OK…
This week kinda wore me out on the porn news tip.
There’s Kanye West who is allegedly in a porn tape with a chick who looks *just like* (she really does) his current girlfriend. Let’s not even get deep into the fact that he claims that he used to watch Kim Kardashian’s sex tape with another guy for his viewing pleasure with other women (or the fact that he brags about it in one of his songs). There are red flags all over that situation. (And can someone *please* tell me why people continue to tape their escapades?)
Then, I read that another rap star, Mystikal, *who went to prison for sexual assault*, is claiming that if his next LP flops, he’s going into porn (and they say that prison rehabilitates people…yeah, um, OK).
Then I read about a mayoral candidate in a Bosnian city who actually put porn on his political website hoping to draw more traffic (I mean, he’s on ABCNews.com and so…mission accomplished).
*And* that Jerry Sandusky , the gift who keeps on givig (SMH), was apparently a part of a child porn ring (I can’t *wait* for him to be interviewed about his own childhood…there’s a story there, I’m fairly certain.)
Yet, in trying to make some kind of sense out of all of this porn chaos, it was when I read two other porn-related articles that I decided to pitch out the question that is the title of this blog.
One was Michael John Cusick, the author of Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle and his article in Huffington Post entitled, “A Pastor’s Struggle With Sex and Porn Addiction“. Here’s an excerpt:
“July 10, 1994, was the worst day of my life. It was the day on which I unleashed a hurricane of destruction and was forced to watch the woman I loved crawl in the wreckage. When I was single, my actions didn’t immediately affect anyone in my circle of family and friends. Now the consequences of my recklessness could be seen in Julianne’s eyes. I had caused my wife’s worst nightmare to come [true].
It was also the best day of my life. Though I was shattered, it was the day I finally understood Jesus’ words recorded in the gospel of John: the truth shall set you free.”
Good for him for sure. Michael is a pastor, though and so, he knows the Lord differently than some other people who struggle with porn probably do.
Which brings me to the other article. This one was actually kind of comical, but it did cause me to pause and think a bit. Actually, it caused me to “pause and ponder” on the “Love is not rude” portion of the Love Chapter (I Corinthians 13:4-8).
There was a man in California who was so sick and tired of his neighbors blasting gospel music 24/7 that he decided to blare porn in retalitation:
“’Just to kind of give them a taste of offensive play there, just a little payback,’ he said. The peeved porn-watcher says he’s sick of the nonstop gospel songs that emanate from the next-door home in the small, quiet mountain town. ‘One day it went on for 12 hours and my dog was howling and it was bad,’ he said. Police say the gospel-loving couple called to complain, but their neighbor isn’t facing any charges.”
That is interesting because if he had called the police on them, I’m willing to put some money on the table that they would have called that “persecution” when the fact is, I love the Lord and I don’t want to hear loud gospel music around the clock, either. Sometimes, our approaches are not *convicting* people, they are simply *offending* them and there is a *really big difference*.
The news stories that I shared, just for this week alone, show us that we live in a fairly porn-saturated society. Indeed, the Word does speak about the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh being “signature traits” of this world (I John 2:16). Yet, being that we are called to be the light of it (Matthew 5:14), being that we are to model the life of Christ and the love of God in *all* that we do and say, do you think that Christians, as a whole, handle the porn watcher or porn addict in the way that Christ would? Because something tells me that he wouldn’t be blasting out gospel music or nagging people to death about their lifestyle in order to get them to stop. But that’s just me.
Do you think that the Church is taking a *Christ-like approach* when it comes to porn? If so, why? If not, why not?
Sound off…