Porn Ruins Love (and Your Soul)

Hi, Porch! It's hard to not walk with a swagger with an intro like that! That's nice! I'll have to incorporate that in DC. It is so great to see all of you! It's just fun to be back in Texas. I'm from here, born and raised. My wife and kids and I are up in Washington, DC, which is crazy. COVID just ended there. Apparently, it ended here quite a while ago, but we're still carrying our masks around and such, but this is fun to see us all together, and it's such an honor to be here.

Before I jump into the text we're in tonight… We're going to be in Matthew, chapter 5. If you have a copy of your Scriptures and want to read, I'll be there. If you don't, just listen, but before we get to it, I just want to say I know this series is Hot Takes, so this is not a hot take. This is just a fact, and that is that David Marvin is a phenomenal leader, and watching him lead this has been inspiring to me.

Let's keep going, because he has done an amazing job of leading this ministry. The fact that cities all over the US are taking their cues from you is something that is special. It's special, brother. It's an honor to be here, and I'm so grateful to see all of your faces. With that said, let me read a passage about sex and make it weird. Here we go! Matthew, chapter 5, verse 27. This is Jesus speaking, by the way. He says,

" You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell."

Let me pray for us.

Father, thank you for every person here, whether they love you and worship was the thing they were looking forward to all week or whether they're not sure about any of this and they're just here trying to maybe find some answers. I just thank you we are all here and there is a possibility tonight to know what our Maker thinks about how we are made and how to best live the life we have been given, so I'm asking for your help, God.

Would you open our minds so we would understand what it is you are thinking about? I pray you'd open our hearts that we could feel what you care about. Lord, I just pray we could be changed as a result of these few minutes. I feel it tonight. I need your grace. We do. We just ask for your grace, God, to teach us and to help us.

I just want to invite you, whether this is like a normal thing for you or not, if you're up for it to maybe take a second here, and if you're willing, you just pray for a second and ask him. If you're up for it, you talk to God and say, "Lord, please teach me something tonight." If you would, please pray for me that the Lord would use me and I would be helpful to you.

Father, we love you, and we trust you. Use this time. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

Well, I fell asleep driving one time. When I was in high school, I was making a long run down to Laredo by myself and woke up bumping along the side of the road and did what a lot of people do: overcorrected in a panic and spun my truck in a 180. It was a miracle I didn't kill myself or anybody else, but as I kind of hit reverse and got back in the right direction… I had to keep going, because I was in the middle of nowhere in Texas, I realized I need something to keep me awake, and the music I brought along was not doing it.

I remembered that a mentor of mine, a college kid at the time, had encouraged me to listen to these sermons. He had given me these sermons and said, "You need to listen to these." I remember just thinking that was the strangest thing ever. Who listens to a sermon in a car? I brought them, and suddenly I thought, "I need to stay awake. Maybe listening to someone talk will help, but I have to find something that is going to keep me conscious," so I opened this thing and looked at all of these titles and in the middle of it there was a talk entitled Sex, and I thought, "That ought to do it."

I put it in and started playing it, and the craziest thing happened about midway through it. I started crying, like an embarrassing, snotty cry, and it wasn't because he was shaming me at all. There was no finger-wagging in the whole thing. He was just actually unpacking the book of Song of Solomon, the book of love, in the Old Testament and just painting the picture of what the enjoyment of the gift of sex was meant to be like.

I started crying, I realized, because the image I had been given and the assumptions I had been given by pornography, which was introduced in my life at a fairly young age, were such an anemic and distorted view. I realized I had such a small view of what sex was meant to be, so I cried over the loss of a beautiful picture and the possibility of discovering it again.

As I say that, I read you the language of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount, and I want to get into what Jesus is saying about it, but before that I want to pick up where David and JD had left off a little bit in talking about the subject to really just make the point before we get into what Jesus is doing, which is kind of restricting some expressions of sexuality. I want to talk about the reality that I think many of you know…maybe some of you don't, though…that the Scriptures are not prude when they talk about sexuality.

