Lessons on Pornography. . .
Last week Lisa and I traveled to the beautiful Berkshire hills in Western Massachusetts. We made a short getaway together out of an invitation to have a heart-to-heart conversation about the dangers and brokenness of pornography with a group of 200 high school kids and their leaders who had gathered for a week of summer camp. This wonderful, Christ-loving, grace-filled and evangelical Catholic camp has been running for 31 years.
The theme of this year’s camp was “Wonder.” In an email to me prior to my arrival, one of the camp’s directors, Maureen, wrote these words: “If there is anything that can destroy the wonder of what God has created for people, it’s pornography.”
My ongoing work with CPYU. . . and our Digital Kids Initiative specifically. . . continues to convince me that this horribly broken and exploitive expression of God’s good and wonderful gift of sexuality is one of the most insidious and destructive forces in both youth culture and the culture-at-large today. And once again, as I stood before this group to talk about this destroyer of God’s wonder and beauty, the faces I looked at revealed a clear knowledge of pornography’s presence, reality, and danger. I think we had a good morning together.
As I was thinking through my remarks to the students last week, I ran across a great little blog post from James Tarring Cordrey. Posted on the Covenant Eyes site, Cordrey writes from his own experience as a pornography addict. His post – Break Porn Addiction: 5 Lessons I Learned Along the Way – is worth your time. It’s also worth sharing and talking about with the kids you know and love. And maybe, it will be helpful to you as well.
Cordrey list these 5 lessons in his post. . .
1. I had been lied to. My culture, influenced by pornography, had told me all sorts of lies about how normal it was to indulge sexual lust.
2. Real change is really possible. The pattern throughout Scripture is one in which people leave behind their former way of life and cling to the hope and promise of being made new and clean in Christ.
3. But you will have to fight for it. And, freedom is worth fighting for.
4. You must engage in spiritual warfare. I have learned how to pray against the work of the Evil One and break the strongholds I have allowed him to build in my life.
5. It really is a matter of life and death. Sin brings death. God brings freedom and life.
I want to encourage you to read James Tarring Cordrey’s full blog post. . . and then talk about it. Thanks be to God that there is hope!