“Tell your wife and kids you love them tonight. I shall do the same as I really don’t know if I will have many more chances to do so.” Those were the words of a man exposed by the 2015 hack of the Ashley Madison website. The site was started by a Toronto-born entrepreneur with the slogan: “Life is short, have an affair” and boasted tens of millions of users in more than 50 countries. When it was hacked, their entire database was released online and there were reports of suicide, divorce, and online shaming of users. While the forms of sexual temptation vary in each generation, the reality and painful consequences of it don’t. I fear that we’re missing some of the Bible’s old-school wisdom in this area. Consider these principles from the Book of Proverbs.
Are you spending more time with cyber friends than neighbourhood friends? Are you focused more on quantity of friendships than quality? Are you listening to the kind of voices that are fuelling your anger? Or have you let charm and beauty take the priority that character and God’s grace were intended to have in your thinking? Let the Bible’s ancient wisdom guard your interaction with social media today.
On Saturday morning, Andy Lundy spoke at our Men’s Breakfast on the theme of moral purity. He dealt with the topic from a number of different perspectives but just as he got started someone asked an insightful question, “Could you give us a definition of pornography, because I’m not sure everyone in the room will otherwise understand what you’re talking about?” It was a helpful reminder to me that our culture keeps moving the line when it comes to morality, and no more so than in the area of sexuality. Andy shared that what used to be considered soft core pornography is now mainstream and what used to be considered hard core pornography is now entry-level soft-core pornography, with modern hard core pornography stretching boundaries of violence and degradation that were previously unthinkable. Anything that is sexually stimulating regardless of whether it’s in a novel, music video, store front advertisement, or movie is pornographic and has an impact on a Christian’s morality.
On Friday evening, I attended a screening of Over 18, a hard-hitting documentary aimed at combatting pornography addiction among children and teens. It’s goal was to provide a wake-up call regarding the extent of pornography’s terrible social impact and to encourage the establishment of laws requiring meaningful age verification to prevent minors’ access to pornographic material. Interviews with porn stars and producers and people recovering from pornography addiction painted a gruesome picture of what this industry is doing to our society.