Actually, they are more boldfaced than we often are or even are comfortable talking about in spaces like this. The book of Song of Solomon, if you never read it, is this book of great love and celebrating sexuality. It's fun, and sex is meant to be fun. You see the guy at the beginning is likened to a gazelle, and he's just leaping toward the woman's house very excited. She's saying, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth." She's very excited.

It gets to their wedding day, and you see that he is riding toward her in this luxuriant coach surrounded by soldiers. She feels protected, and she feels provided for. Then, you show up at the wedding, and the book does not drop off at the door of the bridal chamber. It walks you right into it. As you walk into that chamber, he begins to compliment her, and he starts with her hair and then moves down to her eyes and her nose and her mouth and her neck, and he travels down her body.

You get to Song of Solomon 4… I'll just read you some of this. This ought to be fun. In Song of Solomon 4:5, he says, " Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies." Why does he call her breasts deer? Well, the idea is you don't run up fast on fawns. You're not yelling, "Hey, fawns!" There is a gentleness to the entry into their sexuality.

He says, "Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, I will go away to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense." Let me tell you. If you were to look at the maps in the back of your Bible and try to find in Israel the mountains of myrrh and the hill of frankincense, you won't find them. They don't exist there geographically.

Earlier in the book, she says that she kept a little sachet of perfume between her breasts, and when he says all night long, "I'm going to the mountains of myrrh," he's not talking about a place out of town. He's gearing up for good times. He says, "You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you. Come with me from Lebanon, my bride; come with me from Lebanon. Depart from the peak of Amana, from the peak of Senir and Hermon, from the dens of lions, from the mountains of leopards."

He says, "Let's get away from a context where you just want to be devoured." That's a wild animal. "Let me just use and devour you." He says, "Let's get away from that world and let's steal away to a secret place that is life-giving for us." As he speaks to her, he says, " You have captivated my heart, my sister, my bride; you have captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace."

He calls her sister not because they were biologically related but because they had such a deep connection of friendship and familial love that is now blossoming into erotic love. He calls her in other places a word you could translate as best friend. She's his friend. As he speaks to her, he says, "How much better is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your oils than any spice! Your lips drip nectar, my bride; honey and milk are under your tongue…"

Honey and milk were the only foods back then that didn't require a death, so he's saying, "This enjoyment of your body and this sexuality has no sorrow added to it. There is no death in this place. It's just life." He tells her in verse 12 that he compares her body and her sexuality to a garden. He says,

" A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a spring locked, a fountain sealed. Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all choice spices—a garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon."

He compares her body to this garden. Then, she speaks and says, "Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden, let its spices flow. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits." Dang! Then, in the very next verse, he says, " I came to my garden, my sister, my bride, I gathered my myrrh with my spice, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, I drank my wine with my milk."

Now, it's unclear how much time elapsed between those two verses. It could have been three minutes. It could have been five. It could have been 15 minutes. Commentators aren't sure, but the point is the very next statement is not made by him or her. It is made, presumably, by their friends and maybe by God himself, but this is inspired Scripture, so I think you could say both. The response to this erotic expression is, " Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!"

That's your Bible. That's the Bible's response to sexuality. Eat, drink, and get drunk with your love. The Bible is not prude as it speaks of sexuality. It's a gift. It's a gift that is meant to be enjoyed. Yet, did you catch it? It's also compared to a garden. If you look at the text, a garden locked, it's a walled garden.

The idea of a garden back then was you would nurture exotic plants and fruits, so it would be wild and exotic and exciting and have fruit that was nourishing and life-giving, but it's also walled off, sealed, protected, and secret. The picture of their sexuality here is that it is pleasure that is protected. In the Bible, the boundary is pretty clear that God puts around sex. All of us incidentally in society put boundaries around sex. Most all of us put boundaries around sex. The common boundaries in America today are consent and age.

In the Bible, the boundary is covenant so that someone says, "I want all of you. Not just your body, but I want all of you. I want to know your thoughts. I want to know your mind. I want to know your emotions. I want to know your heart. I want your body. I want our futures and our life and our finances bound together. I'm giving all of me, and I want all of you, and as we commit our entire lives together, our sex together is an expression of this covenant we have made."

