through today. I was transporting three dogs to the groomer, and there was no way I could leave two wild Shih-tzus and one crazy Bichon alone while I went inside for my daily dose.

Millie, the Bichon, sat on my lap licking the window.

As I peeled her away from the glass, I saw the woman.

She sat across the parking lot, leaving just enough room for a thoroughfare, as she too was waiting in the Starbucks line. I smiled, and gestured to her. It went something like this: “Are you next, or am I?” Really, I was fine either way.

She was not.

Thinking I was trying to snag her spot of next up, she gunned her Suburban, rolled down the window, and let out a string of expletives that made me blush. Millie barked back a retort.

“Go ahead, please,” I said. “I wasn’t sure who was first.” I pulled Millie back onto my lap, so she could see I had been dog-distracted and truly didn’t know who was next.

She didn’t buy it. She continued with the name calling without taking a breath. I won’t write them down here, but the main mantra shared initials with the number one social networking site.

Then something really strange happened.

Instead of getting mad or yelling back at her, a sense of empathy invaded me. I looked at her again, and this time I saw someone different, someone who wrenched my heart. Her eyes were red and puffy. Her hair was pulled back in a natty ponytail. She held her phone in her palm, glancing down at it every few seconds. And she was driving that big ole’ gas hog of a Suburban, my own car of choice when I had three kids at home and a carpool.

Dear God. I was looking at myself ten years ago. Same car, same ponytail. Same frustration.

We’ve all been there. Dog vomits on the sofa. Both kids have strep throat. The garbage disposal chooses today to break, when you are trying to disintegrate moldy fridge leftovers.  Husband is mad because you forgot to pick up the dry cleaning and he’s going on a business trip. Sound familiar?

And by the way, was that him she had been talking to or texting?

She gunned forward, just to show me that she could.

I left her a wide berth, smiled at her splotchy face. She shot me a sideways scowl, mouthed the mantra again.

Pulling up to the loudspeaker behind her, I said “I want to pay for whatever the woman in front of me has ordered. And please tell her I hope she has a better day.” I meant every word.

The woman idled in front of me for a good four minutes, talking to the barista who had leaned out the window. She shook her head and handed over a bill. She drove around the side of the building slowly, this time no gunning. Hmmm.

“No takers, huh?” I said to the barista as I pulled forward.

“Nope. She said she couldn’t believe you wanted to pay for her drink after all the names she called you. She said she couldn’t allow it, and said to tell you she was sorry. She felt really bad.”

“Did you tell her I hoped she had a better day?”

“Yep. She said thanks— that she already was.”

“Good to hear.” I smiled and handed her a dollar to put in the tip jar.

As I drove away, I began to cry. Not because I had been called so many terrible names, but because God had answered my very recent prayer—which was that He would allow me to see people as He sees them, not as I see them.

That I might be able to see the hurting inside, instead of just the hurtful outside. And maybe a few tears were of gratitude and amazement that He always shows up with an answer when I sincerely ask.

Found on  http://stdominicgrace.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/she-yelled-and-called-me-names/

Fed Up with Life and Ready to Write

by David Mathis

Ink is the great cure for all human ills.

So wrote a young C.S. Lewis to a childhood friend. 

Lewis was only seventeen years old when he penned such a claim, but he has proved wise beyond his years. 

Here’s the full statement from his letter of May 30, 1916:

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.

Whether we think of ourselves as writers or not — and we are all writers to some extent, even if it’s just email and social media — we should be willing to admit that “all human ills” may be an overstatement. 

But the adolescent Lewis is onto something profound here about the discipline of writing.

Writing is a help for a great many ailments, both in ourselves and in others. 

It is, perhaps, one of the quintessential ways of making sweet drinks from life’s sour fruit.

Writing is readymade for those with some great angst. 

It’s appropriate for the anxious and the angry. 

Writing is for the lonely and the depressed and the misunderstood. For the frustrated and the fearful. 

For the poor in spirit and those who mourn.

For Private and for Public

But Lewis wouldn’t summon us to just be a writer, but two. 

It’s a kind of literary christology: two writers in one person. 

The first writer flows from Lewis’s counsel above about writing as the antidote for whatever it is that is ailing you. 

When you’re fed up with life, start writing. 

There is healing power in getting your passions onto paper. 

This is a call for the private writer.

But Lewis also would suggest that you see yourself as a second writer: the public writer. 

One writes for the self; the other writes for others. 

One expresses himself in some secret journal — better that no one poke their nose into it. 

But the other embodies another way in which the fed-up soul cures human ills, not just our own, but those of others. 

Public writing is its own distinct species.

To the Private Writer

Lewis’s counsel for the private writer is plain enough. 

Just write. 

Get it out there. 

Break all the rules. 

The blank page is your soul’s canvass; letters are your paint. 

When you’re anxious, sad, lonely, or depressed, express yourself.

Write your way through life’s worst days, and best. 

Get your hidden thoughts into the light on the page. 

Spread out the embers of your anger, and let them begin to cool with the air of hope. 

And if you have no hope of your own to bring to them, at least turn them Godward in a prayer or psalm of lament, and let the very act of writing them to God be the distant glow at the tunnel’s end.

To the Public Writer

But it’s quite another thing to give counsel to the public writer. 

Some clear and sharp distinctions must be made. 

For Lewis, what passes as good public writing is fundamentally different than much of what may be permissible and desirable as private writing.

Writing for others, at its best, is not an exploration of our own selves, or peeling away the layers of our onion. 

Rather, it is catching some great glimpse of objective reality, outside ourselves, and laboring to enable our readers to enjoy this reality with us.

The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him. . . . 

To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles. (The Personal Heresy, 11)

This is the heart of good public writing. 

Not burrowing deep inside the writer’s own subjective psyche, and basking in ego-stroking self-disclosure, but straining to open the readers’ eyes to observe wonders in God’s created world — and doing the hard work to put on display some objective reality outside of us.

Love Makes It Readable and Clear

In public writing, don’t just write to give vent to your own soul, but apply the balm to others. 

Let your personal pining get your car to the track, but run your laps on love and the desire to help your reader. 

Don’t fixate on how you want to say it, but how to make it readable.

A great humility stands behind such writing — and makes us free from the need to draw attention to ourselves, and eager to point to God and creation and humanity and sin and Jesus and salvation and the dynamics of everyday life and faith, and do so with clarity.

This is what made Lewis such a good writer, and why we have so much to glean from him for the 21st century — whether it’s his mingling of long and short sentences, or his attention to cadence and rhythm and how his sentences sounded when read aloud, or his relentless use of illustration, or his own manifest interest in every subject on which he wrote and his ability to be so contagious about it.

The Word As Great Cure

Which bring us back around to Lewis’s claim about ink being “the great cure for all human ills.” 

All human ills? 

Lewis might agree that it’s an overstatement. 

But he might respond by saying that it depends how flexible one is willing to be with the image of ink on a page.

It is, after all, a Word who is, in fact, the great cure for all human ills — the Word who didn’t stay in the Writer’s head, but is eternally spoken, and was subjected in history to the criticisms and pains of taking shape in our world. 

God wrote this Word on the page of our story, and the spilling of his ink became the great well for curing every ill and righting every wrong.

If God himself, when fed up with sin, and ready to apply the great cure, did so with a Word, then perhaps you and I — whether we self-identify as writers or not — should give some serious thought as to what ills we also might cure with our words.