It's All Mind GamesIt’s 1:30 in the morning. You’ve been Djing for the past hour and a half. Your set is almost over and just about the entire time, you’ve had this girl staring at you from across the room. She’s fixated on your every move. She’s dressed very provocatively. She slowly starts moving toward the booth, dancing seductively as she comes. She finally works her way up to the booth. You know that as soon as you stop your set, she’s going to want some kind of attention from you. From the perfume, the clothes, and the body language, you know she doesn’t just want to compliment you on your DJing ability. You’re a Christian, you know that you’ve made commitments to God, but what’s the harm in talking right? You know it’s not really going to go anywhere. She seems nice and lonely... and maybe a bit vulnerable. She probably needs a friend. Nothing could go wrong. It’s all so innocent. You wonder if she’s a good kisser and you’ve already lost the battle before it even started.
It’s all about mind games. Forget the physical act of sex. The 6th commandment is so often taken out God’s intended context and limited to only mean sex with someone who isn’t your spouse while you are married. Jesus however brought startling clarity to what God really meant with the 6th commandment in his sermon on the mount. It was there that he said “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-28)
In just two sentences, Jesus took adultery from a physical act of betrayal to a sin that anybody can slip and fall over if they aren’t constantly guarding their hearts. It seems so extreme by today’s standards.
Surely, God didn’t create sex and expect us to only have sex with one person did He? Everything from God is good right? What’s the harm in it? I’m not even married. So what if I looked twice?
Ultimately the reason why God defines adultery differently than we humans do is because God understands fully how sin is born in our lives. Sin does not start in a physical act. It starts in our thought process. We let an idea into our minds. We put it in the deepest recesses, where nobody would look for it and where we can have our own little secret. We then bring it out from time to time and focus on it for a while. We put it back and a while later... we bring it out again a little longer. As we focus on it, we stop focusing on God.
This idea becomes a bit of a drug to us. We get pleasure from it. As we take that pleasure we allow ourselves to go a bit deeper each time. Eventually, we exhaust that thought and we seek new ones. Our hearts crave for more. Our minds figure out ways that we can have more. And... our thoughts become more and more captivated. It slowly grows into an addiction and that addiction eventually comes into the light through our physical actions.
In a way, this is what the 6th commandment is all about. It’s that slow trading of loyalty, not just to God, but to your current or future spouse. As a Christian, you made a commitment to God be loyal to him. You committed to love him more than anything else. You promised to let him live in you and to change your life. Well, if you are hiding things like lust in your mind you aren’t exactly following through on your commitment are you? And as your lust grows, your relationship with God stagnates.
One of the more amazing things about marriage is that it becomes a symbol of our relationship with Christ. Each partner willingly lays down their life for the other. The two not only become one in living with each other, but physically through the act of sex. Sex outside of this commitment then is like trying to have a relationship with God without making a single promise to love him first.
As your lust for others grows, it starts to come through into your marriage. You compare others to your spouse. Not just the physical looks, but the actions, the job they have, the possessions they own and everything else that might come into play. Eventually, you start replacing parts of your married life with what you have developed in your mind. It becomes a dual life. This can happen even if you aren’t actively seeking to have an affair. The affair is merely the last physical manifestation of adultery.
And it is for this very reason that Jesus put the emphasis not on the physical act, but the thoughts that lead up to it. During these mental mind games, your thought process will be altered. You start to see members of the opposite sex, not as individuals with rights, purpose, and family, but as something to possess, dominate, and explore. It is a stripping of humanity. It’s what makes it fun and it’s what ultimately brings you down.
This is why pornography becomes such a struggle in a Christian’s life. Everything that happens in your mind when you are mentally committing adultery ultimately perverts the way you see others. Rather than feeling compassion for them, you wonder how you can use them. You don’t see a woman dancing naked on a pole as she really is, someone who may be hurting deeply inside who needs the money and can’t get it any other way. All you will see is a woman dancing naked and you are taking pleasure in her suffering. That is about as far from what Christ intends for our lives as you can get.
Beyond that, what you see being performed is just an act. It’s not real at all. The people you are looking at are paid to look like they are enjoying whatever it is that they are doing. Sure they might be, but that doesn’t make it any less of an act. In fact, it’s often worse than that. They actually want out and many of them are dying with no chance of ever having a normal sex life as God intended. Here are just some of the facts to think about:
- “Most girls who enter the porn industry do one video and quit. The experience is so painful, horrifying, embarrassing, humiliating for them that they never do it again.” – Luke Ford, quoted by CBS News
- The Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, a health-care clinic for porn workers, carries out 600 AIDS and STD tests per month – How One man Unleashed the porn Plague, Andy Butcher. Charisma Magazine, November 2003.
- 66% of porn performers have
Herpes, 12-28% have other STDS. http://www.courttv.com/talk/
chat_transcripts/2001/ 0723mitchell.html - 26 porn performers have
committed suicide since 1990. http://www.shelleylubben.com/
articles/Suicide_deaths.pdf - 45 porn performers have
died from drug overdose since 1990. http://www.shelleylubben.com/
articles/PIFDrug_Related.pdf - Out of about 90 HIV positive
porn performers, about 25 are living. http://www.indopedia.org/List_
of_HIV-positive_individuals. html
Those are pretty sobering facts. Sadly, these are facts that are not just because people want to get into porn. They are mainly because we have turned pornography into one of the biggest entertainment industry in the world. Again, some facts:
- There are 800 million rentals each year of adult videos and DVDs – Overdosing on Porn, Rebecca Hagelin. www.worldandi.com, March, 2004.
