Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:00] Speaker B: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 05:00 p.m. Or Wednesdays at 07:00 p.m.. If you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us online at Madison Church.
Be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our sermons podcast, madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Good evening and welcome to class. We're going to go ahead and get started tonight. If you haven't already, please go ahead and scan the QR code or click on the link. If you're with us online and take a very quick survey. This will give us some helpful information, more demographic information about our audience. It's anonymous, so you don't have to provide any of your contact information or anything. We just kind of want to know the demographics and then just a little bit of a survey about some of the topics that we've been talking about specifically last week and this week. This is your first time in this class.
You've come in in the middle of a conversation and boy, it has been fun. We are talking specifically about technology and how it impacts our faith. Last week and this week, we're talking specifically about the sexual nature of technology and how it has impacted faith and families and just a whole lot of stuff.
If you are at home in particular and you have some young people that are in the room with you, I do want to give you a heads up that this is an adult Bible class and this particular topic in particular, we're talking about some very adult things. So I would encourage you to perhaps put bluey on in another room and let them go watch that for a little bit while we have some grown up conversations that I believe are much needed and are probably long overdue for many of us in the church setting. Last week, we talked specifically about the idea of taboo things in the church. That list of topics that we don't talk about in church and how that's really just a big old fat lie. There is nothing that we should not talk about among God's people. There's not a list of topics that are off limits, especially when it comes to sin. The church building is not a country club. This is a place. This is a hospital. This is a gathering of people who are striving to become like Jesus, which means you struggle here. We all struggle here. We don't hide the struggle. We share in those struggles. We bear one another's burdens, as the scripture says. And there are certainly burdens when it comes to sexuality and the sexual part of our lives. Last week specifically, we framed the idea of biblical sex by the Scriptures and how Paul in particular, in one corinthians, five, six and seven, talks about sexual relationships. And in particular, he said for the husbands in chapter seven, that husbands, your body is not your own wives. Your body is not your own. They're for each other. And if you separate for a time, let it be for a specific time with the intention of coming back together. And during that time you're apart. You dedicate yourselves to prayer. So the sexual relationship that God has designed and that he has blessed and that he is deemed holy is one between a man and a woman. In marriage, in the bond, the commitment of marriage, we then spent some time talking about what happens with sex in our bodies, specifically in our brains, what chemicals and hormones in particular that are released. Oxytocin and vasopressin are the two main bonding hormones that are released in our brains. And the chemical reaction that happens when we have intimate moments with another person. And the way that works is it creates a neuropathway and it creates a path, quite literally a path in our brain for which to process our lives and how we put together the neural networks for how we see and create our worldview, essentially.
And when we have a relationship, a sexual relationship in the context in which God has designed, then those chemical reactions bond us to one another. And the illustration we used was piece of Scotch tape. You put it on a piece of paper the first time, it's a very strong bond. If you take it off of the paper, there's likely going to be some damage to the paper. It's going to be difficult to remove it. And then each time you try to reuse that piece of tape, it's going to become more difficult for that tape to bond deeply to another surface. The same thing happens with us, with our bodies. The Bible says in multiple places, beginning in Genesis, again in Ephesians as well, that two become one from a physiological standpoint. Two literally become one through this chemical reaction in our brains.
The woman oxytocin, that chemical in particular, we talked about how it's released in excess with sexual orgasm when giving birth, also when feeding a baby. Three very bonding, intimate bonding moments for the man vasopressin floods the brain and his olfactory senses are heightened and so smells, sights and sounds, those things are mapped in the brain in a very unique way.
And that's going to be important because tonight we're going to get into a little bit more detail about how pornography hijacks that God given and God designed process. And we did touch on that a little bit last week. But tonight we're going to look at a lot of stats. And I want to begin by kind of editor's note. A couple of weeks ago, I had quoted or misquoted or loosely referenced a person from the past. And he's in the category of Freud and Marx. We don't hear his name very often, but Wilhelm Reich, he kind of combined the thoughts of Freud who said that sex and the self is the center of all things. And of course, Marx says government is sort of the center of all things and all authority. And Reich has this really interesting blend where he essentially makes the point that sexual codes must be shattered if human beings are to be truly free in order to be free. Freud said that sexual desires must be free and run rampant. Right.
