We live in a “Pornified” Culture.
Pornography is defined as sexually explicit writing, images, video, or other
material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal. We know we
are in a pornified culture by looking at the following indicators:
How we spend our money:
- The porn industry generates more income than the combined revenues of ABC, NBC, and CBS and more than the combined revenues of NFL, NBA, and MLB. In the USA, the porn industry generates between $15 billion – $97 billion a year. Every second, $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography.
How we spend our time:
- More people view internet pornography every month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined.
- In 2016, people watched 4.6 billion hours of pornography at just one of the more than 42 million pornographic websites. That’s equivalent to 524,000 years spent watching porn in 1 year!
How early we expose our children:
- 93% of boys and 63% of girls will be exposed to internet porn before the age of 18.
- The average age of first exposure is 11 years old (some surveys say 8 years old).
How pornography has crept into our local churches:
- A recent survey found that 50% of Christian men and 20% of Christian women are ‘addicted to porn.’ That means that in a church with 100 adults, twenty-five men and ten women are struggling with porn: one in three.
How did we get this way?
Romans 1:21-23 says, “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things”.
These verses show us that instead of worshipping God because He is worthy and deserving as the Creator God, mankind “exchanged” and worshiped that which was created. In other words, they practiced the sin of idolatry. All other sin stems from this root sin of idolatry – including pornography.
According to Tim Keller, “An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought…An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, ‘If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.’…If anything in life becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol.” (Counterfeit Gods, xvii-xix).
In Exodus when Moses went up to the mountain and was delayed, the people thought that their leader was gone and had deserted them. They felt vulnerable, and fearful — maybe even alone. So they “exchanged’ the God who opened the Red Sea and placed their hope in a created god instead by asking Aaron to make a golden calf. Instead of depending on God to protect, provide, and give them hope, they trusted in a created thing.
We are still doing that today.
Idolatry is the root sin that caused God to ‘give them over” three times in Romans 24-28.
- Therefore, God handed them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity (v24)
- For this reason, God handed them over to dishonorable passions (v26)
- God handed them over to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done (v28)
If we work backwards, we see that the reason why we are such a pornified culture today is because God has given us over to our sexual desires which are rooted ultimately in idolatry. We desire created things to satisfy us instead of God. The sin of idolatry and sexual immorality go together. Look how many times idolatry and sexual immorality appear in tandem throughout the Bible: Exodus 32, Isaiah 57:7-8, Hosea 4:12-14, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, Galatians 5:19-21, Ephesians 5:5, Colossians 3:5, Revelation 2:14, 20, 21:25. Sexual immorality has been around since Bible times and continues today in the form of pornography.
How do we break free from this bondage? We need to make another exchange!
Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him, where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all. Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering – Col 3:9-12
Instead of following our fleshly desires, we need to “put on Christ.” Paul reminds fellow believers in Colossians 3:1 that because of their identity in Christ, they are united with Christ: “If then you have been raised with Christ”, then we ought to put off, or exchange, those fleshly desires. It’s interesting to note that Colossians 3:5 is a direct reference to both idolatry and sexual immorality.
Paul says it again in Romans 13:14, “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
The beauty, greatness, and graciousness of this exchange is that Christ has done it all for us in the gospel. Christ has lived the life we should have lived and died the death we needed to die. The exchange took place by His death on the Cross. We just now have to believe that God, in Christ, has made the great exchange on our behalf.
The way we destroy the pornified culture we live in is to exchange the fleshly desires by putting-on Christ and worshipping him. Worshipping Christ is the solution to pornography. Let us worship Christ alone.
WRAP WEEK
October 31 – November 6, 2021 is WRAP Week. WRAP stands for “White Ribbon Against Pornography” and it is a week dedicated to raising awareness about the dangers and damage of pornography. Stop by either LifePlan location to pick up a white ribbon and join us in taking a stand against pornography!
Find out more about WRAP Week HERE.