There are probably lots of sources both online and in book form, secular and Christian, that have useful information concerning sex that can be helpful to a married couple or to those who are to be married soon. The treatment bellow is not directed at such good sources but explicit hardcore pornographic sites that are sinful, addictive, and detrimental to our spiritual life.
Do we really need to establish today that Porn is a hellish sin? Isn't it obvious? Apparently not! Shouldn't a redeemed people shy away from humanity depicted at it's worst? Theoretically, they should but practically they don't. We can tell this from statistics such as that collected by the Barna group and the response given by people from different backgrounds and sections of society, to questions regarding the use of Pornography. Although well forewarned of the dangers of lust in scripture, a lot of people including Christians naively venture into these internet hell-holes called porn sites that are gateways into the sickest debauchery known to man. This is partly due to Porn being easily accessible through the net, right inside our home and only a few mouse clicks away. Those who flirt with online porn, soon enough find themselves, getting deeper and deeper to where they become addicted and find it difficult to free themselves. Once porn gets its hook in us, we become enslaved to it and find it hard to pry ourselves from it. It turns into a regular habitual ritual in which one seeks to procure excitement that they were only supposed to get from a marriage bed. How can we overcome the problem of pornography in our homes? The chapter bellow is a short account that seeks to shed God's light on this very serious matter.
Porn as Warfare
The Devil is in the conception and details
We wouldn’t do justice to the topic of pornography if we didn’t try to show that it has satanic roots. This can be a tricky task as sex was something good given to us by God for intimacy and joy in marriage. Mr. Briggs endearing article quoted here, that talks about the life of the now deceased porn actress, Linda Boreman gives us an inkling into porn's demonic roots. The article documents innuendos made by Linda that she was forced to do sex acts with animals, she was threatened and abused often and that there was frequent drug use by her and her husband/producer while working with the mob as overseer. If it proves nothing else, Linda's life shows that porn started as a mob contraband just like liquor in it's early years. What is porn but a false fantasy sold to us, that is birthed in the deep recesses of hell itself, in order to destroy us. It must be one of the adversaries’ favorite weapons to degrade people and turn them into something animalistic and something much lower than what they were created to be; in God's image. Maybe you don’t believe in the existence of a horned and hoofed fiend. We don’t either; we believe the real devil is much more sinister than Hollywood
The Power of suggestion
Perhaps you have had an experience when all of a sudden a sick, sensual thought came into your head. You sense that it came from somewhere close, you even think it's from your own mind. You could have left it alone but you follow through with it and act on it, only to regret that you did. How many times has that happened to us and yet we fall for it again and again? That is the power Satan has still, to slip in an idea in order to tempt us, make us fall, control us and if possible even posses us. As a fallen celestial creature, yet limited by God in his activities, one of Satan’s methods of attack is the power of suggestion.
Begin to filter your thoughts and identify the foreign ones by putting them in light of the whole counsel of God.
The suggestiveness of movies
We can take this truth further by saying that there is nothing more suggestive than a moving picture. All Satan has to do is influence and possess unregenerate men motivated by greed, lust and power and use them to produce movies to disseminate his evil, sinister plan. As the god of this world, Satan has temporary access into our realm that allows him to suggest, tempt and lie in order to blind us to God’s truth. He might say things like, “Your husband doesn’t love you.” Or “You are not pretty” or “There is money in the sex industry” Attacking the mind with such suggestions may be all he has to do, to lead men with a selfish nature to do his will; our own fallen-ness and corruption will do the rest.
Therefore, it’s not that far fetched to say that he uses Pornography to tempt, entrap and enslave people into sin. How and why he does this and why he is allowed to continue (for now) is subject for a branch of theology called ‘theodicy’ ( the study about the existence of evil in the world) We won’t get into it very deeply here but we will assert simply that it is true (A study in the book of Job and the gospels illustrates the reality that the devil exists and is sometimes allowed to tempt people through sorrow, disease, lack, desire suffering and other ways)
It's a biblically well established fact that Satan's methodology is to lie and tempt people, make them fall and destroy them any which way he can. Eve and Judas are prime examples of this in scripture. We will stipulate and try to prove here that pornography is one of major ways Satan does this today. As soon as film became invented in the last century men had already started to use it for making 'naked pictures'. This continues up until today when tech savvy teens do 'sexting'. The fact that porn became a protected form of free speech where as only a few decades ago it was an outlawed contraband is a sad footnote in our history and an indication of where things are moving in our world
Prophetic insight: At a certain place, The Bible, lumps all such activity, behavior and lifestyle and calls it spiritual Sodom (To what else can Rev 11:8, Isa 1:9 refer to, except the apex of sinfulness), as an emerging element of one of the signs of the last days and very last hours, where moral and spiritual life would have deteriorated in our world, to the point of requiring God's intervention and judgment, the way it did in the time of Sodom. Just think how much sin we have become used to in our time, it's getting to the point where we are getting a taste of the pressures that Lot must have felt while living in Sodom
Porn in a Christian marriage and churches
A cursed booty
What does a redeemed people have to do with partaking of material showing humanity behaving at it’s worst. Instead of praying for their conversion should we partake of their sin?