That's what leads us to freedom. But there was another point in here that I wanted to make that I thought was very interesting, that this fellow Carl Truman said if a person is in some deep sense the sexual desires that they experience, then how society treats those desires is an extremely important political question. And when we get into where we are today and the rise of the modern self, we see that happening to where my desires, my passions are who I am. That's my identity. And from a political standpoint, that is what rules the day. Right? We're in a time of deep contention, which there's never really been a time in humanity where there hasn't been contention since the Garden. But it seems to be unique to this particular generation in some of the headlines that we see and in a lot of the teachings and the political ideologies. Reich wrote those words and pinned those ideologies in the 1930s.
So truly there is nothing new under the sun. It was around it was prevalent in the we always think of the 50s as the golden age. Right? Well, things weren't perfect. Things have never been perfect since Genesis, chapter two. And so tonight we're going to talk specifically about pornography and some of the impacts and the ways that it influences not just younger generations, but all generations.
All right, we'll move on from our QR code there. Maybe we will not.
What about that?
All right. The two types of sexuality we noted in Scripture were holy and unholy. And then we moved into the idea of how does pornography shape our views of sex at different stages of life? That's where we're going to pick up tonight. The adolescent brain is mapped in a very interesting way. The adolescent brain has this hypersensitivity to pornography in particular, but to all things. Have you ever known an adolescent to be really excited about one thing one moment and then just really not excited about something the next moment?
I call that between like seven and 08:00 a.m.
And then over and over and over again throughout our day. There are lots of different reactions going on in the brain of an adolescent. Synapses are firing like crazy. Neuropathways are being developed, being mapped, being paved. Think of it as the transit system of the brain. The interstate system. It's being laid out. It's being paved over and over again with the different experiences and the different things that children learn.
So when you take that and you expose them to adult content of a sexual nature at a very young age, you can just imagine how the Interstate System will turn out.
When adolescents who are highly malleable in the biological world, we call that neuroplasticity. Very easy to program, very easy in what I refer to as the sponge stage of life. Don't waste the sponge. Right. We want to teach them while they're young.
The first thing you learn is typically the thing that you learn the most.
It's the thing you learn the deepest. So if you learn something one time, it's more difficult for someone to convince you that that should be different than the first time you learned it. For an example. Gen z. Somebody that's a member of Gen Z. It's not a sexual question, so you can raise your hand if feel comfortable. Anybody in Gen Z? Yes, ma'am. Thank you very bryn, you want to all right, hands up. Stand up for me just a second. Yeah, you regret it now, don't you? All right, let's see somebody that's a boomer. Okay, Tom. There you go. Stand up. I want you guys to answer at the same time, all right? Answer this question at the same time as best you can.
Is Pluto a planet? Go, you just saved humanity. Okay, ginzie. I thought this would work out totally different. That's good. Tom, what do you think?
There's the door, sir. This is Huntsville. It's a planet. That's right. Thank you. Have a seat. I thought that would turn out a lot different than it did.
I learned, growing up nine very elegant porcupines. My very elegant mother just sat upon nine porcupines. Well, if Pluto is no longer a planet, what did she sit upon?
It's a planet. Thank you very much. That's one thing that we learned as a kid that now has changed. Right.
But I still kind of think of it as a planet because that's what I learned first.
So it's important then, that the first thing that our children learn about God's design for sex is right.
Because the earlier they learn that, the more difficult it will be for them to unlearn that later.
It's very important that we not only teach, but we teach correctly. And we do it in a way that is effective. Growing up, my generation heard, don't have sex until you're married. And eventually that kind of turned into, sex is bad. And then when you become a Christian or become married sorry, all of a sudden now sex is good. That's a difficult switch to flip.
That's why we started last week with what is sex? Designed for, well, it's holy or it's unholy. And it's very important, I believe, for us to teach that accurately and correctly. We've talked a little bit in this class specifically about the idea of Tube platforms. You think of YouTube. When you go to YouTube, you can type in the search bar and you'll get a video or a list of videos. You click on the video you want to watch, and then what's on the side?
