Porn Is Not the Problem
Should a porn addiction disqualify an individual from ministry?
Should a porn addiction disqualify an individual from ministry?
Porn Is Not the Problem JustinTrisha Davis
Justin and Trisha Davis returned to ministry in 2009 following a four year journey of restoration. After successfully planting their first church, Justin had an affair with a staff member, who was also Trisha's best friend. For two months, their marriage was on life support. [continue reading]
Porn Is Not the Problem
Should a porn addiction disqualify an individual from ministry?
by JustinTrisha Davis
Last night, I was doing some reading and writing our weekly MentorUs resource, and I came across this verse. It isn’t new, but it hit my heart in a brand new way:
Ephesians 5:21: Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
That word submit gets a bad rap sometimes. We say it in our wedding and then resent it in our marriage. But the word submit simply means “to put someone else ahead of yourself.”
Your preference is more important than my preference.
Your desires more important than my desires.
Your wishes more important than my wishes.
You being right more important than me being right.
You are more important than me…that is submission.
God’s desire is that both people in a marriage make the other person more important than themselves.
Over the last week, we’ve had several people e-mail us or talk to us personally about pornography. How did I stop watching it? Do I have a desire to watch it? Am I still addicted to it? How did we overcome it?
What I’ve realized is what kept me in bondage to a sexual addiction wasn’t porn; it was pride. It was a lack of submission. My pride wouldn’t allow me to admit my problem. My pride wouldn’t allow me to seek help. My pride was more important than submitting to Christ or to my wife. My pride was bigger than my porn problem. My pride kept my porn problem big.
Pride is a cancer that will eat us alive.
What we have realized is that pride is the cause of so many issues. We meet with couples who are struggling in their marriage; Trisha talks to a friend that has been hurt by a friend…what it usually goes back to is pride.
Pride…
-It’s why you’re not satisfied with the house you live in
-It’s why you feel entitled to that job or that promotion
-It’s why you won’t say you’re sorry
-It’s why you talk to your wife as if she’s a dog
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-It’s why you pretend to be closer to God than you really are
-It’s why you spend money you don’t have to impress people you don’t even like
-It’s why you won’t forgive
-It’s why you don’t respect your husband
-It’s why you refuse to admit you’re wrong
Pride is probably our greatest hurdle to becoming the man or the woman that God created us to be.
It is pride that is preventing you from asking for help. Pride longs to rob you, to cheat you, to convince you that life is best lived looking out for you.
It is a cancer that will one day take over your heart. The great news today is that pride’s defeat begins by recognizing its presence.
In what area of your life is pride holding you hostage? source:
Christians have always had a warped, distorted view on sex and sexuality. It's just built into the religion, part of a sick view propagated by early church fathers such as Augustine of Hippo for example. If one does research on good ole Saint Augustine you'll find one sick ma'ama jamma. If it had been up to Augustine and many of the so called church fathers the human race would have ceased to exist.
In the first century C.E., Paul urged celibacy for Christians. The earliest known papal decree, issued by Pope Siricius in 386, attempted (without much success) to forbid church elders to make love with their wives. Scholar Reay Tannahill says early Christian leaders made sex and "sin" synonymous.
"It was Augustine who epitomized a general feeling among the church fathers that the act of intercourse was fundamentally disgusting," she wrote. "Arnobius called it filthy and degrading, Methodius unseemly, Jerome unclean, Tertullian shameful, Ambrose a defilement." (Sex in History, by Reay Tannahill, Stein & Day, 1980, p. 141)
Christian father Origen of Alexandria reportedly castrated himself in a traumatic display of faith.
When priests oversaw the historic witch hunts -- in which thousands of women were tortured and burned -- church writings reeked of revulsion to female sexuality. A medieval cardinal, Hughes de St. Cher, wrote:
"Woman pollutes the body, drains the resources, kills the soul, uproots the strength, blinds the eye, and embitters the voice." (Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society, by Wayland Young, Grove Press, 1964, p. 201)
When Puritans ruled England in the 1600s, death was decreed for adultery.
In late 19th century America, Anthony Comstock and his "Committee for the Suppression of Vice" pursued sex like a hunted animal. About 2,500 people were convicted on morality charges, and Congress passed the puritanical Comstock Laws. Margaret Sanger was jailed eight times for advocating birth control. Comstock even led a police raid against an art gallery which dared to display the naively innocent "September Morn" painting.
In late 19th century America, Anthony Comstock and his "Committee for the Suppression of Vice" pursued sex like a hunted animal. About 2,500 people were convicted on morality charges, and Congress passed the puritanical Comstock Laws. Margaret Sanger was jailed eight times for advocating birth control. Comstock even led a police raid against an art gallery which dared to display the naively innocent "September Morn" painting.
Police raid against an art gallery which dared to display the naively innocent "September Morn" painting.
Until recently, thanks to church pressure, nearly every U.S. state had Old Testament-style laws against "fornication" and "sodomy" and the like. It wasn't until 1972 that the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that all American couples have a right to birth control. The clergy's opposition to contraception is based not so much on a desire for limitless breeding as a desire to prevent people from enjoying the sexual freedom brought by birth control.
Today, the church's ability to imprison nonconformists has receded. However, every censorship effort, every attempt at sexual repression, still comes from religion. Do you hear that Mr. B.J. Stockman? I feel a new scekwel coming soon, “Men who stare at Jesus.”
Perhaps the most detailed and insightful answer came from none other than humanist Bertrand Russell, who said a "morbid and unnatural" attitude toward sex is "the worst feature of the Christian religion." And much of what he said applies with equal force to the other Western religions. He asserted that church aversion to sex is not only unfounded but harmful. Against the prevailing anti-sex views of religion, he argued that sexual pleasure is a positive good, and that religious objections are based not on reason but on dogma. But perhaps his most important argument was that religious anti-sexuality attitudes inflict untold human misery, especially on women. He observed:
"Monks have always regarded Woman primarily as the temptress. They have thought of her mainly as the inspirer of impure lusts." So the church has done "what it could to secure that the only form of sex which it permitted should involve very little pleasure and great deal of pain. The opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same motive." (Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? - essay)
Strangely, Russell observed, the church doesn't seem to care how miserable its rigid sex laws make people. He cited this example:
"...An inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.' Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not abolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.
"...The church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering... because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. 'What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.'" (Why I Am Not a Christian - essay)
Ironically, century after century of holy hostility to sex hasn't dampened humanity's zest for it. A 1992 World Health Organization report estimated that more than 100 million couples around the globe make love in a single day. And people relish sexual entertainment as well. A recent issue of U.S. News & World Report was devoted to the astounding rise of the sex business in America. It said:
"Last year Americans spent more than $8 billion on hard-core videos, live sex acts, adult cable programming, sexual devices, computer porn and sex magazines -- an amount much larger than Hollywood's domestic box office receipts and larger than all the revenues generated by rock and country music albums. Americans now spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional and nonprofit theaters, at the opera, the ballet, and jazz and classical music performances – combined."
If Americans rent 665 million X-rated videos each year, as the report said, while conservative churches still say sex is "filth" or "intrinsically evil," someone is out of step with reality. And it isn't the billions of people who know, deep in their psyches, that lovemaking is intrinsically good.
Amen!
Latin: Aurelius Augustinus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo
Porn Is Not the Problem JustinTrisha Davis
Justin and Trisha Davis returned to ministry in 2009 following a four year journey of restoration. After successfully planting their first church, Justin had an affair with a staff member, who was also Trisha's best friend. For two months, their marriage was on life support. [continue reading]
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