UNCOMMEN: The Delusion Of PornНамуна

The Job Principle

Scripture: Job 31:1; Genesis 39

How old were you when you first saw porn? I’ve asked that question to kids in high school, D1 football players, and men around the country. I have yet to hear someone say, “Man, I can’t remember.”

We remember the date, time, and circumstances.

There’s a reason why one of the oldest books in the Bible has a guy saying the line, “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1) God created sex. He created men to be visually stimulated. God created sex as “Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flames of the Lord.” (Song of Solomon 8:6)

For men, stimulating images are the first spark. The more fuel we put to that fire, the more it consumes us until we either extinguish the flames or it burns out naturally. For Job, he made a pact with his eyes - don’t feed the fire.

And let’s just be real, while pornography has been gracing mediums ever since we started drawing on caves and clay pots, I’d like to see Job make that statement in a world with HD phone screens and virtual reality. A hundred years ago, our great grandfathers spent most of the day walking behind the south end of a northbound ox. He never saw one billboard, one TV commercial, or one titillating YouTube link.

Nothing’s new under the sun. Lust has impacted every person throughout history, but cultural moves and technology have affected us in two significant ways:

The unlimited amount of images that bombard us without choice. I can’t tell companies not to put up certain billboards, or what commercials come on tv, or for women to cover up when wearing dental floss at the beach.

The unlimited access to images with total anonymity.

Henry Cloud has a book titled: Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality. We can’t change our cultural reality - all we can do is have the courage to make a pact with our eyes - don’t fuel the fire. Steve Arterburn called it the act of “bouncing the eyes.” You have the ability to train your eyes to linger or look away. What will you do today?

Written by UNCOMMEN coach Brian Goins, Sr. Creative Director of FamilyLife and author of Playing Hurt: A Guy’s Strategy for a Winning Marriage (http://catapultconcepts.org/) and Executive Producer on the documentary “Brain, Heart, World: The Harmful Side-Effects of Pornography.”