The Bible kind of blocks sexuality within the boundaries of a covenant of love and within that covenant, a promise to care for you, you are meant to enjoy it. It is meant to be fun. Proverbs 5 says, " Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love."

A man enjoying his wife's breasts is not necessary for procreation. That's not what he's saying there. He's saying, "Have fun! Enjoy it! It's a gift." Earlier, he says, " Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets?" He says, "Enjoy that garden within its protected boundaries. Don't let it flow out into the streets."

I say all that because that was the context as Jesus was preaching that people would have about sexuality. Jesus kind of picks it up and talks about that. "Enjoy but within the confines. Why let your springs flood the streets?" He says in verse 27 of the passage I read in Matthew 5, " You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.'"

He's quoting the seventh of the Ten Commandments. Adultery is someone who is married having sex with somebody they're not married to. He says, "This is a boundary." Incidentally, this is a boundary that almost all Americans agree with. If you have made a covenant of marriage with somebody, you should not take your sexuality outside of that covenant.

There is a nationwide study called Relationships in America that conducts a study all across America to talk about the nature of our relationships, and in that a phrase was offered up. "It is permissible for a married person to have sex with someone other than their spouse." Ten percent of men in America in this survey said, "Yes," and 5 percent of women said, "Yes," so 90 percent of men in America and 95 percent of women agree with Jesus here. It is not right for someone who is married to have sex with someone who is not their spouse.

I'm not going to belabor that verse, because most of America already believes that one. We agree with Jesus on that one, except for roughly 10 percent of men, so look out, ladies, but Jesus is going to do something pretty crazy in the next verse. He says, "You've heard that. It's in the Ten Commandments."

In verse 28, he says, "But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart." He does something there that, if you really think about it, in the Old Testament he just takes the seventh of the Ten Commandments and the tenth of, "Do not covet," and puts them together, so it's not in a sense new, but it is an intensification of the seventh commandment.

He's paddling upstream from the act of infidelity. He says, "Do you know where we need to cut this stream off? It's all of the way back at images and intent and imagination." It's how what you take in through your eyes affects your heart. He says, "More than action, I want to talk about images and intent and imagination." That's where Jesus puts it. What is going on inside your heart?

Really, he's creating a very different boundary, a much higher one. You could say it maybe in modern language as what he's doing is he's calling for the end of objectification of women. That's the idea. I think we're more comfortable with some of that language, but we can say that if Jesus is saying that if looking at images that are affecting your imagination with lustful intent is out of bounds I think we can acknowledge that's a pretty high bar.

That's pretty wild. Sexuality only meant to be enjoyed within the covenant of marriage is very restrictive. I think if we're honest in our culture today, a lot of people might say, "That's too much! That's too restrictive! That's too much." It wasn't that long ago in America (a couple of decades ago) that there was a great sexual revolution.

People said, "These boundaries around sex are too tight. We need to kick some of these walls down and loosen up a little bit and kind of let the streams flow. We have to move it out a little bit." Then, as technology caught up in the 80s and the 90s, this loosening of sexual boundaries really took off through technology and has created today, I think, a really different world for you and for me, so what I want to do with the rest of our time is not really talk about sex so much but talk about what Jesus is talking about, imagery that is affecting our imagination and what we see with our eyes is affecting our hearts.

There has been a shift in the world today, particularly for your generation to deal with, so I want to look at the proliferation of sexual imagery, the problems it creates, the principle Jesus lays out, and the practices he would recommend. Now, as soon as I say that, let me say this. My goal is not to shame anybody.

That's always the risk when you talk about stuff like this. It's like you can see the wave of shame hit people, and it's sad, because the reason I started where I did was talking about how sex is supposed to be fun, but as soon as we move to this, I watch the shame hit people's faces, and I don't like that.

I don't think we feel good about some of how we're handling this gift from God, so let me just tell you my goal here is not to make anybody here feel ashamed or feel bad. I just want to give you the lay of the land of where we are as a culture, assess it, and then show us a different path Jesus offers us. Does that make sense?

Let's talk about the proliferation of sexualized imagery. Mark Regnerus is a research professor at the University of Texas, of all places. Can you believe I'm quoting a guy from UT? There it is. He studies sexuality and particularly yours, folks, and he quotes a lot of information that I'm going to mention here including this Relationships in America survey.

