Overcoming sexual temptation through Christ is a vital message. With internet porn and other sexual temptations, young people need guidance. Read one mother’s Bible-based encouragement to her sons.
A Letter to My Sons: Overcoming Sexual Temptation Through Christ
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 shapes and determines 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 it rears up, 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. It’s 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? Then your life will have a bitter taste. First the flavors might taste sweet. But bitterness will always be the end result. And you will share the bitterness someday in your interactions. Porn affects how you think about girls, talk to girls, treat girls, and pursue girls.
A Wicked Education in Sex
Next, whether you realize it or not, pornography misshapes your vision of girls. And one day, porn might affect your future wife. The women gleaming on screen may not directly feel the effects of your lust. But they will indirectly, as you fuel the industry that enslaves them.
Images cannot feel the grief and loss of a wife whose husband’s hidden sins are inevitably revealed. I plead with you to not let the tea steep that long. Don’t let one look turn into thousands of looks over the course of years. If this happens, you will taste the bitterness, my sons. Then you’ll 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 use and discard.
But the porn industry diminishes men and women. It reduces them to simple actors of animal lust for pixilation, instead of celebrating them as complex and glorious image-bearers of their Creator. This is our consumer society, devaluing human beings as they’re offered up for consumption. The porn industry lines online aisles with a sexual zoo for viewing pleasure.
