Is Porn Your Idol?

@R – One of the things I’ve written about before is the importance of repenting of going down the tempting paths. Remember Proverbs 7? We see in that text a young, foolish man, heading headlong into the direction of temptation. The whole chapter has some astonishing parallels to our own struggles with pornography. Here are some thoughts from an upcoming book we’re going to release on this site:

“Do not stray into her paths.” (Prov. 7:25)

Solomon is saying: Don’t be like this fool I saw out my window. Don’t stray down the path to her home, “passing along the street near her corner, taking the road to her house in the twilight, in the evening, at the time of night and darkness” (7:8-9). This was not a casual evening stroll for the young fool. It was an intentional movement in the direction of temptation. In fact, it could actually be translated that he “marched” down her street. In the darkness of twilight this man is walking quite deliberately toward her house.

How seriously do you treat sin? The more we understand why sin is such an affront to God, the more the idea of playing with temptation will seem detestable to us. If we just want to be moralistic, we can look at behaviors that pertain to sexuality and draw arbitrary lines: “Okay, these sorts of activities break the rules, and these other ones do not.” When I have this attitude then I can easily justify the grey areas, places where I allow myself to dance on the edge of the cliff as long as I don’t fall in. This is moralistic thinking divorced from a true Godward orientation of the heart.

But that’s not the wisdom of Solomon. The wise man does not draw the line at the doorstep of the harlot so he can relish in the idea of being tempted. He draws the line at the end of the street because he hates sin. For Solomon, this is where real wisdom begins: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10a) and the “hatred of evil.” (Prov. 8:13).

When Solomon uses the term yir’ah, translated “fear,” it is a worship term that captures the idea of both shrinking back in terror and drawing close in amazement. It is a disposition of the heart that both dreads and draws. Solomon says this disposition is the controlling principle of living a wise life. To be wise, we must first have our wor¬ship right. We must rightly fear God, stand in awe of him, and in doing so hate the things that rob him of glory and rob us of our joy in Him.

When we fear God we don’t just know where the lines between good and evil are, we come to hate evil because God hates it. Paul would say it this way: “Make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom. 13:14), and “sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you” (Eph. 5:3).

When it comes to pornography, we must not just repent of looking at it, we must also honor the holy God by repenting of our yearning to be tempted by it. For those in your church, this means they must begin to identify with the paths leading to the forbidden woman and repent of flirting with those paths? It is different stumbling block for each of us: a time of day or night, a certain place, a certain computer, being hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. We must take note of these tempting paths and repent of pursuing them.

Again I ask: How serious do we treat sin? The real problem for many men who face pornography temptation is that the temptation is a part of the whole experience. They revel in getting close to the edge. They make seemingly unimportant decisions that bring them one step closer to the object of lust. They tell themselves, “I’m just going to check my e-mail,” or “I’m just going to see who’s online,” or “I’m just checking my Facebook newsfeed.” Deep down, part of them actually hopes to encounter the temptation.

This attitude of wanting to get close to the edge is itself a sin because it is treating lightly something God hates. It is totally void of the fear of the Lord, of true wor¬ship. When we see this attitude rise up in us, we need to recognize that we have already started facing the wrong direction. Men in your church need to be trained to redraw the battle lines. There at the head of her street we have a choice: will we turn around to redirect our worship to God and honor His lordship, or will we walk by her house and choose to be entertained by our idol?