How serious is it when I look at pornography? When do we consider impurity? What does the Bible say? Not only is pornography a false teacher that will make you a failure at love and teach you to be a taker, not a giver, but there are also even more staggering consequences. This is a warning.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and we're here today to talk about the problem of pornography. The early church existed in a pornographic world, a pornified society, and so do we. Maybe theirs was worse. Ours is perhaps worse in a different way.

But we want to, in this podcast, focus on some harsh realities. We're calling this one facing reality because the scriptures really speak in a devastating way about being entrapped in immorality. And so applied to the matter of pornography, we want to bring various scriptures to bear. Scripture is sufficient to help us think through this thing, and so we plan to cover a number of passages of scripture that deal with this. And that really ought to be our approach.

What does the Bible say? In this case, that means that we need to warn. This podcast is a warning, and we also don't want to just leave with a warning, but to speak of the beauties of Christ and how one might escape. But the focus of this podcast will be for a warning. And we really are living in a remarkable time where researchers tell us that men are exposed to pornography at, on average, age 12, that there are billions of downloads every day, that 35% of the searches on the internet today are for pornography.

So it's a very difficult time. Pastors apparently are entrapped. Covenant Eyes tells us that probably 50,000 pastors in America are addicted to pornography. So that's the cultural situation that we exist in. And so Jason, I'm so glad we're able to talk about this very difficult subject.

Thanks for joining us. It's a sobering topic, but lust is every man's battle, so it actually needs to be talked about. Absolutely, and we have Paul Carrington with us, missionary from Turkey. Paul, so delighted to have you. Thanks for having me, Scott and Jason.

Appreciate being with you today. Okay, so Facing reality, if you're looking at porn, you need to recognize the danger to your soul, but maybe even before that, recognize what it means. And the scriptures speak about it. And there are lots of ways that we can talk about pornography. Pornography is a false teacher.

Pornography lies to you about relationships, it lies to you about sexual intimacy and frankly pornography will make you a failure at love It's like going to a business school to teach you how to fail in business That's what pornography does it teaches you how to fail at love. So it's a very, very pernicious thing. So I'm going to read some scripture. The first is Proverbs 2 verse 19, for her house leads down to death and her paths to the dead. None who go to her return, nor do they regain the paths of life." So what are your thoughts about that?

How do you interpret that practically? So it makes me immediately think of Galatians chapter 6 and the law of sowing and reaping, and how really believers and unbelievers alike are subject in different ways to the law of sowing and reaping. So you can't just say, this is under the blood of Christ, under the banner of Christ, and so I can live any way I want and there won't be any repercussions to it. I mean, this is saying that there can be permanent damages done in this category that you never come back from. And that's to the believer and the unbeliever alike.

When you sow this in a persistent way in your life, what you're going to reap is something that you might never have a hundred percent recovery from. Yeah, I think also there's a great tendency to underestimate, and this alarms and awakens you to actually understand what's going on and what's happening when you engage in something like this. He's saying her paths lead down to death and her paths to the dead. And I think a lot of times we underestimate the stranglehold sin, specifically this sin can have on us. I remember oftentimes when I was in the US and we would go to the abortion clinic and every time a man would come up and talk to us as we were on the sidewalk, the first question I would always ask is, what brings you out today?

And he knew why he was there. I knew why he was there. But I, out of the hundreds of people I've spoken to over the years. I can't remember one Individual saying I've come For an abortion today. They would always cover it up with some other Language or something else to kind of minimize it and I think you're what Solomon is doing He's he's hitting it right where it's at.

Our culture wants to minimize the effects of sin. We want to call things by different names and affair, instead of adultery or, you know, abortion, a procedure or something like that. And I think he's really confronting us with the reality of what this sin does and where it actually takes you. And Paul, I don't know whether you were meaning to make this connection or not, but let's make it explicit. When you talk to people at the abortion clinic, no one ever dreamed of having an abortion.

It wasn't part of their life dreams. They became entangled in patterns of life that didn't start at the end point. It started small and far away from the end point, but it led them step by step there. And pornography is actually one of them. Actually, if you could administer a truth serum to many of the men who bring girlfriends or wives to the abortion clinic, they might be forced to confess to you that it all started little with dabbling in pornography and one thing led to another, and now they're at the abortion clinic.

19. It's interesting you're using this one thing led to another language, because this proverb actually pictures that. It pictures steps. And here's another one in Proverbs 5, beginning in verse eight, remove your way far from her, and do not go near the door of her house, lest you give your honor to others, and your years to the cruel one. And you mourn at last when your flesh and your body are consumed, and say, how I have hated instruction, and my heart despised correction.

I have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined my ear to those who instructed me. I was on the verge of total ruin in the midst of the assembly and congregation. So what do we learn from this one? I think there's one thing that jumps out as you as you read that is that last verse is shocking. I was in the midst of ruin, of total ruin in the midst of the assembly of the congregation.

