Porn Sunday Series

One day, in the suburbs of Savannah, a waste management worker turned down an alley on his route. There was a dumpster about halfway down. He pulled his truck over to prepare the dumpster when he heard the noise of a little baby. Looking around, he saw no-one, but inside the dumpster, laying amidst the broken wine bottles, coffee grounds, rotting food and lying in a sea of pornography was a one week old baby.

He rescued her from the filth and called her baby Grace because she had been left for dead and by the grace of God she was delivered from sharing the same fate of the pornographic magazines and the bottles that the man found her in. She was rescued from the dump, and once the newspapers and television news reported her story, she took Savannah by storm, and the baby, who’s own mother rejecter had couples lining up to adopt her and claim her as their own.

Baby Grace’s first week is a metaphor: a picture of our own lives, when like her, many of us were discovered in a dumpster spiritually speaking, surrounded by the filth of our sin: wine bottles, hypodermic needles, pornography. We were pitiful, helpless, needing rescue… And by the Grace of God, Jesus was there. He is the worker, who hears the cry and sifted through the garbage to rescue his people. He cares about and has the power to redeem you from things like alcoholism, drug addiction and pornography.

Some of you here today are still secretly crying out because you’ve faced some sort of sexual dysfunction. Some of you are so spiritually weak that you can’t help yourself. You can no longer resist the temptation because it’s been so long since you’ve been close to God that your spirit is weak and vulnerable. Some of you are in need of a Saviour to lift you out of the dump you’re in.

I want you to know, you are within in earshot of Jesus. You are close to salvation today, if you’ll call out to Him and be saved. You’re in the right place to be delivered from the mess you’re in.

Some people believe church is an atmosphere free of sexual temptation; that no one in the church could possibly be dealing with sins as dark as pornography, masturbation or sexual addiction, but I want you to know that these things are a lot more prominent than you might think.

* Statistics say a third of this congregation has willingly visited a sexually explicit website some time in your life, and of that third, 50% did so within the past 12 months.

* Last year, US porn revenues exceeded the combined revenues of ABC, NBC and CBS (over 6.2 billion a year), and they’re still growing… Child porn alone generated $3 billion.

* 70% of Internet porn traffic occurs between 9am – 5pm, during the workday, AT WORK!

In fact, in 1 month, employees at IBM, Apple, and AT&T spent a total of 13,048 hours on the penthouse magazine website. Last year, America lost $83 billion in productivity because pornography viewed by people “on the job.”

According to the Counsel on Sexual Addiction Compulsivity, 6-8 % of Americans are sex addicts.

Addiction to sexual stimuli isn’t just an isolated problem any more, friends. It’s an epidemic of huge proportions, and every few months it gets worse because Internet use doubles every 100 days.

Sexual stimuli affect everyone. It hunts us down on television, in magazines and over the Internet. You don’t have to want it to find it. It will find you and lure you into its addiction. It’s called the crack cocaine of the spiritual realm because, like cocaine, pornography is highly addictive in nature. A perfectly innocent Internet user can be browsing the web, come across a pornographic picture, follow his or her curiosity and within minutes be hooked on hard-core porn.

There are people in every church, secretly struggling over sexual issues, and they’re too ashamed to tell anyone because they’re afraid they’ll thought of as perverts for the rest of their lives. Someone said, “The church shoots its wounded.” We don’t do that here. At Valley Community Church, we believe in restoration and in giving people the help they need, amen?

If you’re here today, secretly suffering from sexual addiction, then know this with all your heart: that God’s desire for you is freedom. You’ve suffered shame and guilt long enough. God’s will is to win you back, heart soul and mind, to a right relationship with Him.

Keep that in mind during the sermon today that the message is for everyone of us.

Some are here today here because you are plagued by sexual behaviors or addictions.

Others need to hear this message because you’re vulnerable too.