There may be good ways of using one’s imagination in order to make one's marriage exiting in the bedroom; but using pornography is not one of them and will have the opposite effect. Allowing Pornography in a Christian home is like sneaking in Achan’s booty (Joshua 7; 1-26) ; it can only result in judgment and destruction. The word in the camp during defeat was "There are things under the ban in your midst, O Israel"
What was it about that Canaanite booty that was heinous? Naked pictures and/or Canaanite gods?
What was it about that Canaanite booty that was heinous? Naked pictures and/or Canaanite gods?
In any case, we shouldn’t expect God to bless us unless we have repented and stop permitting it's uses in our homes. Also, because the pornography pictures today tend to show extreme depravity, the same spirit can enter a once wholesome marriage and destroy it. It can create a feeling of inferiority and an unfair comparison with ‘professional‘actors and their acts who almost always have exaggerated sex drives and and/or over-enhanced physique. These will serve to create cracks in marriages that along with other factors can help destroy it. We will throw the follwing advice out of our hat for someone.
Stop watching porn; you can't use a sinful merchandise to build a holy marriage, you will only destroy it. The way you will see your spouse will start to change and you may never recover that giddy kind of love you had at the beginning.
Lessons about warfare from the old Testament.
When Balaam, a prophet for hire and Balak the wicked king of 
Porn: A Red Line not to be crossed
Porn addiction is an example of the enemies 'trap door' bondage in which people can fall into while on an illicit search for gratification. Besides, if one is satisfied with the imaginary and the virtual why go look for the real thing?
A Scriptural Foundation
The Lord Said, "He who looks upon a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart"(Matthew 5:28) The usage of both verbs in "he who looks.. to.. lust" intensifies the act to where just looking at people and admiring their natural attributes is precluded from being sin. We look at people everyday and we say "She is beautiful" or "He is handsome". This is obviously not what should be understood to be sin.
Jesus' use of "he who looks" and "lusts" makes his statement fit aptly to the use of pornography we see in our world today. It fits so well in fact that it would seem like when he spoke it, He had anticipated a time, when men would streamline lust, first on paper and later on the new media technologies, as they have today. Being God and prophet He must have peered through time and given us a warning so we could be repentant of this scourge. What are we doing but looking and lusting when we watch Porn. Jesus statement can be reworded to apply to women also as they can also be guilty of such sins. She who looks upon a man to lust after him has committed adultery in her heart. We need to know and be convicted that watching porn is adultery of the heart and mind, a sin which should be hated and one if not repented is terminal to our spiritual life and growth. Eve, King David, Clinton, Tiger Woods, the list goes on and on of the people who "looked upon" and "Lusted" and experienced a great downfall. Each had brought terrible consequences and judgments upon themselves which also affected those around them as well. We find in Hebrews the following quote,
Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge. Hebrews 13:4
Internet Porn: The New Idolatry
It used to be people had to go to the seedy part of town wearing a trench coat with the collar up in order to hide their identity, while they browsed the sex shops and the coin operated peep shows. Today, due to the fact that porn sites are easily accessed and because they can be entered with relative anonymity, it’s easy to think we can get away with surfing porn on the net without fear of being labeled a pervert. It has also become very easy to think we can keep it a secret form everyone and believe that people are not watching. We can also convince ourselves that it won’t harm us or those around us, but this is a serious deception. We might think that no one is watching(Someone probably is; almost all our activities online are logged somewhere!) God is however watching and grieves and the people around us are very much affected by us watching porn. We might ask how or why is this true? It's true, because of the spiritual lukewarm-ness[6] that ensues from sin. While we are supposed to be burning filaments and be a light to those around us[7] we will have our spiritual light extinguished due to this idolatrous sin of worshiping in front of gross lewd images coming through our computer’s screen. Men who are the designated leaders and priests of the home will have become prisoners who are ineffective in discharging their holy duties to lead and minister to their families.