Based on the surveys he looked at, currently in America 84 percent of 14- to 18-year-old males and 57 percent of 14- to 18-year-old females have viewed pornography, so that's almost all high-school aged boys and a little over half of high-school aged girls. Again, to give you where we are as a society, it is now normal for minors to watch adults have sex on a screen.

Depending on what number you check, the number of explicitly pornographic sites in America consistently ranked as some of the most visited websites on the planet. Depending on when you check, it will land often in the top 10. I looked at November of 2020 at the top 10 websites viewed around the globe. The first was Google. That's not surprising.

The second was YouTube followed by Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Instagram, Baidu (which is China's version of Google), and Yahoo, which, frankly, was surprising. The ninth was an explicitly pornographic website with 3.4 billion unique views per month. There are only like six or seven billion of us walking around here. That's quite a bit.

The tenth was a pornographic website that gets 3.3 billion unique monthly visits. If you combine those last two, those two websites alone are visited more than Instagram or Wikipedia. What I'm talking about here is a global phenomenon. There has been a big shift on the planet earth as it relates to sexual imagery.

According to Covenant Eyes, the highest percentage of subscriptions to porn sites are found in zip codes that are more urban than rural, have a higher than average household income, have a greater density of young people, have a higher proportion of people with undergrad degrees, and have a higher measure of social capital, meaning they like to donate, volunteer, and participate in community projects, so basically, a city like Dallas. Basically, this room.

If limited to men 18- to 39-years old… This was maybe the most helpful statistic. It's hard to read who is struggling with pornography. If you ask somebody that, it's kind of a weird question to ask, so the way they did it in the survey was to ask, "When was the last time you intentionally looked at an explicitly pornographic image?"

They found 46 percent of men between 18 and 40 said, "This past week," and 16 percent of women between 18 and 39 said the same. Within your age bracket, 46 percent of men and 16 percent of women said, "Over this past week," and 24 percent of men in America indicated today or yesterday, so almost half of American adult men under 40 are weekly viewers of pornography, while about a quarter of them viewed it yesterday or today.

One commentator said it this way. He said, "Men today can see more flesh in five minutes than their great-grandfathers could their entire lives searching actively for it." There has been a big shift in the culture today. Now, again, let me say I'm not trying to shame any of you, because here's the deal. You didn't make this.

I don't know. Maybe some of you did. I don't know where you work, but based on your age none of you created this environment, but the point is it has affected you, so this proliferation is new in your day. It's unlike anything we've ever seen on the planet earth before. The same guy who said, "You can see more than your grandfather could in five minutes," said, "and we are not prepared for that in an evolutionary perspective."

You're not ready for it. It has thrown us for a loop, so the proliferation is historic, and the problems it has created are fairly acute. Relationally it has impacted the way we relate to each other, so that's really what I want to talk about in the next segment: how it has affected the way we relate to each other. Everyone I'm going to quote is not a Christian. They don't have a religious dog in the fight as they assess what is happening in the culture today. Naomi Wolf is a self-described liberal feminist. She says,

"For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual 'mission creep' of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the 70s, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. …you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. […] Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer."

She said, "The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy." One of the impacts of this proliferation of imagery is an effect on the confidence of women in society today, whether they view it or not, and the ability to feel they can hold a guy.

Jennifer Lawrence, an Academy Award winner, was victim of a hacking. Do you remember? She had taken nude photos of herself to send to her boyfriend, who lived in another town, and someone hacked it and put them online. She was talking to Vanity Fair about that experience, and they asked her, "Why did you even take those photos in the first place?" This is what she said. "…either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he's going to look at you." That's how she views relationship today. Naomi Wolf comments.

"But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, super-size portions, and obesity?"

She says that sex has become commoditized. We took it out of the bedroom and we gave it to multi-billion dollar corporations. As that has happened, it has shifted the way we are able to relate to each other. Christopher Ryan is a guy who wrote a book entitled Sex at Dawn, which I'm not recommending. He's a proponent of non-monogamy, but he was asked in an interview with Vanity Fair about Tinder and, particularly what they were asking about was, the problems of sexualized technology. He says that it's the same pattern manifested in porn use.