Suggested videos. And that is an infinite list of suggestions, right?
You can stream that for days and you click on another one, there's more suggestion. Click on another, there's more suggestion. Well, pornography sites work the same way. They're Tube based sites, which means you type in or you stumble upon one video, you're going to get a host of other options. And you click on that one, you get a host of other options. And this goes on forever and ever and ever. Infinite is not eternal. We said that several weeks ago. It's going to be a reoccurring theme.
The idea of infinite access to something typically does not yield holiness in our lives.
The first time we talked about that, we spoke about it in the context of Amazon and how have easy access to anything and everything doesn't always yield discipline.
It can yield 1242 inch tires on your front step for some reason, just because you accidentally pressed a button, or your child may or may not have pressed a button. There are lots of things that can happen when we have unlimited access.
We have to be the ones that install guardrails into our lives.
When adolescents get access to an unlimited amount of adult content that has a varying degree of violence, of racism, of sexual distortion, they don't have the skill set to build in guardrails.
We've mentioned a time or two that recently our Attorney General made a statement that social media is harmful partly because of these kinds of things that our kids can't build in guardrails for themselves. And so the adults in the room need to do that. Well, we've missed a generation or so. When the internet came into our homes, there was no longer a need to go to a store to purchase pornographic material. When the internet got into our pockets through our phones, there was no need to leave the room.
What pornography offers is anonymity.
It offers isolation.
It offers the person who is consuming pornography to be just that, a consumer in one corinthians. Paul does not say husband, you are a consumer of your wife. Wives, you are a consumer of your husband.
He says your body is not your own, implying that they have access to your body.
The way God designs sex is a giving of self. It is an offering of self to the other person.
When sexual pleasure is at its peak, it's when two people both have the same pursuit of offering pleasure to the other person.
What pornography does is it allows the person sitting in front of a screen to find their own individual pleasure.
And there's some unique things that happen in the brain. Remember we talked about how the connection that happens in an intimate or sexual encounter, those hormones that are flooded? Well, those things still happen, but now they're happening to the tune of whatever's on the screen.
What's remarkable is that there are studies out there that show that teenagers, late teens, 16 and 18 year olds are now entering into young adulthood with a lower sex drive than ever has been recorded.
We think of an overly sexualized society more so than we've ever been, and that's probably true.
But overstimulation does not necessarily lend itself to a deeper desire or a deeper pleasure. You think about an addict, someone who's addicted to cocaine, someone who's addicted to alcohol, someone who's addicted to nicotine.
It takes more consuming for them to get to the same base level of pleasure, right? Addiction does not yield pleasure. Addiction yields addiction, captivity. And in fact, the greater the addiction, the significantly less amount of pleasure is had in that process. So the person that is now giving themselves to this activity, whether it's an opioid or whether it's something sexual, it takes more content, takes more substance to get to the same level of pleasure. And eventually that just doesn't do it. Because the way dopamine works in our brains is that it likes for us to chase, right? Dopamine is we think of it as the pleasure hormone of the pleasure chemical in our brains. But it's really after the chase. It's not after the conclusion of the chase, it just wants to chase after that's. What's exciting delta phosph is what comes in and says, here is the pleasure part, here is the conclusion of the matter.
And then there's a hormone, kreb that comes in and it's sort of the breaks and it says, hey, delta phosphamine, you guys got to chill out.
It's what allows us, in the midst of an adrenaline rush, to say, this is harmful, this is not good. When we get up to 100 miles an hour, we look up and say, there's a turn ahead, I should probably slow down. And it quite literally puts the brakes on. But what we have in pornography is this unlimited access, 24/7. This unlimited and the most unique thing, not just the access of 24/7, but the amount of novelty that pornography offers keeps the brain churning. And it takes that crab, that emergency break, and it just says, move aside.
Because we have superstimulators in pornography that allows us to just over and over again dive into this world that eventually breeds addiction, remaps the brain and changes how we see everything around us. Growing up, I was always told you don't need to listen to bad music, don't listen to the rap music, young people don't watch the bad movies. It's going to change how you think. And as a child I thought there and said, you're quite old, but thanks.