Lies and Excuses
“You will not surely die”
Those of us who succumb to wondering into online porn sites, tell ourselves the same lies Satan told Eve “you shall not surely die, but your eyes will be open to be able to see good and evil” Porn is most certainly the forbidden fruit of our generation that we ought to stay away from. Some of the lies we tell ourselves to ease our conscience when we open up this literal and figurative window (on our PC screen) to watch porn are the following.
Common lies we tell ourselves:- 0. I am lonely, god will understand 1. It won’t affect me or harm me. 2. I can stop any time I want. 3. To watch Porn is not a sin it's those who produce it that are sinning. 4. I am doing research to study the subject. (please! C'mon! ) 5. It will bring excitement to our marriage. 6. It will help me to learn techniques to spice up my marriage. 7. God must have allowed it to exist for a reason(C'mon!). Also refer *.
It’s dangerous
keep your mind out of the gutter
The dangers and pitfalls of being involved with porn are many. There is plenty of research from unbiased scientists about the adverse effects of porn on people, like for example the onset of depression on some. We will only state a few here from common observation.
Let’s begin with what it does to us individually. First, Porn introduces us to perversions and debauchery of the worst kind and stains our mind and stays in our memory’s registry for a long time. Therefore, we can say that every time we read or watch Pornography we are being permanently marked with sick, lewd images of debauchery and the words or images will stay in our memory bank for quite some time affecting us in our daily lives. Our self esteem can also be hurt by the use of porn which is no doubt habit forming. Secondly, we can be led to try to act out what we see in porn, in real life. Most rapes for example, have porn as some sort of ingredient before they occur. Thirdly, it demeans and degrades our perceptions of people around us, making us to see them as objects for sex and lust. It utterly corrupts us and can turn even the most innocent from among us into a pervert. No generation had to deal with what we have seen happen with the proliferation of porn happening in the world today. It has spilled over into the main stream affecting everyone and sparing no one including our very young, who are getting exposed to it at a much earlier age than ever before. Lastly, as the sin that it is, porn will drain us of a healthy thriving spiritual life. If we don’t repent from it our prayer life will dry up, lacking fellowship, intimacy and life from God.
Also being that we have brought in a detestable idol in our midst, it will stand as a wedge between us and our God hindering our intimacy and prayer. We need to get rid of it, if it's present in our home. Besides us, porn can hurt others around us and near us. It can hurt marriages by introducing sex acts that may be unhealthy, violent, perverse or unnatural. Couples who partake of porn get cheated out of real love and intimacy, instead to emulate strange sex acts from the satanically inspired world of porn. When we surf porn we risk exposing someone young or impressionable which is a heinous sin according to Jesus. (Mark 9:42).
Many serial rapists and murderers trace the inception of their crime spree to porn. The convicted and executed serial killer Ted Bundy for example said in his last interview that soft porn was the gateway drug into his crime spree. If we don’t stop feeding our minds with Porno, we will be in serious jeopardy of coming into a bondage that can destabilize our spiritual life, our walk with God and how we see and relate to people around us. We might succumb to seeking to live out the fantasies from porn in real life situations; we will start to see people around us with a sexually evil eye. We might think that won’t ever happen to us but all it takes is the slight impairment that comes from use of drugs or alcohol to put us over the edge and do something we thought we would never do. We would then have graduated from the world of fantasy into reality and actual commission; from the sin of the mind and heart to the sin of the flesh.
Many serial rapists and murderers trace the inception of their crime spree to porn. The convicted and executed serial killer Ted Bundy for example said in his last interview that soft porn was the gateway drug into his crime spree. If we don’t stop feeding our minds with Porno, we will be in serious jeopardy of coming into a bondage that can destabilize our spiritual life, our walk with God and how we see and relate to people around us. We might succumb to seeking to live out the fantasies from porn in real life situations; we will start to see people around us with a sexually evil eye. We might think that won’t ever happen to us but all it takes is the slight impairment that comes from use of drugs or alcohol to put us over the edge and do something we thought we would never do. We would then have graduated from the world of fantasy into reality and actual commission; from the sin of the mind and heart to the sin of the flesh.
I am addicted to Porn? What should I do?
