Canada Revenue Agency and Porn - Part 2 - Taking The Bait

Now that I have your attention with a “clickbaity” title, lets talk about scammers and pornography. Recently, I preached a sermon on porn and sexual immorality at my local church, and this is part 2 of a 3 part blog that is more or less the sum total of what I said. I am posting it here because, unfortunately, pornography exists in counseling and as counselors, it is important that we wrap our heads around what is happening, and what is needed. Read Part 1 Here. Read Part 3 Here.

In Part 1, I explained the prevalence of pornography. So why do we pursue Pornography and sexual immorality?  We can’t ultimately blame the presence of temptation.  We choose to sin.  So why are we letting culture lull us into complacency?  I will offer two reasons.

Sex is Broken

In Genesis 1:28 God says, “Be fruitful and multiply.”  Simply put, have lots of joyful sex.  In obeying God’s command, it is an act of worship. 

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28 ESV)

In Genesis 2:25 it says, “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”  Here God is illustrating how a relationship between husband and wife is meant to be barrier free.  No shame, no secrets.  They can expect mutuality, reciprocity and above all else, love that results in worship. They serve each other through that act of worship.

Rather than sex be something that a husband and wife engage in to serve one another as an act of worship, we pervert it. We remove the sexual act from marriage. We use it to worship ourselves by presenting people as objects to be used, and we see sex as a vehicle to get what we need for ourselves.  Pleasure for sake of self pleasure.

Porn distorts sex in every way. 

When we consume porn, our view of sex the way God designed it, gets distorted.  When we consume porn, we say that God’s plan for sex and sexuality is not enough. When we start down that road with a distorted view, even as Christians, when we get married, we have learned a broken view of sex.  We come to expect things from our partners in order to fulfill our needs and our fantasies. We place demands on our spouses that God never intended.  Instead of sex being something we endeavour to serve each other with, we practice sex on demand.  Sex for me.  When we find ourselves digging into God’s word to get sex, because God says so…we find ourselves manipulating God for our own purposes.  This, in my opinion, is not worship at all, it’s self-fulfillment.

 Porn brings out the worst of our culture.  Porn is misogynistic, sexist, racist and abusive.  There are entire movements dedicated to countering these awful manifestations of human behaviour in our society and they should be eliminated. Yet some of those same movements value porn as a liberation of sexuality.  It really boggles the mind how these groups cannot see it.  In truth, I think that is starting to take a turn, but the damage is done in our society.  It’s our fault.  Porn is the vehicle to get what I want. 

Porn is just a tool that Satan uses to get us to worship anything else but God.

 God says in Exodus 20:3, “You shall have no other gods before me.” We make our own personal satisfaction more important than God and when we do that, we are blind to the truth. We sin against God and each other.

“You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3 ESV)

We Love Porn

The second reason is that we consume pornography because we love what it does for us. Even when we have reasons not to love it, largely because of the secrecy and shame related to porn, we pursue it anyway. We tend not to talk about this hidden aspect of porn, but let me explain.

Porn brings destruction to lives and families. If you are a wife whose husband struggles with porn, you know this too painfully well.  You want it to stop.  It’s painful.  You feel inadequate.  You feel like your husband is being unfaithful (because he is, it is adultery) Men, husbands, you know porn is destroying your family.  You know it is sin. Guilt and shame overcome you and for what seems to be a good reason, in the moment, you just want it to stop. And rightfully so. Yet, if we make porn a behaviour issue, we will short circuit the heart issue. When it comes to consuming porn, we use porn as a drug to mask the pain of life. 

I am a counselor, so I of course I am going to come at this from a shepherding point of view. It really does nothing for me to say porn is bad, and tell you to stop, because if that worked, I’d be out of a job, and quite frankly we probably wouldn’t need Jesus. 

The truth is, sexual immorality, including porn has a grip on us because it provides a payoff.  Albeit a bad payoff, but one we don’t see right away. It gives us something in the moment and the destruction of our physiology, brain chemistry and our family life, is a slow gradual process.

I will let the experts explain the chemical process.  Covenant Eyes, of whom my company is an affiliate, provides tons of resources to help you quit porn and along with that they have great data too.  Here is an excerpt from their e-book, Your Brain on Porn, explaining the chemical process:

God wired the brain in such a way that it wants to remember where our natural drives are satisfied.

 If the body is thirsty, the brain’s job is to remember in vivid detail where water can be found, and dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for helping us remember where to satisfy our natural drives.

 When sexually stimulated, dopamine is released into a region of the brain responsible for emotion and learning, giving the viewer a sense of sharp focus and an awareness of craving: “I have got to have this thing; this is what I need right now.” Dopamine supplies a great sense of pleasure. The next time the viewer gets the itch for more sexual gratification, small packets of dopamine are released in the brain, saying, “Remember where you got your fix last time. Go there to get it.”

 In the context of a secure marital relationship, this push to return to the source of pleasure brings couples back together again and again in sexual intimacy, building a bond of love.

 But in the context of viewing pornography, the effect is something altogether different. Continued exposure to porn, especially for long periods of time, releases surge after surge of dopamine, giving the brain an unnatural high. The brain eventually fatigues, limiting the release of dopamine, leaving the viewer wanting more but unable to reach a level of satisfaction. This is called desensitization.

 Everyday pleasures begin to lose their luster—including sex—and the viewer expands their pornographic tastes and seeks out more novel or harder pornography to get the same arousal.

 James says sin begins in strong desire, but “sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14-15). Growing sin brings about all forms of death—death to pleasure, death to relationships, and ultimately eternal death.

Excerpt from the Covenant Eyes e-book, Your brain on Porn.

We have problems, sorrow, pain and all sorts of things that make us want to escape the realities of life.  As we begin to view porn more and more to provide that escape we make ourselves increasingly slaves to the flesh and sin.

Paul agrees with James in his epistle to the Romans when he says in chapter 6, verses 20-21, “For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.(ESV)”

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. (Romans 6:20–21 ESV

Continue reading Canada Revenue Agency and Porn - Part 3 Here. Part 1 Here.