Q&A: Is porn sinful?
Explore additional resources about finding freedom from sexual sin.
Java with Juli: #211 Understanding Pornography Addiction
Java with Juli: #482 Trying to Overcome a Sexual Addiction? Here’s Why You Can’t Do It Alone
Blog: 5 Healthy Ways to Respond to Your Husband’s Porn Problem
Full Transcript
Is it wrong for somebody to look at pornography? Well, as Christians, we believe that God gave the gift of sexual intimacy as a celebration of the covenant promise that you have with your spouse. It’s the party to celebrate the commitment that you’ve made for your lifetime, and so God would say that any expression of sexuality outside of that covenant of marriage is wrong and it lacks integrity.
But even if we take God out of it for a minute and we say, ‘OK let’s look at the impact of pornography on our society and on the human body and brain’, we can see that this is not something that’s good for you and it’s not something that’s good for society. The vast amount of pornography is actually made from people that are trafficked sexually, and so you’re contributing to a horrible industry that is taking advantage of people and is teaching you to objectify people—to see a man or a woman as somebody who is just there for your pleasure—instead of really learning to steward your sexuality in a way that is the expression of love.
And so pornography, particularly for people that have grown up on it, they don’t know how to enter into a healthy sexual relationship because pornography teaches them, ‘I get what I want when I want it’, when the reality of building a healthy sex life is learning to have self-control. It’s learning to listen. It’s learning to understand and meet the other person’s needs.
So not only is pornography wrong, but you also need to understand that God‘s laws are to keep us from things that are destructive to us as individuals and as couples, and as a society.
