The issue of pornography has been on my heart for many years; it’s an epidemic. Now, if I talk to a young man about his life, I am not surprised to hear that he struggles with porn. That’s why I wrote my song “All My Love,” about the allure of porn, but also about its destructive nature.
Because porn is destructive. It destroys lives, marriages, and even our relationship with God.
Am I overreacting when I say that?
No. Here are three ways that porn wreaks havoc in our lives:
1) Porn pulls us away from God.
When we choose wicked images over God, we’re pulling ourselves farther and farther away from Him. Imagine you are in prison and can only talk to your loved ones on an old phone through a glass wall. It’s not that God won’t hear you when you speak to Him, but there will be a wedge between you. There’s intimacy that you cannot have with God while chasing after counterfeit intimacy with men or women on computer screens.
2) Porn gives us a distorted view of the opposite sex.
Those people whose bodies are captured in images on your computer screen or smartphone are made in the image of God. You’re objectifying them. You’re insulting God. You’re treating His image with disdain and perversion.
Instead of caring for the weak, hurting, and confused, you’re supporting their pain and confusion. You’re encouraging them in it. With each click, you’re giving it a thumbs-up. Instead of seeing them how God sees them, you’re looking at them through broken lenses.
Porn doesn’t just affect the way you see the participants; it distorts the way you see everyone.
Porn has a way of distorting your worldview. If you spend your time indulging in porn, looking at all sorts of people naked and objectifying them regularly, do you imagine you’ll be able to turn that off when you go into the real world? Indulging in porn undercuts your ability to love others as you’ve been called to.
3) Porn hinders the enjoyment of real intimacy.
Porn gives us a faulty view of sex. Not only because we’re seeking to enjoy sexual pleasure of different types apart from marriage, but also because it’s like a movie (if you can even call it that). Cops in movies jump from rooftop to rooftop and fly through the air gracefully as a car explodes behind them. But we should not expect the same from real cops.
Porn is just as fake. There is often nothing real about what you’re looking at, so we should not expect our sex lives to be like porn. Yet, when we indulge in it, we train ourselves to think of sex in a particular way. But by the very nature of the medium, we’re training ourselves in something fake.
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Not only that, but you’re hurting your intimacy with your present or future spouse. All your sexual desires are to be aimed toward him or her. And you’ll have to redirect them. There are certain images that will never leave your mind, and this is one of the devastating consequences of this sin.
So what can you do if you’re addicted and you want to get out? I provide some hope in this short video.
Editor’s note: This post is largely adapted from Trip Lee’s book Rise: Get Up and Live in God’s Great Story and has been used with the gracious permission of the author. Be sure to check out Trip on Twitter and on his website.