There are very few things that are so desirable as a cold drink of water on a hot, muggy day. Picture this pure, desirable water that comes from a spring-fed well. You will enjoy every drop as it quenches your thirst. Now imagine instead a glass of water that is drawn from the sewage of your town. The contents are disgusting, murky, and disease-ridden. Why would you quench your thirst with sewage? This picture illustrates what has happened to our world in its drive for the pleasures of sensuality. We have no idea that we are willingly drinking from the cesspool as we try to quench our thirst for more sensual images and stories.
We come into this world innocently in our childhood with no knowledge of all the trash that surrounds us. Life and sounds and images engulf us, eventually taking shape into the realities of our world as we mature and as we begin to make crucial, life decisions sometimes because no one has given us direction. Some children may not know what kinds of trash they are surrounded by in the world until their later adolescent years while others of us are immediately immersed in childhood into a toxic, sensual environment in which we see the worst of humanity’s descent into its immoral addictions and wicked pleasures even before we understand that this is not how God made us to live.
Whether in childhood or in adolescence, pornography is designed to work like the drugs of the street. The porn-dealers get you to enjoy the first swallow of the illegal substance, and then you find you are not satisfied. You want more. Now what? You will keep pouring drugs (or in this case, pornography) into your system. It will be like pouring gas into a gas tank that has a hole in it. It will not satisfy. It is designed to cause more wanting, lusting, desiring, looking. The drinking water that was once pure and clear before the exposure to the pornography is now filled with sewage and garbage and poison. Now inducing thirst rather than quenching thirst, the disgusting drink poisons everything.
However, when you find Christ to be the One you desire and long for, everything changes: He is the source from which you drink. The pornography begins to lose its hold on you. Vincent puts it this way: “Indeed, as I perpetually feast on Christ and all His blessings found in the gospel, I find that my hunger for sin diminishes and the lies of lust simply lose their appeal. Hence, to the degree that I am full, I am free. Eyes do not rove, nor do fleshly lusts rule, when the heart is fat with the love of Jesus!” — Milton Vincent, A Gospel Primer for Christians.
John Piper share his thoughts regarding our satisfaction with sources other than Christ: “My conviction is that one of the main reasons the world and the church are awash in lust and pornography (by both men and women–30 percent of Internet pornography is now viewed by women) is that our lives are intellectually and emotionally disconnected from the infinite, soul-staggering grandeur for which we were made. Inside and outside the church, western culture is drowning in a sea of triviality, pettiness, banality, and silliness. . . . It is inevitable that the human heart, which was made to be staggered with the supremacy of Christ, but instead is drowning in a sea of banal entertainment, will reach for the best natural buzz that life can give: sex.” To reconnect with the infinite grandeur of Christ, we need to meditate on His character and enjoy His works instead of running to the cesspool.
Over the past decade, I have developed a resource specifically designed to help the church body to satisfy their thirst at the fountain of Christ. Please consider buying and consuming the cross-centered material I have developed in Soul Purity. The main purpose of this study guide for personal or for small group work is to help those who are being drawn into or have been swallowed up by the septic sensuality of our age. You too can “feast on Christ.” But it does take time to change your taste buds from the temporal fleshly lusts to the eternal spiritual desires of the cross and of Christ. Give your heart to an eight-week meditation and study to see what God will do.