1. "Look to those things that are above"
We in fact become complicit in the sin of others when we purchase or even simply consume porn. “Shall I then take away the members of Christ, and make them members of a harlot .. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit”(I Corinthians 6:17)
Therefore, Stop! Granted we will sometimes need to inquire good information about making love and the anatomical and physiological functions of our bodies, we should be careful about where we go to get information and advice. We are deceiving ourselves if we tell ourselves that we are visiting Hard Core pornographic sites or magazines to get good information on how to make love with our spouse. There are many good secular and christian sources both off and online geared towards helping a married couple. It’s better to remain naive and discover the joys of sex by experimenting with our spouses than rely on something evil and sinful like hardcore pornography and drink it's venom. The Bible teaches that we remain innocent concerning things that are evil (Romans 16:19, Revelations 2:24). Porn is definitely one area where curiosity killed the cat.
Therefore, Stop! Granted we will sometimes need to inquire good information about making love and the anatomical and physiological functions of our bodies, we should be careful about where we go to get information and advice. We are deceiving ourselves if we tell ourselves that we are visiting Hard Core pornographic sites or magazines to get good information on how to make love with our spouse. There are many good secular and christian sources both off and online geared towards helping a married couple. It’s better to remain naive and discover the joys of sex by experimenting with our spouses than rely on something evil and sinful like hardcore pornography and drink it's venom. The Bible teaches that we remain innocent concerning things that are evil (Romans 16:19, Revelations 2:24). Porn is definitely one area where curiosity killed the cat.
Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory (Colosians 3:1-4)
However, If you have somehow opened the door to internet pornography and have become addicted and want to be free, you can do so by simply repenting, asking for forgiveness and committing to use the net only for its better purposes. Install software filters to protect you family and have an accountability pact with your spouse where you both promise to be transparent, pray for one another and assure each other of your love. There are many anti-virus software like Zone-alarm's security suite, which include a parental control feature that locks out pornographic and Hack websites, that can be downloaded and installed for less than $50. This can help assure that children surf the net safely when parents are not present to monitor what they are doing. The Bible teaches that we set our imagination on things above, not beneath and have a though life focused on things, good pure, productive and clean.
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2. A Good counsel “Flee fornication” and “be ye separate”
God’s Word concerning any form of sexual Immorality is always to run from it and stay away from it. It’s as simple as that. Because we are inundated with sexually provocative material in magazines, billboards and commercials, we have to be creative in how we practice these two simple pieces of advice from God’s word.
God’s Word concerning any form of sexual Immorality is always to run from it and stay away from it. It’s as simple as that. Because we are inundated with sexually provocative material in magazines, billboards and commercials, we have to be creative in how we practice these two simple pieces of advice from God’s word.The word “Parabis” in Greek meaning a 'trespass-sin' in the New Testament and is used to mean trespassing a clearly stated commandment (Romans 4:15, 5:14; Galatians 3:19). Likewise we need to be convicted that going to a porn site is a ‘Parabis’, a spiritual trespass of God’s word that repeatedly says “do not enter, the sin of lust kills.”(Leviticus 18:29). As it turns out the internet has evolved to have some more safe guards in-bedded due to the outcry that followed its heyday when it was flooded with free flowing porn access. It's still not that hard to find and watch pornography online. However, because of the new federal rules put into law to protect minors, porn sites have to ask users to verify their age before allowing anyone to enter their website. References for Further Study
[1] Matthew 5:28
[1] I wish you were hot or cold
[1] Timothy save yourself and those around you
[1] Mark 9: 42
[1] I Corinthians 6: 15, 17)
[1] The Act of Marriage: Tim and Beverly Lahaye
[h] I Corinthians 6: 18
[i] II Corinthians 6:17;l
[1] Romans 4:15, 5:14; Galatians 3:19
[1] Proverbs “a young man who goes to the door of an adulterous woman”
[r] Jesus said, "He who makes one of these little ones to stumble it would be better for him if he had a milestone around his neck and thrown into the sea"
[1] Joe Bob Briggs, Linda’s Life: A sad story, and its impact on us all. http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-briggs042502.asp
[2] Job, Eve and Jesus were all tempted and propositioned different things
[3] [3] Joe Bob Briggs, Linda’s Life: A sad story, and its impact on us all.
[4] Achan whose family was stoned under Joshua’s leadership(Joshua)
[5] Matthew 5:28
[6] lukewarm
[7]Porn as a weapon of Spiritual Warfare