He said, "The appetite has always been there, but it had restricted availability; with new technologies, the restrictions are being stripped away and we see people sort of going crazy with it. I think the same thing is happening with this unlimited access to sex partners. People are gorging. That's why it's not intimate. You could call it a kind of psychosexual obesity."

Now, again, these are people with a liberal sexual ethic, so they're not reading a Bible. They have no moral constraints because of religious convictions. They're just looking at society and saying, "We kicked down some boundaries, and we're seeing that as it spills out it is less like nourishment and more like fast food, and it is creating an isolation."

The idea to do whatever sexually as long as it doesn't hurt someone doesn't really hold, because the reality is the lustful gaze unrestrained is hurting all of us. I won't go into details now, but Mark Regnerus quotes a neuroscientist who says that in the past the porn industry has characterized their opposition as primarily religious, but the reality is porn addiction harms human bonding.

I won't quote many more stats. We have to move on, but the reality is dozens of studies have confirmed that this bathing in sexualized images has led to self-reported lower relationship satisfaction, lower relationship quality, a tendency to experience more negative communication with a romantic partner, feeling less dedicated to the relationship, less sexually satisfied, more likely to commit infidelity, tend to see monogamy as unrealistic, and lower self-esteem in the men and women.

It had led to earlier sexual debuts in relationships, because rather than sex now being the culmination of our love it is now an anchor I throw into a relationship to try to secure the possibility of love. Rather than expressing love, it is a thing we introduce earlier, hoping love will be on the other side, but statistically what we are seeing among your generation is an earlier sexual debut in a relationship is not a good predictor of the survival of a relationship. It is actually a good predictor that the relationship won't survive.

All of this sex has led us away from each other and from God. That's one of the craziest things. Samuel Perry is a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma. Do they have those there? I guess they do. Good for you, Oklahoma. The parking lot of Texas! I had to throw a joke in there about Oklahoma. You have to laugh sometimes to keep from crying.

He notes a direct correlation between a relationship with sexualized imagery and growth in religious doubt and declining importance of religion. Isn't that a fascinating thing? God gave us the gift of sex for bonding. It releases hormones that create bonding. It is meant to reinforce emotional bonding, but when we remove it from a relationship with a human and put it into these situations where we're just now using it as a commodity, it has actually damaged our ability to connect with each other, and it has damaged our ability to connect with God. What he created for bonding is now reinforcing isolation. Last quote, and then we'll move on. Naomi Wolf says,

"Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don't know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.

Other cultures know this, and I'm not advocating returning to the days of hiding female sexuality, but I'm noting that the power in charge of sex are maintained when there is some sort of sacredness to it, when it's not on tap all of the time. In many more traditional cultures it is not prudery that led them to discourage men from looking at pornography.

It is, rather, because those cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time and to help men in particular to, as the Old Testament puts it, rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times. These cultures urge men not to look at porn because they know a powerful, erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong family."

Let me just clue you into what you just heard there. A self-professed, non-religious, liberal feminist just quoted the Old Testament sexual ethic favorably. She says that maybe there was something to this idea of boundary not as a restrictive, septic pond but as the banks of a river that allow this to flow in a life-giving way.

Maybe there was something to this. Maybe what we have here… All of this liberty has not brought us freedom. Maybe this liberation of sexuality has led us to bondage, and I would argue to you that a lot of the movements you see in the streets now are so different than what you saw back in the 60s. Now, the call is for restraint. The #metoo movement. People are saying, "We kicked down some boundaries that maybe should go back up."

Now, let me just say again that it is really different for our generation because of the amount of it that is online, but this whole situation is not particularly historically new. In ancient Rome, there was a much looser sexual ethic. Men could sleep with whomever. I guess anybody could, but whenever you have a society with a looser sexual ethic, it tends to favor men because they are more interested in sex and powerful, wealthy, men, because they have the influence and money to create situations where they get more sex, so it created a moment where men would exploit women and other men and children.

