Guest post from Luke Gilkerson, community manager of Covenant Eyes:
“Sex is ruled by a peculiar version of supply and demand—our desire for it can only be spoiled by promiscuity.” – Charles de Gaulle
Why do guys like porn? There are many reasons why: some obvious, some not so obvious. For some people it is a tangled web of motivations. It certainly was for me . . .
My first serious brushes with porn began in college working at a video rental store. I had free access to any impure videos I wanted to see . . . which I did. This peaked my curiosity about what I might find on the Internet, and thus began years of an addiction. It would become a defining struggle of my young adult life.
But the story does not really start in college. It starts many years before.
As a young boy I discovered the power of imagination. I remember how easily my imagination could carry me to far away lands, creating vivid worlds of adventure and excitement. In these worlds I was the superhero, the sage, the warrior. When I would tire of the real world, full of its disappointments, disapprovals, and dismissals, there was always the world of my imagination. It was my escape.
When puberty hit, the content of the fantasies changed. Fueled by raging hormones, I found a new cast of characters for my imagination. I would cast my latest crush as the leading lady in the movie of my mind. There she became the woman I wanted her to be. It was a mental form of trophyism: these untouchable women were my collectibles, existing to validate me. At first these fantasies were not strictly sensual (though many of them were that as well). They were more like relationship fantasies.
My warped imagination provided a rich soil for pornography to later take root. Porn provided a new cast of characters, settings, and plot-lines, but the objective remained the same. In the fantasy world, I was the main character. The woman was merely a prop that supported the great theme of the fantasy: that I was desirable, manly, irresistible, and attractive. The fantasy woman was there to bolster my ego.
In these fantasies I was god. And like a deity, I made those fantasy worlds to revolve around me and then I populated them with female worshipers who would go to great lengths to show me the level of their devotion.
If this sounds narcissistic . . . it is. This is one reason why porn is so enticing to some men. Porn is manufactured to feed this attitude of self-centeredness.
Watching pornography I depersonalized women, making them into props that served my ultimate desire: to be worshiped. The more outwardly attractive I thought the woman was (by some sort of cultural standard impressed in my mind), the more spotless a sacrifice she was to me. My “hell” had become the world around me where I felt rejected and unattractive. To save me from this hell, the women of porn served as fitting saviors.
Why do I use “worship” language to describe my past addiction? I do this because I believe the language of worship is one of the primary ways the Bible describes our sin. We cannot help but be worshipers. We worship either our Creator or idols. Since our fallen race has been ejected from the Garden, the great question in our souls has been: what or whom will we worship?
Bear in mind, the Bible doesn’t limit idolatry to the worship of statues and totems, but expands this idea to include the “idols of the heart” (Ezekiel 14:1-8). The apostle Paul counts greed as idolatry (Ephesians 5:5; Colossians 3:5). He says it is possible to make even our own appetites our gods (Philippians 3:19).
Tim Keller sums this up nicely when writes:
“Whatever we worship we will serve, for worship and service are always inextricably bound together. We are ‘covenantal’ beings. We enter into covenant service with whatever most captures our imagination and heart. It ensnares us. So every human personality, community, thought-form, and culture will be based on some ultimate concern or some ultimate allegiance—either to God or to some God-substitute. Individually, we will ultimately look either to God or to success, romance, family, status, popularity, beauty or something else to make us feel personally significant and secure, and to guide our choices. Culturally we will ultimately look to either God or to the free market, the state, the elites, the will of the people, science and technology, military might, human reason, racial pride, or something else to make us corporately significant and secure, and to guide our choices. . . .“Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry.”
I had taken a good thing—the beauty of a woman—and made it into an ultimate thing. Instead of my sex drive pushing me towards personal and spiritual maturity so that I could court, marry, and care for one woman, I had allowed myself to create a fantasy world where I could feel like a man and never require myself to be one.
If wrong worship is at the heart of our sin, it follows that our only way out is a worship-shift. We must be profoundly “converted”—to use the old word. We do not merely behave ourselves into sinful habits. As Tim Lane says: We worship our way into sin; we must worship our way out.