And I went out and I listened to the rap music, much to my parents chagrin. Sorry.
I also watched the movies that I wanted to watch and one day I was driving to campus and somebody cut me off in front and I slammed on the brakes and then out came a word that typically didn't come out of my mouth.
And I sat there for a minute and said, where did that come from?
So I changed it back to the Beach Boys.
What you put into your brain, what you consume with your eyes, the eyes connected to your heart, jesus taught that what you consume eventually will consume you in a very real way.
And that's no more obvious than here in this realm of pornography dopamine surges are the barometer which you determine the potential, the excitement of an experience. And so when Kreb no longer does what it's supposed to do, you don't have an emergency break. And that is when addiction is just wide open. And that's for opioids, that's for substances, that's for any kind of behavior. That's especially true for sexual behavior. According to an online web tracker, four of the top 14 most visited websites in 2023 were adult pornography sites. That includes Google, YouTube, TikTok, yahoo. Wikipedia. All of those were ahead of the four.
But those four websites were ahead of Zoom. They were ahead of another version of Yahoo. They were ahead of Amazon, amazon, for crying out loud. And they were ahead of Reddit, which has millions of users every day in various chat rooms and discussion groups.
Four websites were higher than them. Nearly half of Porn site visitors are between the ages of 18 and 34 according to this survey. 80% are men, 20% are women. More and more studies are showing that the addiction of women or women in use of pornography is increasing.
Common sense. Media has done a lot of research as well and they take it from a family friendly standpoint and they track about the same. They say that about 70% of the survey they did, and their survey was a little over 1000 people. So not a massive survey by any means, but about 70% admitted to regular, weekly or more pornography consumption. Adult content consumption. From 2013 to 2017, there was a reported rise in female friendly pornography by 1400% over the last year. Pornhub, which is one of the more popular adult sites, they do an annual report of their content and their searches. Terms for LGBTQ and transgender are ranking higher and higher on their searches, which indicates that there is an increase in novelty. Like we've mentioned, there's an increase in equality in the porn industry, that it is expanding. It's not catering specifically just to men, it's marketing to all sexual orientations that are out there.
And we also talked about how our young people, our emerging generations are maturing faster, or, excuse me, maturing slower.
But they're finding adult content sooner, and there's greater novelty and there's more of an endless supply than there's ever been. A 2021 Bark annual report revealed that 68.97% of tweens so just under 70% of tweens just before their teenagers and 90.73% of teens encountered nudity or content of a sexual nature online. Nearly 91% of teenagers had encountered sexual content or nude content online.
I've heard parents say, my kids got to learn to use social media at some point. I got to learn to use a smartphone at some point. And that is very true. At some point you got to learn to drive a car.
I don't give my twelve year old the keys I will never give my twelve year old the keys to go and drive on the interstate because they don't have the cognitive development to make the decisions necessary to navigate safely. Also, they can't reach the pedals.
How old do you think your child needs to be before you drop them in the middle of downtown?
Pick a major city.
That's the analogy I use for social media. But when we give them a smartphone with zero parameter, zero limiters on it, with no extra adult supervision, you might as well just take them to the red light district of any major city and say, good luck kid, we'll see you at dinner.
All of the things that we've been talking about are so connected because of the way technology forms and shapes us.
But what we've been talking about is satan's toolbox.
What we've been talking about is how we feel good about using things that are so unbelievably powerful.
Nuclear energy is amazing when used for the right purpose in the right context. Nuclear energy can be so damaging when used maliciously.
Alfred Nobel created the Nobel peace prize so that he would be known for that and not for dynamite. As people started using that in wars and countries started buying his creation and destroying people with it.
How we navigate this particular age of humanity is vitally important for the adults in the room that have been Christians for many years and that perhaps grew up in a more analog life. The times, they are changing. Bob Dylan once said, he's right.
Samson Solomon also right. Nothing new under the sun. The sins are the same. Lust, greed, selfishness, murder, envy, strife. Yep, all present, all accounted for. Deception, lies.