The sex that happened in ancient Rome happens still today. A looser sexual ethic is how you get a Harvey Weinstein. What is fascinating about ancient Rome is… I got really interested in why Romans would become Christians. If you were a part of ancient Rome and wealthy and successful, why would you join this fledgling Christian movement where you might get killed?

"This is a neat little club. What do you guys do? Get murdered? I'm in!" Who would join that club? One of the most attractive things about the Christian community was their sexual ethic and the fact that the women seemed happier and the men seemed happier and the children seemed happier. It was interesting.

Romans would look at them and be like, "Your sexual ethic is backward, regressive, weird, and attractive. You just seem happier than us." One of the things that drew people to Jesus is what Jesus is doing here. I'll be honest. When I first read this passage when I was younger when Jesus said, "If you even look at a woman lustfully, you have committed adultery," I was like, "Come on!" "You already did it!" "I didn't! Oh, man!"

It just felt a little too high, but now I realized he isn't being the morality police here. He's not measuring the hem of all of your dresses. That's not what he's doing. He can just see downstream. The lustful gaze unrestrained is going to lead you to a place where it is harder to meet each other, harder to date, harder to get married, and harder to enjoy marriage, so Jesus sees the damage downstream and says, "Let's cut it off up here."

He's not saying this because he is prude or rude. He's saying it because he loves us. Oh, how he loves us. I see it differently that way now. He warns us, and here's the principle he warns us with. He doesn't start with their bodies. He goes back to the intent of their eyes and their imagination. What you look at through the eyes affects your heart.

He's quoting Job there from Job 31:1. Job said, "I have made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a…woman." He says, "If my heart goes after my eyes and my feet go after a woman, may God judge me!" He understood what I gaze at with my eyes will stir my heart and move my life. What do you entertain with your eyes?

The book, Atomic Habits, talks about this maybe in a more business-like language. They talk about cues and craving and response and reward. When I see a cue, it kick-starts a craving, so I respond to get a reward. You see this with food. This was me all through COVID. I would walk through the kitchen and be like, "Cookie!"

As soon as I saw it, it kick-started a craving. "I want to eat you." Then, I would do it, and I would feel a reward. I would feel good inside until I gained about 10 COVID pounds and was like, "This costs too much. I don't want to keep doing this," but I realized every time I saw a cookie it just started the cycle. Cue. Craving. Respond. I realized I had to change the cue.

What Atomic Habits said was, "Eliminate the cues from your home and it will decrease the cravings," which happened. I told my wife, "You have to get all of these snacks out of the house. What are you trying to do to me?" We got them out of the house and what happened? I would feel it sometimes. "I want a cookie. There are no cookies. Oh, man. I guess I'll read a book, write a poem, or go on a walk." What happened? Suddenly, my imagination was freed up. Do you see that?

I had a friend who was a sex addict, recovering, and he said, "Do you know what was so wild? When I got this stuff out of my life, my creativity came back. I didn't even know I had lost it, but my imagination had been so filled with these images that when I cut the images out my imagination kick-started in some other areas. I started writing songs again. I started biking again. I started going on trips with friends. It unlocked some things I had lost."

He realized, "This was costing me things I didn't want to give up," so he made a change, because what goes into the eyes affects the heart. These images affect your imagination, so if you want a pure imagination, you have to get purity to your eyes. Again, notice here he's talking about lustful intent. He's talking about your intent here or the intent of the gazer.

Our intent can change. I remember when I was a youth pastor right out of college. I had all of these young girls in my ministry. When I looked at them, I thought, "Word association. People I'm meant to care for. People I'm meant to help. My little sister, because they look like my little sister." I just thought of young women I wanted to see flourish under God.

I remember visiting some buddies up here in Dallas my same age and some girls walked by the same age, and they started making sexual comments about these girls, and I got super offended. "How dare you?" Then, I realized we are the same age looking at the same girls, but our intent was really different, and that intent matters.

Notice here he's not necessarily talking to the women in his illustration to make a change. This isn't a talk where he was like, "Ladies, everyone has to wear muumuus and hoods may be a good idea." He doesn't do that. He puts it on the person who is looking and says, "You have to be honest with yourself about your intent."

