Porn is scary, but it doesn’t have to be. As loving parents we need to help our children know more than what to avoid, we need to point them to the life and hope available in Christ.
The porn conversation, while never easy, doesn’t have to be complicated. Today we’ll discuss God’s clear standard, how it is delivered with incredible grace and hope, and how we can see God’s victory even in areas of repeated, intentional personal failure.
Recommended Resources:
Accountability Apps:
- For Adults: Covenant Eyes
- For Kids: BARK
Addiction: ReSTART
Human Trafficking: Fight The New Drug
Transcription:
Purposely. Your life. God’s purpose. Listen at onpurposely.com.
Hello everyone and welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. My name is Nathan Sutherland and this podcast is dedicated to helping families love God and use tech. Today is it’s a special episode because it’s not okay. Anyway, it’s unique in that it’s directly inspired from real life events Recently. So we’ve talked about these six episodes. We’ve got talking about real life issues, and today we’re going to be talking about pornography. This particular conversation is stemming from a very recent real life conversation I had with multiple adult men but they’re not my age adult. So they’re younger adults but they are independent and trying to live in the wild of the real world. And pornography came up in a very natural sense. So I think we’ll just kind of jump in here because it came up. We were reading this is John eight, and so as Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives earlier in the morning, he comes again to the temple.
All the people came to him. He sat down and taught them. And then there’s this description of the scribes in the Pharisees bring a woman who’s caught in adultery and say, Hey, the law says this lady needs to die. What do you say? Jesus writes in the dust. And then when they press him for an answer, he says, great those of you who are without sin throw the first stone and the oldest leave first. The youngest eventually realize they don’t have critical mass, they only get one throw. They can’t complete this part of the law on their own, and therefore they quit too. And we see Jesus speak to the woman that says, women where they has no one condemned you. She says, no one Lord. And he says, neither do I condemn you. Go now and sin no more. So we have this beautiful account of Jesus that inspired this conversation of, all right, where are we not recognizing our forgiveness and not living in that forgiveness, right was kind of the idea.
And all three of these young men were like, yeah, pornography, that’s the one for me. And absolutely there’s other areas of sin in these young men’s lives, but this was what they brought up when I said, Hey, what do we need to do here? We need to repent and confess of our sins. We don’t just need to acknowledge them. We don’t need to just wish it away. We don’t need to just hope or even shame ourselves and go, man, if I just loved God more, I wouldn’t insert the blank anymore for them. This was pornography is the thing that I continually dislike and keep doing. That’s my number one. So in that I have tried to avoid the conversation of pornography for a while. I think I’ve done two episodes on it. It is a section that I talk about and I usually keep it very factual.
And the reason for this is I think twofold. One, pornography is fraught as a conversation on just how do we deal with it? How do we talk about it? People are freaked out about it. Most people have some experience with it in some way, shape or form. Our American culture right now is just inundated with pornography and we’re just a pornographized culture to the point where we don’t even know what it is sometimes when we’re looking at it. So today’s the first reason. The second is my just personal journey with it. I don’t know, it’s an awkward thing to talk about pornography. We like to talk about it as a thing that’s in the distant past and yet how distant is it when we can sin in this way, just in our hearts and minds? What does that look like to have victory? How do we know what victory looks like?
And I have not felt like the person who should be sharing this, and yet today’s conversation very much convinced me that I need to be talking to people about this. Not because I’m perfect, not because I’ve got this unlocked, but because the conversation matters and that God is great in this area and that I want to see men and women walking in victory. I want to see young men and women delaying the years with which they have to live with the sin and just the fleshy side of what happens with that, with our brains and neuroplasticity and the habits that we develop and the mindsets we gain and the relationships that are hurt and the death that occurs because of sin in our life. You can delay that from 12 to 14 or from 14 to 20 from when your first exposure and experience in this area of sin is. That’s amazing that there are benefits to that. So I think I’m diving into this conversation a little more a assertively than I would have prior to this conversation. And my prayer is that it’s going to be a blessing to you because the conversation with these young men showed me that it’s not necessarily a complicated conversation, it’s intentional. It needs to happen consistently over time, but it’s not the most convoluted <laugh>. It’s actually pretty straightforward. So with that, let’s get this conversation started.
Welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast, a resource for parents who feel overwhelmed and outpaced as they raise healthy youth in a tech world. As an educator, parent and tech user, I want to equip parents with the tools, resources, and confidence they need to raise kids who love God and use tech.