But how we access those changes now, weekly, it seems like. So if we parent today the exact same way we parented 2040, 60, 80 years ago, we're going to miss some things. What we typically miss. As we talk about raising a new generation of teenagers and young people, we forget that we're also raising a new generation of parents.
These stats are not just numbers. These stats are souls.
These stats are the future of the church.
So how does it develop? Well, we talked about adolescence. One survey from Common Sense Media said that 15% said that they first saw online pornography at age ten or younger. 15%, the average age reported is twelve. That tracks with what we said last week. The average age was right there in that 12, 13, 14 range. 44% have seen it intentionally. Additionally, 58 have seen it accidentally. 71% who said they have intentionally watched pornography reported viewing it in the last week. Unintentional exposure to pornography could be a common experience for teens at 63% said they have only seen pornography accidentally reported that they had been exposed to pornography in the past week sorry. And 45% felt that online viewing pornography online gave them helpful information about sex.
Sex education the number one teacher of that has become pornography.
I talked to one of our teachers here recently and she said that in 7th grade they have instructions about sex, sex ed, and specifically don't send pictures of yourself to other classmates.
That has to be instructed to our children today because they've been given keys to a Maserati and they've never had a single driving lesson.
We put them in a Formula One race car and we say, lean into the turn, kid.
It's a real big deal. And the fact that we don't talk about it actually makes it a much bigger deal. And it's only uncomfortable because we allow it to be uncomfortable. You know what's uncomfortable?
People's souls being won by the devil.
That's what makes Christians uncomfortable. That's what makes us awkward. Right.
Everything else shouldn't be the case.
So when these adolescents that have now grown up in this and particularly millennials is where we really started to see the surge of the dark triad remember we talked about that anxiety, depression and suicide ideation.
Social Media 2012 was a big one when more than half of the teenage population began having access to that. So teens, adolescents turn into teenagers and teenagers turn into young adults. So what happens there? Well, neurons that fire together wire together. So increased exposure to lustful content combined with a change in hormones. Listen, raise your hand if you've already made it through middle school.
100%. Right. Hey, good job, guys. Way to go. We did it, right?
It's the worst.
You're trying to figure stuff out and you talk like this a lot and things happen on your face that appear that you don't know where they came from or how to get rid of them. But all of a sudden it's a lunar landing, right? So many weird things are happening and on top of that we're adding in this complication and this disturbing content that they're trying to figure things out.
We used to learn about sex mostly from our friends.
In that survey you took, you were asked, did your parents have a conversation or conversations with you?
Typically the trends that I see are minimal.
So we're not talking about it, we're not teaching our children about it? Where are they learning from? It no longer just their friends.
They're going to the Internet, and they're finding everything the world has to say about it that is unacceptable, that will destroy a generation.
So these young adults, these teenagers, they turn into young adults. They go through middle school, high school, and now they also have access to all the social media apps. And as they're learning about their body, kids don't necessarily advance at the exact same rate in time, right? Some early bloomers, late bloomers, somewhere in between.
So now we have access to a camera 24/7 that could also send images to other people, and they've been sold a lie that there's an app or 30 of them, that it's safe because it's temporary.
There's no such thing as temporary anymore. Ask any politician in the last 15 years that said something when they were in college that was stupid, that got brought back up during an election.
And our kids are living in real time. They're being shaped by that. I remember when the first boomer president, not to point out the boomers again, but he tried to redefine the word, is when he had an extramarital affair in the Oval Office. Right. I learned what oral sex was by listening to the radio as a child in the early 90s because the president had an inappropriate relationship.
Our kids are growing up hearing all these terms and figuring it out one way or the other.
It's not just them. Our teenagers go to college. Our college students become young adults.
But now we've had years of this addiction, perhaps on and off, or perhaps steady this addiction that still trying to come to church, still trying to be around spiritual people, still trying to learn how to break the addiction, how to get rid of the temptation.
And what happens is that guilt. Guilt is designed to lead us to God, right? Guilt is like a pain in your stomach. It's a, hey, something's wrong here.
