1^st August 2012

Pornography is a dreadful scourge costing billions of dollars and making misery for countless captives around the world. We are a sex-soaked society with unrestrained consensual sexual activity, decriminalised, legalised and affirmed. "With this generation, it's a battle against cheap satisfactions, that make children act like jaded whores, and adults act like spoiled children".
Biblical directions on sexuality are considered restrictive and outdated. We have an increasing preoccupation with sex as an object and an end in itself. But the Spirit and Scripture lift us to powerful standards . ‘there must not be even a hint of porn, and ‘flee from porn'. Porn, (Bible Greek ‘porneia') translates ‘sexual immorality', and in these Scripture passages, is shown as a vicious enemy of genuine love. Porn inhibits, even prevents love, because it totally absorbs the mind in introverted egosexism. Porn causes an implosion of energy, rather than allowing an explosion of thought and action towards another in deeds of justice and care.
Sexual impurity left unchecked, spirals into a limitless internal world of fantastical activity. It shuts off a person from feeling and seeing and giving oneself to fulfill the needs of others. It manacles its prisoners to endless indulgence. I heard a shell of a person plead for freedom from porn addiction which had led them to ask the Devil to supercharge with demons of porn.
Porneia -porn is forbidden, not just because it isn't love, but because it prevents love. Rage, greed and even things like impatience and drunkenness, have similar characteristics. Martin Bryant began to drink high alcohol spirits, ‘to fill in time and relieve his loneliness'. He had nothing inside coming out. Just drink coming in to glaze conscience and drift the mind unchecked in its own internal world. Such things, even obsessive preoccupation with romance and drugs introvert the mind away from real life and joyous living. Porn prevents interaction with creation, from the imaginative development and practice of interesting skills, and from being quick to respond to the needs of someone else. Porn is against love, because it totally ties us up with ourselves. Porn affects and breaks whole societies.
A social anthropologist said, "Any human society is free, either to display great energy, or to enjoy sexual freedom: the evidence is that they cannot do both for more than one generation".
Paul in Colossians juxtaposes the things that are to be put to death, and the things we are to cooperate with the Spirit working within us. The first one to die is porn (verse five), so that its opposite, compassion (verse twelve), may grow in its place. A person preoccupied with porn, cannot be compassionate. But practising compassion kills porn. Compassion implies a generous action touched off by an inner feeling for someone else. An inner feeling extroverted into action. Porn is feelings introverted.
Our living Saviour bore into final judgment all our porn in his obedient death. He is on the side of such miserable captives and he will deliver! Let the possessed cry out for his help, confess the evil and He will systemically remake a personality from the very core of their being. No other is strong enough or intimate enough . We should tell the porn- bound never give up coming to Him, who alone may make something good out of nothing.

Ian Clarkson (First published in ACCatalyst June 2011)