What if your son were kept free from this draining fever in the first place, and all of his spiritual energy could be spent on God’s call in His kingdom?
~ Every Man’s Battle
I can’t conclude without talking about our responsibility to our children. If you’re a dad, your job is to build the walls for you kids and to guard their gates from the vile and vulgar stuff that’s out there. Unless they are older, they don’t know enough to do it themselves yet.
The pornographers particularly want your boys. They know that if they can get your sons exposed to pornography early, they create life-long customers. I’ve seen a statistic that says that the average age a boy is exposed to pornography is between thirteen and fifteen.1 Pornographers are even willing to give away free samples if it means that they can hook your kids.
Remember when you first were exposed to pornography? Don’t think it was an accident. You didn’t just stumble across that magazine, or that filmstrip, or that video collection. It was strategically planted there for you. You were led to it by the Enemy.
My first exposure to pornographic material happened when I was seven. My mother had allowed a man to stay with us for a few months after he moved to Texas, because he had been a good friend of my sister before she died. One night after I was supposed to be in bed, I went walking into his room. While I was there, he showed me some magazines with pictures of nude women in them. I don’t think he meant any harm. In his eyes, he was initiating me into the things of men.
While there was nothing exciting about the pictures to me at that age, I believe seeds had been planted that dramatically changed the way I thought about women. What began as curiosity about the female body became fascination and then preoccupation.
As the hormones of puberty began to change my body, I was again exposed to pornographic material while visiting my older brother’s house one summer. He and his dad (we had different fathers) had dozens of “medical research” books with page after page of pictures including every imaginable sexual act. They even had reel-to-reel pornographic movies. Fuel was added to the fire, and preoccupation became addiction.
I began looking for new ways to view pornographic material. If left unsupervised, I found late-night movies on cable T.V., magazines stashed under a mattress at a friend’s house or sexual story lines in my mom’s racy novels (always three-fourths of the way through the book, a friend told me).
It wasn’t hard to find, and that was over twenty years ago. Today, it’s so much easier to find porn. You don’t even have to go looking for it. It will find you.