You don't necessarily go to fix the pain. You go to fix the problem, because otherwise you're just treating symptoms well. Guilt is meant to say, hey, something's wrong. You're a Christian. This is not who you are. This is an identity crisis. The activities you're participating in, the way you're thinking, it's not right. It's not leading you to God, to point you back to God. When we ignore that guilt or we live with that guilt, eventually that guilt turns into shame.
Guilt says, I did something wrong. Shame says, I am something wrong.
And so now when we live with this hidden sin that we think nobody else knows about, or we think that nobody else could forgive me, even God himself, we can't talk about it with anybody. I can't share my struggle with anybody. It's horrifying because there's sin, and God hates all sin. All sin is the same, except for the fact that we really, really know that God really. Really hates sexual sin because we put that on a pedestal of shame.
And in this hospital where we're supposed to gather together to worship God with a clean conscience, we're supposed to lay our burdens down. We're supposed to lift each other up. We're supposed to bear one another's burdens. The one place we can go and share, for whatever reason, we've created this culture where we can't share those things.
So we suffer in silence. And last week we talked about what it sounds like when someone drowns. It sounds like this.
You rarely hear someone drown. You have to have eyes on them.
We have to be in each other's worlds. We have to be a person that is trustworthy, that has developed a relationship with other people so that other people feel like they can share that you're a safe person.
And that's not just something that's unique to Gen Z.
We have to be safe for each other because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And if you believe that, start living it and start telling other people that start confessing sin to one another.
We kind of think that the Catholic Church has this market on sin, on confession because they have cool little know with a little screen and things and I mean that sounds cool. I used to love the phone booth back in the day. Superman would not have had a career without it. But we don't need a booth to confess. We need a friend. We need a brother and a sister and we need faith in God.
Our faith in God should always trump our faith in people. Your faith in people are always going to let you down. I promise you that. I promise you I will let you down at some point. The people sitting beside you will let you down at some point and you're going to do the same. So what? But God the Father, his Son came to die for every one of us so that we could confess that sin. The yoke is easy, his burden is light. I found it so I found it. So we sing it right, but do we live it? Do we believe it? So we move from college into young adulthood and hopefully by that time we're not giving up yet. But they're trapped in this cycle of pornography and this is something I think is a biblical it's a biblical point. But also research now indicates that while guilt can motivate healthy change, shame actually fuels problematic porn habits. Guilt says this behavior is bad while shame says I am a bad person. So now pornography becomes a means of coping.
When you're sad, when you're depressed, when you're frustrated, when you're tired, pornography becomes that coping mechanism. It becomes that way for you to deal. The same way a glass of brandy becomes a coping mechanism for an alcoholic.
When things get difficult, they go to the mechanism. We all cope one way or the other.
It's actually remarkably, I think it would be shocking to know how many of us don't cope well with life.
And that's not to call anybody out for any. That's to say that it's hard, that it's difficult because there are so many opportunities to cope in an unhealthy way.
Every vice out there is offering a coping mechanism to each and every one of us.
Alcohol hits for some, not for others.
Lustful content hits for some, not for others. Because it's not yours doesn't mean it's not a thing. But this is an actual academic journal that is citing the connection of guilt and shame to pornography. And so in the shame, when we live in the shame, we feel like we are awful, we are bad. And so no one could love us, including God. We don't confess it, we live with it. And then eventually we just get to a point where we're tired of doing that and we just embrace it.
And I've seen that with some of our own spiritual family here at Madison where they go and they find a community that embraces everything that they feel, all of their passions. And we didn't even give ourselves a chance to be there for them.
Young, marrieds and families.
One statistic that I read says that if a couple watches pornography, their chances of divorce increase by 200%. I don't know exactly how you get a stat like that, but it sounds pretty awful. I don't really want to know how you get a stat like that.
A couple of other things that I want to throw out to you. And when talking about the delta phosphate process in Kreb, it doesn't stand much of a chance. In the era of supernormal stimuli, the numbed Kreb response induced is often called desensitization.
So when that emergency brake no longer works, we get desensitized. And that's where that dopamine level has to increase.