Thank you to everyone who has made this podcast possible. Thank you for listening, for rating, and for sharing it with your friends. We are seeing this podcast grow, which is super cool. We’re seeing it grow in density in areas that have already had listeners and we’re seeing it expand in new areas. So thanks. Rating, it allows people to find it. Subscribing lets you make sure you don’t miss any new content. And reviewing lets people know that when they do find it that it’s worth their time. That’s a one to two sentence, just quick review. You can scroll down wherever you’re listening to rate and to review. That does help us. So thank you for helping us reach more people at this ministry. Talking about pornography, I first want to address what is it? So if you’re listening to this and you’ve never listened to it, this is the start here conversation of pornography.
Let’s just jump right into what is pornography. Pornography is anytime we are taking someone else’s image and we’re using it for selfish gratification. That’s our definition of pornography for today. If for talking to a kid I like the good picture, bad picture definition. It’s a book to talk to kids about pornography starting as young as five years old. And it just simply says that sometimes there’s pictures of people not wearing clothes being unkind with their bodies. That’s a lovely way to talk about it with kids. And it focuses really on how does it make you feel? Does this make you feel funny? Does it make you feel uncomfortable? Great. Tell an adult, right? You say no, you look away, you tell a caring adult. That’s the little kid version. But is it big adults or big kids? I guess in this case, we need to understand that pornography isn’t just naked people.
Pornography is anytime we’re taking someone else’s image and we’re using it selfishly for our gratification. It’s a distortion of what God designs sex to be. We’re wired to be individuals who enjoy sex. That’s a positive thing. God made sex on purpose. It’s part of the edict in the garden of Eden. They’re going to do work and they’re going to multiply. And there’s only one way to do that as humans. So sex is part of God’s design for the perfect creation. It has been distorted. And as part of that, now we have to deal with what we call pornography, which is this just concept that we’re stealing someone else’s an another image barrier of God’s likeness. And we are taking it for our satisfaction on our time, right? Pornography never says no, it never has any limits. It is constantly a myriad of different individuals who are running into our minds and accomplishing our fantasies, not God’s purpose.
And for all these reasons, it is bad and wrong. It doesn’t just have to be naked people. As I mentioned, it can be everything from a halftime show at the Super Bowl to just whatever magazine or image you see. It could just be someone walking down the street. But if you’re using that and you’re taking that image and you’re saying, yes, that’s going to bring me satisfaction, this individual is in it. It’s not part of you serving another person. It’s not part of a loving, monogamous relationship, then that you are doing that selfishly and that is not out of love. And you are now out of place with your desires and what you are feeding yourself. So for you that is going to be pornography with that definition, then we need to make sure that we’re recognizing that this is coming out of the Bible.
This is what Jesus says in Matthew 5 18. That, or actually earlier than that, but let’s talk about in Matthew 5 when we’re going through the be attitudes. And then he gets to the part where he talks about adultery and he says, yeah, yeah, don’t have sex with someone out of marriage. That’s going to be bad. But I tell you that if you look at somebody in lust, that you’re committing adultery with them in your heart. This is where I’m getting my definition of pornography from. I’m saying that pornography is anything that causes you to commit adultery in your heart. Okay? That’s our definition. It’s because otherwise you get into like, well, is it art or is it pornography? And people get very, they get very what would I say, relaxed or very intentional with their mental jiu-jitsu. So I’m just going to say, great.
Does it cause you too lust? If it does, maybe it’s art for someone. I’m going to leave that out there as a question mark for today’s conversation. But if it causes you to lust, it’s not okay for you. And that’s what I’m talking about, your heart, your setting before the Lord. Because sin, when we talk about pornography, pornography is causing us to sin. It’s causing us to lust into commit adultery in our heart. It’s also causing us to sin against someone because we are now stealing from another individual who is not consented to this and we are participating unilaterally in this sin. They’re not involved. We are. So now I’m committing a sexual sin by myself that brings death. This isn’t just a bad idea. This is an anti-God idea. This is something where I’m going now beyond what God has called me to. This is really important.
