There's Nothing Soft About Porn

There’s Nothing Soft About Porn

By David Moore, Pastor, Braehill Baptist Church, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Aim: To show the increase in the use of pornography world-wide, and exhort the believer to sexual and mental purity.

Text: Colossians 3:1-7

Introduction: The book of Colossians was written to a church situated in what is now modern Turkey. We are nowhere told exactly how a church came to be in this town or how the town was evangelised. Certainly it was a town that Paul had never visited, and yet, unusually he is writing to a church with which he bore no personal relation, to a people whom he never knew. For the apostle Paul to write to people he had never even met there had to be a reason, and there was. Whilst he was imprisoned in Rome, Paul received a visit from his friend and Pastor of the Colossian church Epaphras. Epaphras reported to him how new teaching was infiltrating the church and threatening to destroy her testimony and ministry. It was a heresy derived from several sources which denied the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ as Head of the church. The name modern scholars give to this false teaching is Gnosticism.

Time will not permit us this evening to consider the finer points of Gnosticism, but suffice it to say that Gnostics taught that all physical matter was innately evil but the mind (or soul) was intrinsically good. In other words Gnosticism saw no relationship between body and soul, they divorced the material world from the spiritual world, and believed that however men behaved physically that had no bearing on their spiritual welfare. It was a predominant world view in the days of the early church, and as a world view it had all but died out until the mid 1960’s.

In the 1960’s the western world adopted what could only be described as a neo-gnosticism. Remember this was the hippie era, the days of flower power and free love. It was the beginning of the modern drugs culture, and the stepping stone for eastern mysticism into western society. Rejecting Christianity wholesale the hippie philosophy divorced morality from spirituality, it severed the body from the spirit, and the result was sexual promiscuity. It was called the permissive society. Today, four decades on, the western world is reaping the fruit of the permissive society - we are now living a sex mad, drug infested world. The world has changed beyond all recognition in less than half a century.

One of the great evidences of that change has been the growth and profusion of pornography in society. This evening I want to speak to you on this subject. Now I know that most preachers and most churches would rather not speak about pornography, and to be honest I would rather not speak on it either. But it is a moral and social evil that has plagued society, the church included, for the best part of half a century, and our ignoring it will not take it away. I haven’t come to the pulpit to embarrass you or to discuss anything that is in any way lewd, but I want you to see that we are facing a real moral problem today - and that God has something to say about it.

I have three points in all. Tonight we are going to examine:

I. The Spread of Pornography

III. The Saint & Pornography

IV. The Solution To Pornography.

I. The Spread of Pornography.

A. Illus: In 1997 eleven pornography enthusiasts in the U.S., backed by a civil liberties organisation, named Mainstream, sued a group of libraries for refusing to provide them with pornography.

1. Remarkably they won.

2. Now that little legal episode tells us where we have come in western society.

3. Twenty five, thirty years ago people still had a little shame about the use of pornography.

4. Pornography was not something people admitted using.

5. Those who sought it had to seek for it from “under the counter” of magazine shops, or else visit such places as Soho in London or Times Square in New York where pornographers plied their seedy trade.

6. Today, however, Soho has arrived in our living rooms.

7. From 1973 - 1999 the revenue generated by the porn industry increased 1000 fold.

a. Today pornography attracts a greater gross income than all the Hollywood movie generate in the U.S., and more than all rock music and country music recordings the world over.

b. In fact today the porn industry draws revenue of somewhere in the region of £7 billion pounds in the U.S. alone.

c. It stands to reason then that someone is buying this stuff!

B. We have to ask how did pornography make its way from the seedy side streets of London and New York into the mainstream of our lives?