One stat here said that subjects might see a square seconds before the appearance of pornography. After several rounds of this procedure, subjects consciously and unconsciously connect a square with porn and sexual arousal. All objects quickly condition their arousal to symbols predicting porn. But compared to controls the compulsive porn uses, it's a lot of talk. Basically. Remember Pavlog when he rang a bell, the dogs got hungry, they started to salivate. Well, if there's this pattern of porn consumption, the way the brain works, even the object so a particular laptop can become what we call today a trigger. It can become that stimuli, so a phone can become that stimuli that we can't get away from this pattern that we've created in our lives now it's an actual wiring of the brain.
So when we say, I'm going to pray for you, that's super, please do that.
What do we say? Last week is better than I'll pray for you? Being the answer to someone's prayer in person, in the flesh, in their life at lunch, at work, at school, at church.
This is a very different it's a very different sin in the sense of the consequences and the manipulation.
It's a very sophisticated tool of the devil and we're just now catching up to some of it.
This was an interesting line.
Masturbating to pornography to prepare for sex is like playing golf for years to compete at Wimbledon. It's training for the wrong sport. One quote from a study said I will never get enough of what doesn't satisfy me and it never ever satisfies me.
So if we now have years of this pattern of pornography, consumption and self pleasure and then we try to enter into a marriage in pursuit of holiness, where we're supposed to give of ourselves, we've taught ourselves when it comes to sex, I'm just here to consume.
There are other studies that show that there's a significant increase in abusive porn and revenge porn.
Pornhub, the company I mentioned earlier, they're in multiple lawsuits. They had to remove about half of their content over the last couple of years because of the lack of validating ages of people that were on their feed.
Porn affects brain development. It affects personality development. It affects current and future relationship. It affects body image. It destroys a child's innocence. There are multiple audiences in the room tonight and probably online as well to the parents for just a moment that have young children.
There has never been a time where passive parenting was successful.
It is beyond impossible today.
The ODS are stacked pretty heavily against us.
And I'm not just here to be a Debbie Downer.
There is a source that we have that will conquer all and that is the gospel.
So it is possible, but it takes actively researching and learning. We can't stop learning about our bodies after we get out of high school biology class or physiology class.
We need to keep learning. We need to learn technology for the sake of our children's souls. I'm not a tech person. I don't care. That doesn't matter.
You're a lover of people, right? You love your children, your grandchildren.
All of this has come from the internet and from books.
We need to research. We need to learn for the people that are in this room that are struggling mightily with this particular sin. I know that it feels like there is no escape sometimes. I know that it feels like there is no hope sometimes.
If you're in a marriage relationship and you feel like there's distance, it's because there is there is hope and there is a future for you that is bright and that is pure.
When it comes to sex, there are physical things that cannot be made whole again, so to speak, or made new again. Spiritually speaking. We were always made whole and new again.
The brain, for all its neuroplasticity that we've talked about, is still trainable.
The brain can be reprogrammed very successfully. It's challenging takes a long time. It takes a lot of help. We have some resources here. We have counselors. We have one counselor in particular. Darren, if you wouldn't mind standing for just a moment. Darren Crowdon is one of our counselors on staff and deals specifically with sex addiction. If you find yourself in a state where you can't get rid of this addiction and you've sought wise counsel from friends, seek wise counsel from spiritual mentors. It may also be a possibility that Darren could be a big help to you, to help you reprogram, help you understand how your brain is working and how you can find ways to get past that and to reprogram it.
If you are a person that is married excuse me, that is unmarried in this room, and you seek to be married one day, you need to commit everything you have to getting rid of this habit and this sin in your life.
And I say that with as much grace but as much passion as I possibly can. Every moment that you invest in self pleasure and every moment you invest in pornography, consumption is an investment in the destruction of your family and your marriage. And there's zero embellishment there.
This is where Satan lives.
Jesus said that if you look at a woman to lust, you have already lusted in your heart. Lust is an issue of the heart.
There is a difference in temptation and sin. And James outlines that, but he says, if we don't deal with temptation, it will lead to sin. And sin, when it gives birth, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.