It's almost like a man who's living compartmentalized. He's still taking part and partaking of the worship of God, but all the while this is happening in the background. And, you know, it just makes me think, as you're saying, that, you know, 100 years from now, let's say, when there's an analysis done on our day, we might find that the greatest affliction hasn't been, you know, the woke movement or communism or even, you know, COVID or whatever else is going on in our age, but it might be that the thing that's taken the most captives and rendered most men the use most men useless might be something like this, where there's been this compartmentalization going to church, some of the stats you mentioned at the beginning, and this just strips us of all power. It renders us just impotent, really, before God and before men. And so, that's what I get just reading this initially, you're pretty shocking.

Scott and Paul, another thing you see in that text is the running of stop signs. The man being described there is bemoaning the fact that he just wouldn't listen to his instructors. They gave him counsel that would have held him back from the destruction that he's now experiencing. But now the opportunities have come and gone, and he's just simply ruined with really nothing, with no way back from the ruin. And it's because he ran stop signs.

There were stop signs, there were things between him and his ruin, but he wouldn't stop at them. You know, Jason, you and I have been pastors here in this area for a long time. We've seen this, you know, more than once, where a man faces ruin. Now thankfully, In some of those cases, those men really did repent and they were restored. They did lose something forever, but they were restored.

Even when they came to this point, I was in the midst of the assembly and congregation on the verge of total ruin. We've seen it, and we've seen some restore, and we've seen some continue to fall. But that's the picture that's here. And again, you find that trajectory. It doesn't just happen overnight.

There was a way toward and then near her house. Yeah, it keeps calling you back and then it takes you further and deeper away. It's such a crippling sin that there's that one line, and you've given your years to the cruel one. I mean, just this enslavement and inability to be, you know, to set yourself free. It's just kind of keeping going back to the same cloth and poisoning yourself, poisoning your soul.

– So, Scott, can I jump the Scripture reading line? – Sure. – Okay. Ephesians chapter 5, verse 3, Paul says this, but fornication and all uncleanness, Let it not even be named among you as is fitting for the saints." And then skipping down to verse 5, for this you know that no fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man who is an idolater has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. You know, we have these darling sins, and we're serving our lesson.

We're talking about one category, but it's not the only category. But when you have a darling sin and you just won't give it up, Paul actually calls it by what it is, it's idolatry. The tagline for desiring God is, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. Now, what are we talking about with pornography, lust, these darling sins that you won't give up. It's actually idolatry.

It's actually an unverbalized proclamation that the things that God has given you aren't satisfying. You're not satisfied with the things that God has for you, so you jump the fence and go in search of. And that's why the word covetousness is used there. Covetousness mentioned twice in that passage. The uncleanness is connected to covetousness.

You want something else, and that's the, you know, that's sort of the beginning of the trajectory. 10 And so on one level, it's this base thing, this degrading thing, this sort of serving the lusts of the flesh, and on that level it's bad enough. But actually, if you just come up and look at it from the top level, it's actually an expression of dissatisfaction in God. It really is an accusation against God. You're accusing God of withholding things from you that are good or that you need.

And neither is true, but it really is an accusation against God. And it's interesting, in the previous passage in Proverbs five, the man is in utter ruin or on the verge of utter ruin in the congregation. In the Ephesians five passage, it's hell. It's actually hell is what he's talking about. That's the devastating message of these passages is that her paths lead down to hell.

And Proverbs 7 makes this very clear. Solomon talks about this young man who's devoid of understanding. He's passing along the street near her corner. I liken that to surfing the internet today. And he took the path to her house.

There's so many pathways to her house on the internet. They jump all over the place. He says, in the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night, he says, do not let your heart turn aside to her ways, nor stray into her paths, for she has cast down many wounded, and all who were slain by her were strong men. Her house is the way to hell, descending to the chambers of death." So it's hell. The language is so devastating.

And we shouldn't just leave this matter with, well, every man struggles with this. No, no, no, no. The Bible speaks in a completely different way about it. And somehow we have to learn how to think in a holy way about this situation. And the Bible, of course, helps us to do that.

Yeah, My view is that the only path to deliverance is first magnitude of what's being done. And I mean, it's so all who were slain by her were strong men. Let's think we're going to be the exception, which often can be the case for the man or for the young man. I'm going to be able to keep this under control. And he said he preempts that by saying, look down the course of history, look down the pathway, you're gonna see bones, skeletons, littered all the way down through that.

And so this idea of the idolatry component that Jason mentioned, it's like going to the pagan temples. It's going to the groves at night. This is the great danger. Many, many men are slain by this thing. And so, it's an alarm.

I think we need to see that magnitude first. And if men don't see the magnitude, you know, you kind of soft-pedal it. You use words like, I'm struggling or I'm dabbling, or, you know, I kind of, you're weakening it. But if you confront it as the scripture confronts it, that might be the very beginning of being delivered from it. Pete If it's a sin that will drag you to hell, it either has to mean that it's the unforgivable sin that when you engage in this, you just, you can never get clear of it.

