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Christian Worldview Blockers of Porn
By Jay Wegter
How you use your ‘temple’ is a statement of what you worship. What is salvation? It is the purchase of God wherein the believing sinner is purchased or redeemed, and becomes God’s possession and is no longer his own (1 Cor 6). Our response to being ‘possessed by God’ is to present ourselves back to Him daily, unconditionally, as a living sacrifice (Rom 12). Thus, our reasonable, rational, service of worship means giving ourselves to God—it is how we love God. This is a lifestyle of worship which reveals what we think of God, of our union with Christ, and what we think of who God is toward us in Christ. Our body members (including thought and affections) are constantly being presented to our functional master (whether it be Christ or unrighteousness—Romans 6).
The cross of Christ severed the believer from the world as source (Gal 6:14). The power of the cross of Christ is matchless—it severs us from the world (false source) and joins us to Christ who is the fountain of life and our true source of life, meaning, and fulfillment. The devil destroys by accusations of guilt (and the offer of false solutions—Hebrews 2) and by temptation to sin (the lusts of the flesh—Galatians 5). The world and the flesh are false sources of meaning and fulfillment which is why they are referred to as the ‘lusts of deceit’ (Eph 4). The cross won or purchased a mighty set of assets to counter the demonic strategies of fear, accusation, temptation, and slavery to sin. The true believer must know what his weapons are that are fashioned by the cross, and how to use them (Rom 6; 2 Cor 10; Eph 6).
Godly masculinity is inseparable from constant mortification of sin. Sin is only killed by starvation. How does a man become a consistent spiritual influencer of others? He must commit himself to the development of the virtues which describe true blood-bought Christian character (2 Pet 1:5-8). Finishing well, bringing to harvest, overcoming sin, entering the Kingdom with confidence is incredibly demanding work. The man of God is called to theologize. He is appointed by God to think deeply about God; to live a God-ward life, and to teach, preach, and live the ‘big picture’—that is that all things exist for the glory of Christ. Note the metaphors for this kind of godly labor: farmer, athlete, soldier, faithful man, truth broker, etc. (2 Tim 1-2).
The devil is out to damn souls by defacing the image of God as much as possible. Here is where true believers need to think sharply. The sins of the flesh are not merely forbidden illicit pleasures, they are idols which break souls apart. Francis Schaeffer describes an idol as a ‘false integration point’. In other words, what promises integration, wholeness, meaning, fulfillment, etc. actually fragments, addicts, and enslaves. Since we are made for God, all finite integration points will prove to be idols. Satan takes possession of souls by the ruling lusts in a man’s life. When the flesh is allowed to set the standard of a man’s behavior, the devil is at the helm of that man’s life—and apart from the grace of repentance, the evil one will pilot and shepherd that soul into the very mouth of hell where the soul will be eternally fragmented (the second death).
The devil tempts believers to play at the edge of hell. The book of Jude indicates that departure from the faith once for all given to the saints involves turning the grace of God into a license to sin. In James chapter one, believers are sternly warned that giving place to temptation creates the conditions necessary for enticement. And enticement involves believing the false promises of the flesh. Once this fleshly promise ‘gestates’ in the life of the mind, it gives birth to acts of sin. Porn use plants 100’s and 1000’s of images for present and future enticement (the DNA of damnation). According to James 1, that is a death wish.
Christ died to purchase, refine, purify, deliver, present His church, His people to Himself. The warranty, or evidence that Christ has purchased us is manifested in our commitment to Christ’s cause, which is to present us to Himself without spot or wrinkle (holy) (Eph 5). Our mortification of sin, our reckoning of ourselves as dead to the sins Christ died to destroy (Col 3) is evidence we truly know Him and are radically identified with His cause.
We are ineffably transformed into the likeness of what we worship (Ps 115; 135). If it is the Lord whom we worship, then our lives will increasingly become Christ-like (2 Cor 3). If it is the appetites of the flesh which hold the desires of our hearts, then we will increasingly become selfish, self-centered, proud, sensual, and demanding. This operative principle of transformation is inseparable from a man’s destiny.
Beauty is a major part of the battlefield, or battle for the soul. True beauty is always joined to the true, the real, and the good. The devil’s lie rips beauty from its divine context—making it an idol which degrades (Gen 3). God has created us for the experience of the transcendent—for that is who He is. Beauty is enriching because it is a kind of ‘glory pointer’ which aims us toward God’s transcendence—enjoying and worshipping God is our creational calling. Living obediently in a fallen world involves much discernment. For, beauty includes the human body. But, the beauty of the human body requires the God-given context of purity, matrimony, and marital covenant. This leads to our next porn blocker.
Our idolatrous culture has normalized the worship of sex and the body. The human body is sacred because it is the second ‘half’ of the soul-body binary which is the image of God. The naked body is not for public viewing. For, the image of God is so weighty, bearing so much gravitas, that the naked fallen human creature publicly disrobed is shameful because it cannot in its present corrupt state adequately represent God as His image. Our post-Christian culture, by its normalizing of nudity, immodesty, lewdness, and sexual sin, has desacralized the human body. Our Christian discernment must identify this desacralizing as prurient and abnormal in God’s world. That conclusion is essential to our discernment, and it is vital to our protection from temptation, and to our victory in holy warfare.
The lascivious woman, whether visual (digital) or in the flesh is the ‘strange woman’ described in Proverbs (Prov 2; 6). She is ‘strange’ because she is an adulteress—she is foreign to the covenant of marriage. Relations with her, whether in the mind as a sexual fantasy, or in the flesh, are never legal, but sinful. By her immodesty, lewdness and inviting gaze, she lures the naïve man into her clutches. Scripture states that it will cost him his life—his soul (Prov 7). Believing men must remind themselves constantly in our sex-worshipping culture that gross immorality has been ‘normalized’. To live by the appetites of the flesh is to be an enemy of the cross of Christ (Phil 3). The gift of sexual oneness is holy, but when it is torn from its moral context of monogamous marriage, it destroys souls.