This is something we have to take serious. It's something that you have to pursue with all your might, and you have to put in guardrails, and you have to pay a subscription to a coveted eyes or to some program to put a guardrail in because we can't trust ourselves with our devices. For the young person that is no longer in college and now lives on their own, there's very little accountability. That's not fair, because you have no accountability, but you've got 24/7 access. It's not a fair fight. Don't think that it's a fair fight. Fight back with other things, with other people.
Prayer is the first place to start. It's the first place to end, the last place to end every single day.
If you really wanted to find out some other things about how this is going, you can find yourself looking on different websites like Fightthewdrug.org and Your Brain on Porn. Both of these websites have podcasts. They have research, they have all kinds of helpful information. Parents, you need to be very familiar with these sites. You need to go to what is the one Ashton Kutcher started?
I'll find it and I'll send it to you later. He started a nonprofit organization that helps with human trafficking to try to end human trafficking. I have a friend that works for the Secret Service. It's a secret.
He recently was a part of a pretty big bust in our community where they rescued a young boy who was contacted online by an old man who then got together and stole him. And he said, we got him back. It was great. It's still under pending all the judiciary stuff, so I can't talk in detail. He said, we got him back. And then he said something that kind of gave me chills. He said, that just doesn't happen all the time.
I'm sorry. Thorn. Thank you. Thorn.org is another one. Thorn.org. I'll have a list of resources for us here in a couple of weeks. I'll put it together in a document. You'll have access to all of that. He also said that we live in a unique community because we have Nashville to the north, we have Birmingham to the south and Atlanta to the east. And we're in this corridor for human trafficking. 565, highway 20.
It's a real thing.
Sexual addiction is a real thing.
Lust is a real thing.
And if it's a real thing, we have to respond appropriately. We have to make sure that we are wise. We've said that every single week. We have to make sure that we are in each other's lives. We've said that every week. We say that every week when we take the Lord's supper.
We have to be willing to if we're going to fellowship on that level, to that depth, we have to fellowship. When it comes to our temptations, when it comes to our sins and our struggles, there's no excuse and there's no other way to do church the way God described it.
If you are struggling, I'm begging you, come talk to me. Talk to someone else in this room. Talk to Darren, talk to anyone. Talk to someone.
Let's begin praying together. Let's begin putting in some boundaries and some guardrails in your life. If you're a parent and you're struggling, you don't know what to do. Let's talk. Let's figure it out.
God loves us very much. I love you very much. I'm not the only one.
It's inexcusable for us to let this continue to go on in silence and on the list of taboo. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the time You've given us to be together tonight, to study Your Word and to also become wise of the realities that are all around us. Father, help us to find joy in helping each other. Help us to find joy in bearing one another's burdens. Most of all, help us to be vulnerable with each other. Help us to be vulnerable with you. Because Christ gave the ultimate sacrifice and gave us the ultimate example of vulnerability by allowing Himself to come to this earth to be poured out. We thank you so very much for his sacrifice, for his death burial, for his resurrection, for the fact that he appeared to many others after his resurrection. And I pray, Father, that we have that same mentality approach to life to die, that we bury the old self, including our sexual temptations and struggles, that you would raise us up to a new life, that others would see that appearance in us. We thank you, Father, for Christ, in his name we pray. Amen.
Yes.
[00:45:14] Speaker C: But I actually work with sex and point addiction as well, but I really work more with spouses. So if you are a spouse and you feel like your partner has a problem or if you're a female and you don't feel comfortable talking, there's those options.
[00:45:32] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:45:32] Speaker C: We have a really good community here in the Huntsville Madison area that has a lot of resources for this because it is a big problem. And so there are all kinds of support groups that are faith based. I mean, there's a lot of resources.
[00:45:51] Speaker A: Go to our website. This is actually on our church website under Serve. Go to the counseling ministry, and all of their contact information is listed there for Becky, for Darren, and for Karen. And in case you didn't hear her, she sees specifically spouses, the folks that are struggling with sexual addictions. And we have a lot of resources in our community for this particular struggle as well. So be sure and reach out. Their contact information is listed there on the webpage. Any other thoughts or comments?
All right, have a great night.
Bye.
