Hooked on Porn

My shift started with a 12 year old girl with a chief complaint of alleged sexual assault.

Her father began fondling her 6 months previously under a blanket while watching movies as a family.

My second patient was an 8 year old boy brought in for suicidal ideations.

The father was appropriately upset about the death talk, but even more devastated by finding his 8 year old son with his pants down leaning over his little brother.

We live in a sexed crazed society.

I work in an upscale proper-looking suburb of Chicago, and these cases are not unique. Not a day goes by without us hearing about some sex related scandal.

It can be the football coach of an elite school abusing young boys, or the principal of a middle school sending lewd texts to his intern. It can be a politician facing shame over taking naked pictures of himself, or a teacher at a Christian school touching himself during class. The stories are horrific, and our reactions properly outraged.

And yet…turn your television on any given evening and you’ll find you have much more of a stomach for sex and nudity than you originally thought possible.

Little by little our culture has been pornified, pushing the limits of our sight – both real and imaginary – and most of us have been too busy to notice.

I remember the first time I saw sexually inappropriate materials on television. Today it would be rated PG 13. Regardless, I was far too young and I was hooked.

We didn’t have the internet in the 70s, so I was temporarily safe. Three decades later porn is free and just a click away.

No one is safe any more.

I was recently walking through the grocery store with my nephew. We were in the milk and juice aisle. Suddenly he brought me a magnet from the end of the aisle with the picture of three women in thongs. “What is that?” he said.

He is seven.

Shame on us for kicking the bar so low that our children are unsafe. Yet we walk around blaming folks like Joe Paterno for saying too little, and doing nearly nothing to protect the young. It’s easier to blame someone else for the corruption we have quietly contributed to.

It’s not easy being a Christian in a pornified culture.

It’s like swimming upstream in the Niagara Falls. It takes miraculous effort. It takes supernatural ability. It takes God on your side and in your heart. It takes friends who have been there and been rescued. It takes time on your knees and a heart that is soft. It takes the willingness to say no and the courage to live differently. It takes simply saying no when it feels so good to say yes.

It takes a culture that will stand together and refuse to accept what has been quietly shoved down our throats.

It’s time to make a choice. Will you walk in the dark or will you turn on the light of God’s truth? It’s not too late to turn our culture around.

We’ve got to start somewhere.

Today, why don’t you start with yourself?

I almost found myself a casualty of my desires once. It took me by surprise. It came out of nowhere. It wasn’t through the internet. That’s too tawdry for a sophisticated Christian. It wasn’t through the television. That’s too time consuming and juvenile. No. It was through an unexpected, even respectable venue.

I stumbled around a bit thinking I could handle it. I couldn’t. The lure is too strong. The flesh too weak.

I tried to minimize it. I tried to justify it. I tried to deny it.

It doesn’t work.

There’s only one way to stop the bleeding: apply direct pressure to the obvious site while you look for the true source of bleeding you can’t see. Surround yourself with a trauma team. Stick to the protocols.

God’s word is our protocol. Spirit filled Christians are our trauma team. The obvious sites are those things that trigger our fall: a television show, an internet site, a book. The less obvious sites are harder to admit: lust, loneliness, disappointment, fear.

It’s an all out war against the culture. It’s individual Christians refusing to laugh when everyone else does, and refusing to look where everyone else is staring. It’s you and me getting back to the place where we are shocked by porn.

I refuse to be hooked on porn. I refuse to allow the callousness of the culture to wrap its way around my heart until it’s too dry to survive.

Paul says this in II Corinthians 11:3 “But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ”.

If Paul was afraid of the danger, I assure you that I, too, am afraid.

I’m afraid enough to change. I’m afraid enough to share my struggles with you. I’m afraid enough to take drastic measures against the things that I can.

Aren’t you?

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