What did this mean for me?
1. I needed to label my pornography problem not just as a weakness, but as a sin. I needed to label it as rebellion. To be sure, my past, my upbringing, and my schooling had all played some role in shaping my style of sin. But I am not a mere victim of my environment. I am a sinner. I am an idol maker.
2. I needed the cross. I had been told to “lay my sins at the foot of the cross” many times, but this abstract and sentimental expression never held water for me. I needed something concrete. It wasn’t until I started to really meditate on the cross that I started seeing the worship-shift begin in me.
Meditating on the cross I discovered the full ugliness of my rebellion. Seeing the cross in my mind’s eye, I saw the eternal Son of God, beaten and bloodied, abandoned by His Father, and feeling the full weight of the curse of my sin. Seeing the cross I saw what real hell was like, and it was not being rejected by women: it was being forsaken by Almighty God. This was the hell I deserved.
Meditating on the cross I also came to understand radical love. On the cross I saw the perfect Son of God willing to put on mortal flesh and clothe himself in my sin. The more I gazed at the crucified God, the more I was blown away by His love for me. And it is a love that wins my heart every time I see it.
Seeing both sides of the cross—wrath and love, curse and blessing, judgment and forgiveness—I came to understand how costly grace really is. Seeing God’s wrath in the cross made me hate my sin more and more. Seeing God’s love in the cross turned my affections towards Him. Finding that love, I submitted my “need” for validation to the greater glory of God, and in doing so found a sort of validation from Him I never imagined possible.
3. I needed to repent. To be sure I had “repented” of watching porn thousands of times. I had many tear-filled nights agonizing over my sin and still felt no power to break free from it. I could never get my repentance to stick. But each time I was merely repenting of an extremal behavior. Over many years God showed me, through prayer and the wise counsel of others, that I needed to also repent of my “idols of the heart” and make a full-scale turn towards a godly way of relating to women.
4. I needed wisdom (and I needed it bad). I felt like the naïve young man in Proverbs 7 who foolishly walked down the street past the house of the seductress, only to get caught in her snare. Solomon promises the reader that the only way to avoid her smooth words was to have a heart full of wisdom (7:1-5).
Wisdom in the Proverbs is not merely book-smarts. Wisdom in Hebrew culture is essentially “moral skill”—the ability to make godly choices. Wisdom is having both the discretion to know what is best and the foresight to know why it is best, thus having the godly motivation to choose it.
Wisdom is not something merely taught. It must be caught. Wisdom is gleaned from walking with the wise (Proverbs 13:20). God’s path of maturity in the Christian life is the path of discipleship. I needed wise friends with whom I could be honest about my addiction, with whom I could share my heart.
Over the years my addiction had proven this proverb to be true: “The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water…” (Proverbs 20:5). Many times I had no idea why I was doing what I was going. I was unable to see my real motives. I knew something dark was lurking within me, like something hidden deep in the ocean, but I could not see it. So Solomon finishes the proverb: “The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.”
Solomon is telling us: Find a close, wise friend, or a group of close and wise friends who can walk alongside you and help you discern what really makes you tick. Find friends who know how to get beneath the surface. Find people you can do life with. Find people who can really know you and know how to counsel you.
With skillful questions and probing thoughts a good friend drops a bucket deep into our hearts and draws out observations about ourselves which we are afraid to admit, even things we have never noticed before. A man of understanding thinks deeper than just what you said or did. He knows how to probe beneath the surface and find the idols.
Now years later I experience a type of freedom from sin I’ve never felt before. To be sure, I still unearth new idols from the recesses of my heart. I still am prone to lust. But I am learning to identify my idols and not lift my heart to them. I am learning to seek the face of the God of Jacob (Psalm 24:3-6).
Luke Gilkerson is the general editor and primary author of Breaking Free, the corporate weblog of Covenant Eyes. Luke has a degree in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Bowling Green State University and is currently working on his Master of Arts in Religion from Reformed Theological Seminary. Before working at Covenant Eyes he spent six years as a Campus Minister. He lives in Michigan with his wife Trisha and two sons.
