This post is part one of a three-part series. Pornography is a snare because it is:
Available | Affordable | Anonymous
You are living during the worst time in human history as far as sexual temptation is concerned. You face more temptations, of greater strength, in more places, at more times of the day, than any other man has faced in the past. Which means, if you struggle with pornography, part of your struggle is not your fault. Yes, your sexual sin is your responsibility. But the pervasiveness of porn isn’t.
Your challenge as a Christian man is that pornography is Available with a capital A. At no other time in history has it been possible for a man to access hardcore pornography of the most wicked sort from so many places. There was a time when women and men covered their nakedness in public, when television and the internet did not exist, and when depicting sex acts was illegal. In those days, if a man wanted to see a woman naked, he had to go out of his way to find it. Pornography was unavailable except to the most industrious and curious of individuals. You had to be hell-bent on finding pornography because it simply didn’t exist anywhere in public.
When I was a boy, for example, so-called adult magazines were sold in corner stores, but you had to be 18 years old or older to buy them. They were situated on the top rack in the store, where my arms couldn’t reach. If someone wanted to view hardcore porn, they had to hop on a plane to Amsterdam, or order through a friend of a friend, or meet up with a criminal type in a dark alley. Hardcore porn was unavailable except for the initiated.
Today, of course, hardcore pornography, including illegal porn, is everywhere. It’s available to you 24 hours a day no matter where you are in the world. If you carry a smartphone, you carry porn in your pocket. If you have a cable TV subscription, you have porn available in your living room at every hour of the day and night. You can see naked women at strip clubs. You can visit adult stores. You can buy dirty magazines at the corner store. You can see giant posters of women in just their underwear at the local mall. In short, you live in an age where nudity, sex and pornographic images are to be found anywhere, all the time. You don’t even have to seek them out. They pop up in your Instagram feed. They show themselves while you are watching movies with your kids. They leer at you from billboards during your morning commute.
This is not your fault. You may be hooked on porn, but the easy availability of this sin is none of your doing. You didn’t ask to have sexual temptation available to you 24 hours a day. You never voted to have the most vile of sexual immorality thrust in your face uninvited at work, at home, and everywhere else in between. I want you to acknowledge this and really take it to heart. Yes, your sexual sin is your fault. Yes, your struggle for sexual purity is your responsibility. But your battle is harder than ever before in human history because of the easy availability of pornography. You are in the agony you are in precisely because the temptations to sin are everywhere, and so powerful.
Men in the past never had to contend with the level of sexual temptation that you face. You battle more visual temptations in a single day than most men faced in an entire lifetime. Avoiding pornography was easy in a day when it didn’t exist (no filthy magazines, no adult television, no X-rated internet, no provocative social media, no R-rated movies, no raunchy books). This doesn’t excuse your sin, of course. But it helps to explain it. It helps to explain your struggle. Your battle with porn is understandable. Because you didn’t bring it on yourself.
By the way, if you desire to be free of the snare of porn, you must tackle this availability issue. One way is to install Covenant Eyes or another brand of porn-blocking software on all of your electronic devices.
Need a daily kick in the pants to quit porn biblically? Buy the book, or subscribe to my daily kick.
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