Or it has to mean that in the final analysis, if it's a sin that you just couldn't turn away from, it meant that you didn't have a new heart that had new affections. And the exhortation of the New Testament is to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. If a man just can't seem to get clear of this, it should shake his assurance of salvation because it actually is revealing data about whether there is a new heart and new affections. Yeah, and of course, you know, the Apostle Paul was writing these things in Ephesians, you know, to the Ephesian church, living in a, you know, a pagan Greek society. And, you know, if you've ever been to Ephesus and walked the streets of the restored ancient Ephesus, it's very, very clear.

The sexualization of this culture was just astounding. And I think it's equivalent to the pornographic culture that we have today, except it wasn't in pictures. Now, it wasn't statues and things like that, but all those things were designed to draw you in a direction. But yeah, these are very devastating things. Proverbs 9 uses the same language.

Proverbs 9.17, Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant, but he does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of hell. So again, Solomon, he comes back to this matter of hell. Paul does it for the Ephesian church as well. And it's remarkable that the Lord Jesus Christ does the exact same thing in Matthew chapter five. And he brings these dramatic illustrations.

We're gonna talk about this matter of amputation that Jesus addresses here in another podcast. We won't focus on that, but I'll just read what Jesus says. It's very consistent with everything we've already read. He says to his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you, for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you, for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to be cast into hell." Now, I don't want us to get diverted to the matter of cutting off and amputating. We'll talk about that later. But the issue is, he repeats it three times, that heaven and hell are in the balance. And so, somehow, we've got to learn how to talk about this, not in psychological terms, but in biblical terms, in order to actually deliver the truth to one another.

Years ago, there was the Promise Keeper Movement. And one of the things I really appreciated about it is they always addressed this. They were filling stadiums full of men, and there was actually radical prescriptions for what you should do to get clear of these things. And I'll never forget one of the things that one of the preachers... I don't remember who the preacher was, but he said, some of you are treating your worst enemy like a friend.

You're nurturing it on the side, you're hiding it, And its only objective is to kill you and take everything that you value from it, but you're treating it like a friend. Don't spend one more minute treating this mortal enemy as a friend and hiding it and keeping it alive and helping it to grow. We were together when whoever said that said that. Yeah. Yeah, we were.

That was a long time ago. Might have been Tony Evans. It might have been. But you know, what Jesus is saying is that Looking leads to hell. Looking leads to hell.

I think you see that. So one thing just going back into Proverbs 7, what's interesting about Proverbs 7 is there's also Proverbs 8, and you've got these two women presented, wisdom and then this, this harlot and where we're supposed to look, he, he presents these two options. One, both are calling out to you at the corners of the streets. Both are at the crossroads, which is fairly symbolic, right? And so as you're saying that, you know, looking leads to acting.

You know, there's probably no better example of that than David with Bathsheba and just the stunning unraveling. I was just thinking about that before the podcast here. And you know, David had, he had become king over Israel in chapter 5 of 2nd Samuel the Ark had been returned in the next chapter chapter 7 he had expressed his desire to build the temple and then chapters 8 to 10 are this kind of chronicle of all of his successes in battle, and then you come to chapter 11 and you just see this, you know, stone rolling down the hill, picking up speed and crashing toward the end, and of course, you know, we know the results of that, but looking led all the way down to terrible, unbelievable consequences in his life. Pete I'm so glad you brought up David because he's such a perfect cave study in a couple of different ways. In one way, it gives us hope that there is restoration and restored fellowship with God.

I mean, Psalm 51 in his Psalm of Repentance is just tremendous. God didn't take His Holy Spirit from him. He did restore to him the joy of his salvation. And so, David as a case study holds forth hope for the man who's caught. At the same time, it is a warning of sowing and reaping.

I mean, this did wreak havoc in David's life and the life of his family that really lasted his whole life long. So his fellowship with God was restored, but he continued to sort of suffer what he harvested from them. Yeah. Well, let's wind it up like this. Impurity is a satanic means to send men to hell.

That's the purpose of pornography, is to send men to hell. And the apostles corroborate this, the Lord Jesus Christ made it very clear. Solomon explained it. Paul writing to the Galatians said this in Galatians 5 19 now the works of the flesh are evident which are adultery fornication uncleanness lewdness Idolatry that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. So I think we want to end that way.

You know, the purpose of this session really is to warn of the devastating consequences of continuing down the path. Don't kid yourself. Her paths lead down to hell, and you will not inherit the kingdom of God if you continue along this path. And that's what the Bible says. We would like to soften it, but the Bible makes that very clear.

So the remedy is, repent, turn to Christ, abandon these things, and kill the flesh. So there you have it, a very sobering set of scriptures to go over. Thank you so much for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. We're going to continue our discussion next week on this matter about ways of escape. Thanks for joining us.

We'll see you next time. You can join us, go to ChurchandFamilyLife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.