When we talk about pornography being taking someone else’s likeness and using it for my satisfaction, I’m committing a sin. This sin brings death, yes, spiritually death, but it’s going to bring death to all the areas it touches. Pornography is an area that kills relationship. It kills sexual satisfaction. It kills mental health and wellness. It kills my ability to process others as humans, and it objectifies them. Whether or not I want that to happen, that doesn’t have to be my goal. It is just what’s going to happen because this is sin. And sin is the antithesis of God’s design for our hearts and our minds and our spirits. So when we allow sin to grow, it brings death, not just spiritual, eternal death long term. It’s bringing death to the relationships and the opportunities. It also kills our ability to hear from God. One reason is because we’re committing a sin on purpose.
Second is because the main thing we’re going to hear from God is stop that sin <laugh>. And I have found that when I sin intentionally and God starts saying, stop that sin. I can’t hear anything else. All I hear is stop that sin because it’s the number one thing God’s trying to drive across. So we now have our definition of pornography, and I wanted to show just how broad this is because men and women struggle with it. We struggle with it in different ways and certainly there are different outcomes and consequences for what we’re into for how long it exists. But we need to understand that this is sin and sin brings death. So what do we do with pornography? Well, let’s handle this I guess in two parts personally and then with our kids. I think we need to address the personal part first. Again, in light of talking to these young men, man, I want us to support our kids well, but think of this in terms of an airplane.
We got to put on our mask first. <laugh>, we got to get our oxygen going first so that we can help our kids. We have to be experiencing spiritual life and freedom in this area. It’s wonderful to be real with our kids about our struggles, but our freedom, it doesn’t have to be a 10 year journey. It can happen in the next 10 minutes. So let’s talk about that with us and our relationships with our hearts in the area specifically of pornography. Many of you listen to this, have struggled with pornography. Many of you have struggled with it for maybe long seasons. And if you’re anything like me this conversation is an awkward one because it’s not a linear journey. You have good seasons and then you have a season where man, your thought life stinks or you get anxious or you get frustrated, or you just decide that it’s not worth fighting anymore.
And then you repent and then you’re back on the wagon. And when I talk with my friends about this or when I talk with men that I am in accountability, for example, they’ll think of it in terms of streaks like a snap streak. Well, I had six good months and then I blew it. So now I’m back at zero. And I actually think that there’s a lesson learned from kind of alcoholics anonymous, AA on this, that you absolutely have your bandwagon that you’re on, and you have your journey, you have your steps. And if you have a bad day, you didn’t have three good years and now you’re starting at zero. You had three good years and six bad hours or whatever that is, and you acknowledge that that was a failure and it was a mistake and that was bad. But you don’t undo all the good.
You had three good years and now you’re going to start the next day continuing that streak with a really bad blip in the middle. And the reason that’s important is we start to think in terms of streaks and we start to go, well, I already messed up, so why even start? I can’t get three years back. I can’t wait for three years to pass before this matters again. And that’s absolutely true. You don’t start to matter three years or four years or 10 years down. That’s not when your righteousness starts to count. As Christians, we recognize, all right, I am righteous in Christ. I am free from the sin, but my brain and habits and lifestyle have formed around the thing. When I get anxious, this is what I go to when I get lonely. This is what I go to when I get sad.
This is what I go to. This is now part of how I handle the problems of this world, and I need to turn to the Lord and expect him to drag this out of me, expect him to put to death my sins. I can’t keep this thing on life support. I can’t make excuses for it, and I can’t wait for myself to get good enough to now say, great. Now I can be used by God. So Christian listening to this, know that we got three things we’re going to do. The first is we’re going to repent and we’re going to confess. This means you’re going to find another human being. You’re going to say out loud, I have struggled with pornography. Whatever that means to you, that might mean you’re actively right now not knowing how to form healthy relationships. You might be actively right now dealing with as I love this phrase Hillarie Cash of reSTART a tech addiction program.
She says she calls it an intimacy deficiency. I’m struggling with an intimacy deficiency. I’ve turned to a false form of intimacy to look for meaning and belonging in comfort, and it is messing me up. So you just have to confess it. You have to say those words out loud. You can’t just say it alone in a room. You have to then repent, meaning you recognize it and you’ve said it out loud, and now you say, Lord, I see this as sin. I repent. I want you more than this. And then we can ask, Lord, help me with my unbelief. Lord, help me with the fact that sometimes I don’t want you more than this. Help me with the fact that I’ve made a mistake on purpose and I recognize it’s wrong. Lord, help. That’s our repentance. Because then Lord, help becomes our prayer day to day.
