Porn

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Reading "Surfing For God"

When I was in high school, my best friend's dad smoked a pipe.  Coming from a Baptist family, who were all non-smokers, had only used pipe cleaners in craft projects.  I was waiting for Denise one day, at their dining room table and amused myself with what was available.

Now...imagine the horror that she felt when she discovered that I had made little animals out of all of her dad's pipe cleaners!  Imagine my confusion when told her dad used "pipe cleaners" to...well...clean his pipes!  She was afraid that her dad would be angry at the wrong use of his pipe cleaners.

There was a legitimate use of the pipe cleaners that I didn't quite have the experience to "get."

(this is not a good parallel, but it meant something to me.)

In reading "Surfing for God," the author, Michael John Cusick, related a story:

My friend Danny is passionate about baseball. He is also deeply committed to working on his soul—understanding his brokenness and walking with Jesus to be restored. In 2005 we drove together to the Colorado Rockies’ opening day game. During our drive he shared that he hadn’t missed an opening day game in years.

Through his involvement in a men’s group, he realized that he “needed” to attend opening day the way an alcoholic needs a drink. Danny had recently discovered that opening day numbed the pain of growing up with an absent father because it symbolized the minimal time and attention his father gave him. His legitimate desire for fatherly involvement attached itself to a designer gift—a legitimate good.

But because attendance at opening day was an attempt to protect himself from the pain of his wound, the legitimate good became a counterfeit good. He was turning stones into bread. The game we attended was the first time his heart was free from the need to be there. (1)

It reminds me of something that C.S.Lewis wrote

If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad... But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things.

The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much...I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness.

Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled...In order to be bad he must have good things to want and then to pursue in the wrong way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order to be able to pervert them.(2)

Cusick echoes this:

Every gift from our Designer has a corresponding gift from the deceiver—a “shadow” gift. And you can bet your three hundred ringgits that every deceiver gift is a counterfeit. Satan cannot create anything; he can only take what has been created and twist it against its design. So, we are tempted to overindulge the Designer’s gift of food. We might make a god out of alcohol—turning to it addictively to meet all sorts of inner needs—or maybe we make a god out of not drinking alcohol. We are deceived into believing that deceiver gifts will actually make us flourish.(3)
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So, something in the sermon on Sunday reminded me of those pipe cleaners, which triggered the memory of this segment of the book.

I had taken a "thing" with a use - a use for which the thing was made, and made something frivolous of it.   I cannot see making animals out of pipe cleaners as "bad" - but it certainly isn't the intended use.

Food isn't bad - God gave us the good gift of food.  But abusing food twists the good gift into a bad use.

God gave us the good gift of sex, with an intended good use.  We can twist that good gift by using it outside of the intended arena.

I've written on "lady porn" - trashy romance novels that twist the good gift of romance into mere fodder for emotional flights of fantasy.  This abuse of a good gift can twist a marriage into a competition of sorts, where the husband feels the need to live up to the "romance" of his wife wanting to be swept off her feet by a "knight in shining armor."

More and more current studies show that women share the porn problem with men.  Women may get different things from porn than men do, but the problem gets shared.  Women twist the good gift of sex and intimacy just as easily as men do.

Cusick wrote:

We begin our journey from slavery to freedom when we expose the counterfeits at the root of our brokenness and admit our thirst for the real thing.(4)

.When a woman uses porn (or lusty romance novels, or food, or anything else) because we thirst for something else...what do we thirst for?

When I feel stressed at work, I do this crazy thing:  I hit the quarter machine.  You know, you put in a quarter and turn the knob and it gives you 11 or 12 Good~n~Plenties.  But I can't just eat them.  I need to line them up...pink and white and pink and white...and I need to eat them in the right order.  When I thirst for order and control, I feel that I can quench that thirst by arranging and eating pink and white candies in the right order.  That's some sort of twisted...

Humans twist all sorts of things, and the point of this post centers on porn, but it doesn't need to...throughout life test all things...do you have the "right use" in mind?  or something else?

 

  1. Cusick, Michael John (2012-06-05). Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle (Kindle Locations 1174-1183). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
  2. Lewis, C.S.  Mere Christianity, Book 2
  3. Cusick, Michael John (2012-06-05). Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle (Kindle Locations 1183-1187). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
  4. Cusick, Michael John (2012-06-05). Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle (Kindle Locations 1195-1196). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

 

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The article is here.

