My Dear Sons,
The eye beholds much good and evil in this life. Beholding leads to becoming. What we continually put before our eyes and minds will shape and determine who we are. Images either tell the truth or lie, but they all speak. On top of this, our natural eyes are lustful things not easily satisfied (1 John 2:16). One lustful look can change us. One look can feed the monster within so that it rears up its ugly head looking for more.
“Feed me,” he says. His appetite is fierce and unsatisfied. One look leads to another, and then to many more.
This is the kingdom of sexual lust—a world of soft porn and free porn—and secrets contained in cleared web browsers. What you behold, boys, you become. If you steep your tea too long, it becomes bitter. Likewise, if you sit and soak in pornographic fantasies, your life will have a bitter taste. At first the flavors might taste sweet, but bitterness will always be the end result. And the bitterness will be shared someday in your interactions with girls: how you think about girls, talk to girls, treat girls and pursue girls.
A Wicked Education in Sex
Pornography misshapes your vision of girls, whether you realize it or not. And one day, pornography might affect your future wife. The women gleaming on the computer screen may not directly feel the effects of your lust, but they will indirectly, as you fuel the industry that enslaves and trafficks them.
But the images cannot feel the painful grief and loss a wife feels when her husband’s hidden sins are inevitably revealed. I plead with you to not let the tea steep that long; to not let one look turn into thousands of looks over the course of years. If this happens, you will taste the bitterness, my sons, and you will want to spit it out.
Lust distorts the glory of both biblical manhood and womanhood; it goes against the divine mandate in the garden of Eden. Men are to care for women—and provide and protect with humble strength—not exploit and dominate. Women are strong, capable and your equal, not objects to be used and discarded.
But the porn industry diminishes both men and women, and reduces them all the way down to simple actors of animal lust for pixilation, instead of celebrating them as complex and glorious image-bearers of their Creator. This is the consumer society we live in, devaluing human beings as they’re offered up for consumption. The porn industry is lining online aisles with a sexual zoo for viewing pleasure.