Lord, help me follow you in this. Lord, help me want more of you. Lord, help me see my sin. Lord, help me trust and follow and do your will each and every day. So now we’ve got that. We’ve confessed and we’ve repented, okay? That’s part of our faith, our belief. You can’t have faith in Jesus and refuse to repent because then that act of lack of repent is showing that you don’t trust that Jesus is better than or bigger than your sin. Yes, it might have been a long time, or yes, it might have been a really stupid mistake, but confessing and repenting need to happen. They might need to happen way before you’ve gone to any internet site or found any other resource. It might have just happened in your heart and your head and you need to confess it and repent it.
I’m not even going to tell you who you have to tell, but you have to tell somebody, and they need to be a believer who can prayerfully intercede with you and for you that the Lord would meet you in this brokenness and would bring life from it, okay? Because this is sin and it’s bringing death. So that first thing we got to do in our lives, repent, confess. The second is we have to do what Jesus says. We have to cut it off and gouge it out. You can use this in the psychological term of triggers, but there are things in your life that are causing you to sin. Jesus says this in Matthew 5 27, and it says, you’ve heard that it is said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with a lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart, and he continues the 5 29.
If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away for it is better to lose one of your members, then that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away for it is better that you lose one of your members, then that your whole body go into hell. And he repeats us by the way in Matthew 18. So we get this repeated again if it causes you to sin in this case very graciously, it’s specifically addressing this concept of lust, of using others selfishly for our personal gain and pleasure. Jesus says, if it causes you to sin, I need you to hear this. If your smartphone is your go-to for your sinful mistakes, it is not worth going to hell for. If your video games are the area where you get drawn into pornography, it is not worth you going to hell for if that event, that group of friends, that job, that technological resource, TikTok, whatever the thing might be, that is your go-to right now for sin, it makes sin easy.
You go there and that is your trigger to begin sending. If having a drink causes you to do this, whatever it is, it needs to go. You need to lay it at the feet of Jesus. You need to prayerfully repent and confess that this thing is a stimulus for sin for you, and you need to walk away now. You will not ever get to a spot where you are bulletproof from sin. That’s actually what this verse is saying. If it’s causing you to sin, even if it’s really important to you, it’s worth tearing out, gouging out, cutting off. It’s that level of importance. So prayerfully, once you’ve repented and confessed to this, there’s action to be taken. There’s cutting off and gouging out of things that you’ve developed habits with that are simply unhealthy. So for me, this might have, or excuse me, for me, this was video games as part of my journey.
Yes, I had an unhealthy relationship with video games. They were taking over my brain, but when I was attempting to not play video games, I had another go-to for quick excitement that was accessible and it was much worse than video games, right? Pornography was available on the internet, and that was a horrible trade off. Video games were a way better option, but I knew that video games weren’t, some weren’t something I was supposed to be playing. So then I had this all right, but I’m still bored and anxious and I want excitement. And it was a way, way worse option. And so that was another area where I was like, I just can’t play video games then. I can’t manage this well enough because when I get stressed, I go to the internet and video games aren’t there for me right now, and I’m convinced of that, and this other option is even worse.
So I’m prayerfully giving up the whole thing. For some of us that might be what cutting off and gouging out looks like We’re going to trust the Lord to be good enough that in our struggles and in our inefficiencies where he’s going to still be gracious and we’re still going to have joy and excitement. We’re going to cut off and gouge out as Matthew 5 27 to 29 says. The third thing we’re going to do after we’ve confessed and repented, we’ve cut off and gouged out, is we’re going to build a hedge. This doesn’t mean we’re going to make sin impossible. It means we’re going to be intentional. This is where accountability comes in. Your accountability is not there to keep you righteous. That’s your job with the Holy Spirit. You’re righteous in Christ, not righteous in community. You are in community to point you back to righteousness when you stumble.
So yes, attend a Bible preaching church. You need the body of Christ around you. Yes, get an accountability partner. I use Covenant Eyes. It’s awesome. It means that someone else has always seen what I see on my laptop, on my smartphone, an Android device. It shows everything from your Zoom calls to your random searches. It’s not just the bad stuff, but it picks up on it has an imaging scanning awesomeness. It’s great if you even just stream from Netflix, it’ll pick up images that come across that, your text messages, it’ll pick that up. You are trying to make good decisions easy. You’re trying to make bad decisions hard simply because that is your goal. If you ever decide, you know what? I don’t want righteousness anymore, I want to sin, then that’s an option for you. But while you’re trying to walk the path God’s called you for pornography can be slippery.