My General Opinion:

If a Christian marriage is supposed to mirror Christ and the church, Molher's teaching is a full on assault on gospel-defined love in marriage (the UNdeserved favor of mercy and the ILL-deserved favor that is grace.)  Molher has warped  the testimony that IS the image of Christian love having replaced it with a loathsome treadmill of legalistic, regular performance and reward.

A Covenant Blessing?  Or "Regularly Earned Privilege?"

The privilege of marital intimacy, in Mohler’s teaching, comes from performance, not covenant, which means it’s no longer a covenant blessing – an expected part of a Christian marriage.  It is now a reward.

This goes beyond sexual intimacy as a right that can be lost – it is now a privilege that must be earned.

The argument goes - "so, you would force a wife to have sex, no matter how her husband behaves?"

There is a huge difference between starting out with a covenant blessing, and forfeiting that blessing by behavior that is covenant-breaking...and having to earn marital intimacy to start with.

This is the direct opposite of the gospel; this is full pelagianism in the sexual arena – a man must fully, and regularly earn his reward.  Gone is the image of “one flesh” and in its place we find a life lived under constant performance judgment, reward, or retaliation.

If a Christian marriage reflects Christ and the church, this teaching tells us that we enter into a covenant relationship with our Lord, and then we have to earn Enghetti.

When a “privilege” must be “regularly” earned, it explicitly communicates the premise that the starting point is…nothing.  Mohler is not teaching that Enghetti can be lost…he’s teaching that the husband’s default is the desert…and he must “regularly” earn the oasis of the marriage bed.

So...What if He Stumbles...?

If her husband does not “obey the word” – a wife will not win him “without a word by her conduct” by violating  1 Peter 3:1

A wife’s openness to her husband inspires his love toward her, bringing more closeness between them, allowing him to give more of himself to her.  Marital intimacy should not be a system of “carrot and stick” to allow him to earn access to the marriage bed!

1 Cor. 7:3 says “ The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.”  The KJV says, “due benevolence” – marital intimacy is “benevolence,” not an earned privilege.

I would submit that if a wife only gives of herself when all is well, or worse, only when he as performed to her expectation, that's not "due benevolence".

If she only "wants" sex when she wants it, when he has earned it...on her terms, that tags her with Mohler's description of him: "the accomplishment of sexual fulfillment."

It is when she gives of herself for HIM - to HIM, for HIS sake - not because he has earned it, but because she loves him, that's love.  When she gives to him, not because his behavior has earned it, but because her heart wants it, that's covenant love.

Final Thoughts:

Mohler writes:

Rather than taking satisfaction in his wife, he looks at dirty pictures in order to be rewarded with sexual arousal that comes without responsibility, expectation, or demand

Rather than making the battle against pornography a team effort, it becomes a battle of the sexes instead.

SHE gets to decide if he has earned sex.  SHE gets to decide if he has earned marital intimacy. SHE gets to decide of his behavior is good enough to give of herself.

All he can do is stay on the treadmill and hope that he measures up to her standards, whatever those standards might be.

If we bring “man and wife” back to “Christ and the church…” It doesn’t get any worse than this.

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A Prayer for Friends Struggling with Pornography

Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. Romans 7:21-8:2

Jesus, my heart goes out today for friends and their spouses whose lives are being assaulted by the ravaging and enslaving grip of pornography.  I know of no other power sufficient for the task but the gospel. This is why I run to you today with grave concern, but also with great hope.

I invite you to read the rest. (HT: Challies)

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She was sitting in her chair when he got home, settled in to watch a rented move...a "chick flick"

"Why can't you be more like him?" she asked her husband. He shook his head and thought...I'm not him. I'm me and I want to be wanted for who I am.

He nuzzled her neck and whispered..."let's head for bed."

She lifted her shoulder and gently pushed him away, "No, I'm in the middle of this movie. I don't feel like it tonight."

He backed away from her "cold shoulder" and walked to the home computer. Click.

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Using porn is the choice of the person viewing it. But within a marriage, there is another person involved. If it's the husband using, the wife is also involved.

I will never say that a husband's choice to use porn is the sin of the wife.

I will say that the sin of the wife of denying her husband could (and sometimes does) lead to the temptation of the husband to use porn.

We have a responsibility to help one another avoid temptation. When we don't help, we often hurt.