In the 1990s, Friends taught us that pornography is a consequence-free pastime that pairs well with a laugh track. A generation later, porn is no joke, but rather a modern-day scourge that has consumed the lives of countless men, women, and even children, leaving only devastation in its wake.
There is a difference between the quantity of porn use among Christ-followers and everyone else, but it’s a problem in the church nonetheless. We need to bring our struggle with pornography out of the shadows and into the light of the gospel. We need to talk about it humbly and hopefully with an eye toward repentance, restoration, and gospel-powered holiness.
The gospel of Jesus Christ changes everything, and we need to understand how the gospel changes our view of porn. The life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus—what does it mean for Christians who are secretly aware of the lust lurking just beneath the surface in their hearts? What does it mean for Christians who are addicted to porn and assume they always will be? What does it mean for women exploited and abused by photographers and advertisers and traffickers and website owners? How do we glorify God in a world where we can gorge on sexual perversion any time we want via the 5G portals in our pockets?
Two new books—Garrett Kell’s Pure in Heart: Sexual Sin and the Promises of God and Ray Ortlund’s The Death of Porn: Men of Integrity Building a World of Nobility—aim to guide the Christian, and the church, in unpacking what the gospel means for lust, sexual sin, and pornography. Both share a conviction that the answers can be found in the gospel. Both believe the church is a central part of the solution. Both will prove useful in the pursuit of holiness for the glory of God amid a culture looking for salvation in sex. The former contains insights for men and women alike, the latter is addressed specifically to men.
Start with the Heart
Pure in Heart by Garrett Kell exemplifies practical theology. Kell, lead pastor of Del Ray Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, knows firsthand the struggle with sexual sin and the inability of manmade purity tactics to address the real problem.
“Purity for purity’s sake is a powerful form of self-serving idolatry,” Kell writes. “We are not created to simply ‘not eat’ forbidden things, but first and foremost to freely eat all of God’s good provisions” (28). God exhorts us, “Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food” (Isa. 55:2).
“Our affections are stirred toward what we feed them,” so the battle with sexual sin begins further upstream than we may assume (86). Although “God created Eden as a playground of pleasure,” Adam and Eve neglected the bounty of goodness lavished on them to instead stray after the counterfeit pleasures of sin (86). Pornography and sexual sin are nothing less than us repeating their fatal mistake—ingesting poison that for a moment seems like honey, but proves to be “bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword” (Prov. 5:4).
As we grow in our affections for God, we come to understand that he does not call us to a glum asceticism as the enemy would have us believe. Rather, God delights for us to embrace pleasure—even sexual pleasure—within his design and for his glory. For Christians, “sex should cause us to marvel at Jesus because all its pleasures point to the glorious one who made them” (47).
There are, however, no shortcuts. While we “ought to be amazed that God uses his creativity for our pleasure,” we must also joyfully submit to the design he has ordained (50). Attempts to enjoy God-designed sexual pleasure apart from God invariably lead to misery. “Love is not love,” Kell writes. “God is love, and any ‘love’ that goes against his character or commands is a deadly imposter that steals life rather than gives it” (75).
Attempts to enjoy God-designed sexual pleasure apart from God invariably lead to misery.
Freedom is found not in the “my truth” spirit of the age, but in God’s truth as revealed in Scripture. His truth addresses our sexuality and thankfully is far greater than our sexuality. This means real hope is available for all who look to him: men and women, married and single. And he gives us help in whatever form of sexual temptation we may endure.
God’s design is that we find lasting hope in the context of the church, where “we pursue each other and discuss uncomfortable areas of our sin, for we know isolation is the enemy of purity” (103). While sin begets estrangement, church members “[resolve] to love and do whatever it takes to help each other cling to Jesus and persevere to heaven” (98).
Face the Cost
Ray Ortlund’s The Death of Porn shares Kell’s basic convictions and is written in a unique format: a series of letters from a wise father to his son. Ortlund—pastor emeritus of Immanuel Church in Nashville, Tennessee—reflects on God’s noble purpose for men and women and the warping effects of lust and sexual perversion on that purpose. This is not a how-to guide but an attempt to elevate our gaze with a vision of the infinitely greater purpose for which God created us.
Ortlund’s words are fatherly, wise, sometimes stern yet always gentle. One has the sense that nothing confessed in his presence would shock him, a picture itself of the God who saves us from our most shameful sins.
Especially compelling is the second chapter, “She is Royalty,” which may bring some men to tears with the realization that use of pornography is nothing less than the willful abuse of real women who are image-bearers of the Creator. For a few pages Ortlund hands the pen to a Christian sister named Tara and asks her to recount her story as a victim of sex trafficking.
What if it was your sister? The women used in the sex industry don’t just have a face and a body. They have a soul too. They have a name. . . . For a guy, it’s a short burst of sexual gratification, and then he moves on. But for the woman, the effects from that single moment of sexual selfishness can last for the rest of her life. Every moment of porn leaves behind a broken woman. (49)
Ortlund’s goal is not merely to shame the reader away from porn, but to expose porn to the light of reality—the light of the gospel.
You’ll start getting free when you start getting honest. No man is helped by nicey-nice hypocritical words like “I slipped up today.” . . . If you look at porn, be honest enough to say to God, “Today I entertained myself with sexual exploitation,” or “Today I joined in the abuse of a woman.” (51)
Kell shares this perspective, noting that porn “reduces the people being watched to mere servants of lust. They entertain; we indulge. We don’t care about their names or their pains, only that they gratify our lust. We forget that God created the men and women employed by the porn industry. They bear his image. They have souls” (75).
Our Destiny Is the Kingdom
Christian readers of either book will feel conviction at various points. But, as with the Bible, these are not books about judgment, but about God’s glory as he saves us from judgment. As Ortlund writes, “Jesus is building his new kingdom in a surprising way. He gives porn stars their dignity back, and he gives porn consumers their honor back. He loves doing this” (61).
These are not books about judgment, but about God’s glory as he saves us from judgment.
The enemy would tell us that ours is a losing battle, that we’ve had to repent one time too many, and that God is ashamed of our repeated failures. But for Christians, Kell reminds us, the future is certain. “You are in Christ, and he is in you. You can become like him. You will become like him. . . . As you catch glimpses of his grace in your life, know they are the firstfruits of God’s eternal purpose to make you like his Son” (133).
Christian, don’t despair in the fight against porn. Enslavement in the darkness is not your destiny. Lasting hope and real help can be found in the light of the gospel and in the fellowship of the church, where the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin (1 John 1:9).
The Gospel Coalition