It can be sticky. It can show up in parts of your life you never expected. Especially like me, I work on the internet all the time and ads pop up that I never asked for, and now I get to wrestle the mental jiujitsu, not because my wife isn’t amazing enough or because my heart doesn’t want to do the right thing, but because I have habits built from seventh grade that are really quick slippery slopes into behaviors I don’t want to participate in. So a hedge helps keep those at bay, keep a distance, and I make good decisions. I go to bed on time, I eat well. I don’t stay up late. I leave my smartphone downstairs. I make decisions that make good decisions easy. The other parts of being intentional with this is I guess making sure that our tech is intentional and our tech is functional.
That’d be the last piece. So if we have accountability, if we’re building a hedge around our internet with technology that’s going to make decisions easier to make I’m also going to make sure the tech I use is intentional and functional. Why am I using this tech? Is it helping me in my goals or is it distracting me from them? So then the reason I spend all that time on us is because we extend those exact same expectations now to our kids. We don’t say, Hey, I’ve got this down pat. Pornography is not a struggle for me. So it shouldn’t be a struggle for you. We simply say we recognize that pornography is wrong, that it’s hurting you because it’s sin, and that brings death and it’s hurting others because you’re meant to be salt and light and you can’t be salt and light when you’re completely consuming darkness.
So son and daughter of mine, we are going to set up loving boundaries. We’re going to set up this loving hedge. We are going to make sure that we repent and confess little things that don’t seem like they should be worth it. Like I got mad at you today. I had anger in my heart. I had whatever it is with our kids. I was harsh with you in my discipline. I disciplined you correctly, but then I took it too far, right, and I started disciplining you because I was frustrated. Repent and confess. That stuff cut off and gouge out the stuff that causes sin, not just lust. Matthew of 18 takes it beyond just lust. But in our situation, we’re going to, if we recognize that, I don’t know, an app, a search thing, a browser, train our children that hey, if that’s causing you to sin, that thing becomes expendable because we love you.
Not because we’re mad at it, but because this is wrong and we want right. And so we’re going to intentionally take steps to do that, and we’re going to build a hedge. We’re going to make` good decisions, easier to make, bad decisions, harder to make, and we’re going to continually do that for you because we love you. We’re not relenting and we’re not exhausting of doing what’s good. We’re going to keep doing what’s right, which is raising you up, pointing you to Christ and reminding you have a purpose and a man, a hope that goes beyond cheap thrills that goes beyond a lie of what sex is. And I would love to say that this is just for our kids, but as I’m talking with these young men who are again in their early twenties and they’re all processing this as I’m talking with friends, as I’m seeing men older than me come out with addiction, and this is probably happening with women too, but I’m seeing it specifically with men who truly believed that somehow marriage was going to satisfy them.
Pornography’s not about satisfaction with our wives or with sex. Pornography is a lie and it’s a cheap thrill that we turn to in a moment of desperation when we’re feeling anxious or when we’re feeling lonely or when feeling bored or we’re feeling whatever. And it is a sin and it is killing us. It does not bring joy. It does not bring satisfaction. It does not bring health. It brings dysfunction and dissatisfaction in areas far beyond what it’s impacting. And it’s a lie that we need to confess and repent, that we need to prayerfully seek the triggers for and say, Lord, what do I need to give up? What do I need to trust you with? For some of us, it’s going to be as extreme as jobs where we are in an unhealthy spot because of this going on in our life, and it’s not just going to fix because we ask God to fix it.
He’s going to say, yeah, I’ll fix that, and you need to trust me with answer the blank. For me, it was my video games, something that was a big deal to me. And then finally, we need to build a hedge. We may need to make easy decisions easier. Again, great ways to do that is control the router that would be, so I use a Griffin router where it just sets basic family blocks. It puts internet on restricted modes. So you can’t read YouTube comments, just simple stuff that will make it easier. It tracks where people are going on the interwebs. It’s not accountability doesn’t stop you, but it makes it so you can see where each device was going. I use Covenant Eyes for mine. Something like Bark might work for our children because it goes into text messages and the conversations beyond just pornography.