I'm not trying to present myself as a super holy person. Like I said, I ran into pornography like many of you at a very young age. I was looking at it, and it had that weird effect of being really alluring, because looking at naked women is fascinating to men and you are meant to find it to be so, but seeing it divorced from relationship the way it was also introduced a bunch of shame into my heart, and it just did that weird dance where I was drawn to it and repulsed by it and I was repulsed by me, and I dislike this proliferation of sexualized imagery because I see it rob people of their hearts so much.

I'm not mad at you if it is something you have struggled with. I'm mad at it because it is a distortion. Sex isn't the Devil's game. The Devil's game is to distort it, and I don't like that, and I don't like the way it steals a lot of the vibrancy and creativity out of a lot of the young people I get to minister to, so I want to see it change. What Jesus advocates is this practice of,

"If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell."

The practice, he says, is that restraint can bring liberty. Restraint can bring liberty. If what I see through my eyes is corrupting my imagination and corrupting my action, then I will change what I see with my eyes. Now, is he advocating mutilation? No, although some people historically in Christianity have read it that way.

Famously, Origen, the great theologian, read it that way. He understood hand as a euphemism for the male organ, so he cut his off. At the Council of Nicaea, they told everyone, "Stop it. Don't do that anymore. It was a bad call," and that was a good decision by religious leadership. I love the way John Piper said it.

Is Jesus saying, "Cut out your right eye," being literal? No, because you could just lust with your left eye, and if you cut out both eyes, you can still lust in your heart. He just located the heart as the source of the problem in an earlier verse, so he's being metaphoric here about the reality that we have to get a lot more radical with what we allow into our eyes to affect our imagination to affect our actions. Get radical.

He's not talking about mutilation; he's talking about mortification. There are some things that need to die in my life. If there are some cues that always kick-start this craving, I'm eliminating the cue. I'm getting it out of my life. Now, again, notice he says if, because you have to gauge you.

If your eye causes you to sin, then cut it out. There may be some places and spaces that you say, "This is a place that when I get here my eye has a lustful intent. I can't do this anymore." For others of you, it may not be an issue. You have to be honest with you and how you deal with different challenges and frustrations.

I have a friend who going to bars does not bother him. He can have a drink with a friend, hang out, and visit, and there is no temptation to get hammered and black out. It's not his problem, but I have another friend who is a recovering alcoholic, and he just had to be honest. "Dude, as soon as I walk into a bar, the sights, the sounds, and the smells just kick-start this craving that is almost out of control. I want to go hang with my friends, but I just realized I can't do it. For me, I can't go in there," so he had to mutilate himself socially. "I'm going to cut off a part of me socially to protect my life."

My other buddy can go in there without a problem, but the buddy who could go there without a problem had a real issue with pornography, so he had to get pretty radical of getting a lot of screens out of his house and getting rid of computers in there and locking up his stuff with accountability software and friendships.

Then he realized, "As I was locking up all of my screens, I would go to bookstores sometimes because I was so hard up for a sexual image that I would be cruising this bookstore looking for books that might have something like that, and I realized this is nuts. I have a problem. I just can't go to this bookstore anymore."

Some of you have never thought that way about a bookstore, and I'm sort of sad for even putting it in your mind, but he had to be real. For him, bars were fine but not bookstores and you have to be honest with you. There are places where you go, "To be honest, all of my friends are watching this show. I can't watch that show," or "I'm following these people online because all of my friends do, but I've noticed every time I look at that person's Instagram I get unhappy and sad and don't like my body or my life."

Guess what. Cut your eye out, or quit looking at their thing. Mortification. Cut it off, because that restriction actually brings liberty, which we know in theory anyway. Right? All of us know that. We agree with it about food. Right? How does Simone Biles fly through the air like a bird? It's because there is some team of trainers behind her meticulously counting out every grain of salt.

"No, no, no! That's too much," along with her sugar intake and food intake. She has had to put so much restriction to her diet to liberate her to do some superhuman activity in gymnastics, and some of you are that way. You restrict your diet so you can climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest river and all of the stuff you do, so we all know we agree with this practice Jesus is advocating. Restriction just might bring liberty.

