Christianity,  Culture

Pursue God, Not Pornography

The New York Times published an article this week about teenagers and porn-use, and the first hand accounts contained in the piece are devastating. I am not going to link to the piece here or even describe it because it is too vile to share. In fact, I regret reading it myself. It’s that bad.

For those that have read it, however, I want to pass along some items that might be a little more helpful and hopeful.

1. The video above is a message preached in the chapel of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It’s an exposition of “Flee youthful lusts” in 2 Timothy 2:22 and how that applies to porn-use. If you’d rather have the audio, you can download it here or listen below.

2. Here is a short piece dealing with a similar article that appeared in TIME magazine in 2016: “The Darkness of Porn and the Hope of the Gospel.” Among other things, it says this:

I am not being hyperbolic when I call porn use a civilizational calamity. The sexual revolution promised us more sex and more pleasure. It has actually delivered to us a generation of men who think of women as objects to be used and abused for their sexual pleasure. It has not given us men who know what virtue and honor are. It doesn’t teach men to pursue their joy in self-sacrificially loving and being sexually faithful to one woman for life. It teaches young men to use women for sex and then to discard them when they become unwilling or uninteresting. This means that it has given us a generation of young men completely unprepared for marriage and for fatherhood.

3. The best book I know on the gospel and breaking the power of porn is Heath Lambert’s book Finally Free: Fighting for Purity with the Power of Grace. If you are in the throes of this struggle, you need to read this book.