But today’s conversation is pornography. We’re not talking about self-harm and depression and things like that but we are then going to build that hedge lovingly, setting up some boundaries so that our children can make healthy decisions and can see what it looks like to make a healthy decision. These young men don’t even know what it looks like to live well and they don’t have that support right now in their lives and their friends. So man, my hope is we talk about pornography. We can recognize it, we can have conversations about it, repent, confess, cut it off and gouge it out and build that hedge. Because if you’re a believer in Christ, you are free. You Christ has won the victory for your sin. He’s paid that debt and that debt being paid means it is no longer yours to hold onto. That’s not your sin to enjoy anymore.
It’s Christ. He carried your sin to the cross. He killed it, and he rose again, a new life to put to death the sin that we hold so dearly onto. And we need to bend our knee and repent and confess, get rid of the stuff that’s causing us to walk back to the sin, seek the help and the professional aid in other areas. That might be kind of more, actually the core issues, and this is just symptomatic, but it’s becoming a whole issue in itself. I understand that happens. My hope in having this conversation with you is that you will experience freedom in Christ that leads to joy in daily life, that leads to life everlasting in life, that we can then extend to our own families, our communities, our church, our counties, and our countries. Because this is an area that when we walk in victory in just this one area, it’s going to expose so many other areas of our lives where we need the Lord and it’ll stop us from experiencing self-righteousness and telling others to get on our level because we’ll recognize our amazing need and we will love because Christ loved us.
So this is an area for us to be vulnerable. I pray that you would be vulnerable in this. You would seek the help you need that you would experience the victory that’s available for you today, because that journey to victory is worth it. It’s not three years down the road. It’s today. Your journey begins and you get to live that victory out as you watch Christ bring life and bring renewal into all areas of your life. So I’m going to end with prayer today. It’s not something I do all the time, but we need it for this conversation. We need it more often. Maybe I’ll make this a regular thing but let me finish us in prayer for this conversation. Lord, thank you for being better than anything we could seek satisfaction in beyond you. We thank you Lord for calling out sin in our lives.
We pray that by your Holy Spirit, we would have a holy discontent with areas of our lives that are bringing death, that are bringing brokenness and separation from you in the area of pornography, Lord, where we are selfish with our thoughts and with our hearts, even with people that you’ve set up our spouses, we can lust and be selfish in conversation and in action towards our spouses. Lord, we call that out and we pray against pornography for our children. Lord, we pray that our kids would have eyes to see it for what it is, that this is a lie that it’s a distortion of something great that you’ve made. And I pray for our hearts that as we have history with this content or if we don’t that we would recognize it for the sin than it is for that fit for the fact that it’s bringing death.
And Lord, that we would hate it the way that you hate it, that we would feel about it when we see other people struggling it that it’s not a joke, that it’s not a phase, that this is a sin Lord that brings death and then makes it harder to hear from you and harder to serve and follow you. Would you help us experience great victory in this? Would you bring renewal to our hearts and to our minds? Would you help us want to trust and follow you and help us extend this grace to our kids, to our spouses, and to our neighbors? Thank you, Lord, for your love. In your name, amen. If you are someone who is struggling with this some amazing resources. I mentioned Covenant Eyes, they’re incredible. There is a reSTART in the Washington State is an amazing group. People travel here for addiction specifically to technology.
So if you have a technology, lack of health and you’re having an intimacy dysfunction in this case, then that is absolutely a group I would encourage you to check out. They’re not Christian and they’re in their process, but they are biblical in their basis of how they’re going to help you find freedom in that. So restart is that group. Hillarie Cash is the co-founder of that. Groups that I would encourage you to check out his Proven Ministries is an amazing ministry for breaking the cycle of addiction and having a process for that. They run Zoom groups and trainings and have an online course. So proven ministries would be a group I’d point you to. And if you just need research fight, the new drug is amazing. If you’re not entirely bought in that this is actually a bad thing. If you’re still kind of looking at it from a distance and be like, well, there’s worse stuff.
Check out Fight the New Drug. They have a website and amazing resources. That’s not the easiest reads. I would not encourage you if you’re actively going through this journey to check out any of that on your own. I don’t think it’s helpful. I think it can be very triggering. But as far as the human trafficking and the psychological damage side, their research is solid and their basis of proof is kind of leading the charge in recognizing that this is the new intellectual slavery of our world, and we need to not be okay with it, and we need to not stand for it. So I hope that this was encouraging to you that this is helpful for you and that you can apply this to your family and I hope you’ll join us next week as we continue this conversation about how we can love God and use tech.