- 11,000 adult movies are produced each year – Overdosing on Porn, Rebecca Hagelin. www.worldandi.com, March, 2004.
- Half of all hotel guests order pornographic movies. These films compromise 80% of in-room entertainment revenue and 70% of total in-room revenue. – Sex-Film Industry Threatened With Condom Requirement, Nick Madigan. The New York Times, 24 August, 2004.
- According to 2004 IFR research, U.S. porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC (6.2 billion). Porn revenue is larger than all combined revenues of all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises. The pornography industry, according to conservative estimates, brings in $57 billion per year, of which the United States is responsible for $12 billion. – Internet Pornography and Loneliness: An Association? Vincent Cyrus Yoder, Thomas B. Virden III, and Kiran Amin. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, Volume 12.1, 2005.
- Non-Internet pornography can be purchased or used through the Internet and is estimated to produce $20 billion in revenue worldwide (IFR, 2004). – Internet pornography statistics. Internet Filter Review, 2004.
- Playboy’s third quarter profit rose to $3.2 million from $1.9 million in 2005. – Porn may be on the way for iPods, Rebecca Barr, www.azcentral.com, 2005
This mental adultery is a battle that the entire world is losing. In fact, they don’t even know that they are losing it.
I truly didn’t set out to write this article about porn. Despite filling the article up with stats and focusing specifically on it, what I really want you to understand is that this commandment is something we break slowly over time as we simply go through our lives. If I were a betting man and someone asked me to bet on whether or not any random Christian walking on the street was struggling with porn, I would have to say yes in almost all cases. Here are the last stats I’ll refer to this time:
- For every 10 men in church, 5 are struggling with pornography – The Call to Biblical Manhood. Man in the Mirror, 6 July, 2004.
- According to pastors, the 8 top sexual issues damaging to their congregation are: 57% pornography addiction, 34% sexually active never-married adults, 30% adultery of married adults, 28% sexually active teenagers, 16% sexual dissatisfaction, 14% unwed pregnancy, 13% sexually active previously married adults, and 9% sexual abuse. – More Sex, Please. Christianity Today International, Winter 2005.
- Roger Charman of Focus on the Family's Pastoral Ministries reports that approximately 20 percent of the calls received on their Pastoral Care Line are for help with issues such as pornography and compulsive sexual behavior.
- A 1996 Promise Keepers survey at one of their stadium events revealed that over 50% of the men in attendance were involved with pornography within one week of attending the event.
- In 2000 Christianity Today survey, 33% of clergy admitted to having visited a sexually explicit Web site. Of those who had visited a porn site, 53% had visited such sites “a few times” in the past year, and 18% visit sexually explicit sites between a couple of times a month and more than once a week.
- Out of 81 pastors surveyed (74 males 7 female), 98% had been exposed to porn; 43% intentionally accessed a sexually explicit website National Coalition survey of pastors. Seattle. April 2000.
- In his book, "Men's Secret Wars", Patrick Means reveals a confidential survey of evangelical pastors and church lay leaders. Sixty-four percent of these Christian leaders confirm that they are struggling with sexual addiction or sexual compulsion including, but not limited to use of pornography, compulsive masturbation, or other secret sexual activity.
- 34 percent of female readers of Today's Christian Woman's online newsletter admitted to intentionally accessing Internet porn in a recent poll.
- In March of 2002 Rick Warren’s (author of the Purpose Driven life) Pastors.com website conducted a survey on porn use of 1351 pastors: 54% of the pastors had
As you can see, it is unfortunately normal that we as Christians struggle daily with a screwed up perception of sex. While most of us know that we have problems with it, very few of us openly admit it. It would not surprise me if the above numbers are actually lower than they should be. Something is deeply wrong with Christians today. The question now is what we do or rather YOU do about it.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-28)
Are we truly ready to start living
as God intended? I hope so. I’ve had my own battles with this and
every year I come to a better understanding. I know many of you have
as well. If you are looking for help in this area of your life, please
check out www.xxxchurch.com. Yes, you read that right. They are a church
organization that is focused on sexual addictions and pornography. They
have tons of resources there for you as well as a large support network.
If are reading this and you’ve been involved in the porn industry,
let me encourage you to visit Shelly Lubben’s website (http://www.shelleylubben.com/
And let’s get back to that scenario I laid out at the beginning of this article. You as a DJ are going to be in a club and part of that club life is about adultery, at least in the secular clubs. You have a responsibility to the club owner to play music that attracts members of the opposite sex into the club for the purpose of making him money. Often times that money comes from things that may be at odds with your Christian beliefs. While you are working there though, you cannot forget your obligations to God. You should not be putting any stumbling blocks in the way of those who are there. I would never claim that someone is responsible for making someone else sin, but think about the music that you are playing. You don’t need to play music that is overtly sexual in nature. You don’t need to encourage any more people to break this or any other commandment.
In fact, you are in total control of the music. Play the best music out there. Make the people who head to your club come there because the music and the atmosphere is the best. Don’t play music that makes it a great place to pick up a guy or girl for the night. Make the club a place that people can really come and enjoy hanging out at.
Oh, and as far as that girl coming toward you after your set goes, be polite, be nice, be friendly… but guard your heart and mind with God’s word so that you don’t fall into a trap. Keep your eyes on God and let him lead you to the woman of your dreams. That’s what I did and we’ve been married now for over 11 years.