He looks sexually at us and says, "It's the same. I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to save your life." This unrestrained, boundary-less sexuality has cost us too much. It has cost us too much. He says, "I don't want you to pay that cost anymore. I want it to change." Now, let me close with this.

You hear this, and I do think some of us should look at his command and say, "I have to make some changes, and I have to be honest." You may be like me where I got rid of my TV at one point, which for some people sounded so insane. I'm like, "He said to cut your eye out. Getting rid of your TV is actually fine. I read a bunch of books."

You may need to make some real changes, but if all you do is walk out of here and feel bad about yourself, this is not a good sermon. If you make some changes…I hope you do…that's also not sufficient. We didn't read it, but the way he starts this sermon is not with, "I'm going to tell you guys how to get your crap together. Write this down. First, cut your eyes out."

He doesn't start with a list of rules to get you to maybe earn God's approval. Do you know where he starts this sermon? He says, " Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." What does poor in spirit mean? It means I have spiritual poverty. I'm not enough to earn the approval of God. I'm not. I have fallen short. My hands are dirty. My eyes have seen things. My hands have done things. I have been depleted spiritually. He says, "When you admit that, you are blessed."

"Blessed are those who mourn…" He says, "When you realize how far you have gone from the standard, you mourn." You cry in the car like me. He says, "When you do that, you are blessed, because my comfort is coming for you." He said, "Blessed are the meek…" That means I'm not proud. I'm not puffing out my chest saying, "This isn't a problem for me." He said, "No, no, no. The meek are the ones who will inherit the earth."

He said, "I have come here to do something new. I'm a King inaugurating a kingdom, and the entrance into my kingdom and the entrance into the blessing of God, the smile of God, and the love of God that is inexhaustible doesn't come by getting your act together. It comes by admitting your need."

"I am poor, and I feel sad about it, and I'm not proud. I need you." I need the King to be what I'm not. That's what Jesus loves to do. He loves to live the perfect life you couldn't. Then, the Bible says that the wages of sin is death. Death is the payment for sin. He never sinned. He didn't need to die, so what he did on the cross is what David said earlier.

He who knew no sin became sin for you and for me. He said, "I know what you've done, and I'm taking all of it and the shame of it and the sadness of it. Every sticky, sad, isolating, lonely thing I am driving like a stake through my heart, and I am burying it in the grave, and then I rise, and I'll leave it behind, and you trust me, and you rise. Yeah, I have a way for you to live that is good, but where does it start?"

Jesus was asked, "What is the work of the Father?" and he said, "Believe in the one he sent." You come to Jesus. His arms are open wide, and I promise you he wants to change you from the inside out. Then, we can be what he says in this sermon, a city on a hill, shining out to a broken world to some answers, being again what the early church was, and showing the world we don't have a regressive sexual ethic but we have a liberating sexual ethic. "What you have is slavery. What we have is freedom."

If you're like, "I don't know if any of this is realistic in the world today," we're not supposed to be like the world today. We're supposed to be like the kingdom today. The world is a mess, but when they see what the King is doing in us, The Porch will be a city on a hill. That's a pretty encouraging thought.

Father, we love you. We thank you there is grace today in Jesus. We thank you that nobody has sinned beyond what your arms can reach. It's insulting to suggest that our sin is stronger than your sacrifice, so if anybody is tempted to feel that way…

"He doesn't know what I've done. He doesn't know how far I've gone." I don't, but I know how mighty Jesus is, and don't insult him by saying your sin is stronger than he is. He can forgive you, and it magnifies his grace to forgive you, so come to him because his arms are open wide. Admit, "I'm poor in spirit. I'm needy. I'm not happy about that, but I'm happy that I'm coming to you with that because you promise me that those who are mourn and are meek and are poor in spirit are blessed. They're blessed. They're blessed. Lord Jesus, would you heal me and forgive me and bless me?"

Does anybody want the grace of God today? I just want to encourage you right in your seat before we clear out of here and go wherever we're going to go to let that be a holy space with Jesus. Let this be a moment that maybe you never forget as you deal honestly with him about what he was unafraid to speak of about the most intimate part of your life. Let him speak healing into it. Let him speak grace into it. Let him speak life into it.

We're yours, God. We love you, and we look to you.