Show Jesus Your Porn

For those of you who struggle with pornography, I’ve got an assignment for you:

Show Jesus your porn.

I’ll tell you why.

When I was nine years old, one of my best friends opened his backpack on our way to school and showed a group of us a Penthouse magazine he’d found at his house. It belonged to his dad and he’d snuck it out of his house that morning. I remember feeling a mixture of excitement and embarrassment, thrill and nausea as the four of us crowded around as my friend flipped through the pages.

I can still remember some of those pictures.

When did you first see porn?

If given a safe opportunity to talk about it, young kids exposed to porn will often express a mixture of feeling “icky” or gross about it and at the same time feeling drawn in, curious to see more. Their bodies may feel aroused even as their hearts feel uneasy. The combination of these conflicting feelings can be confusing for kids. It’s like an error code pops up telling them something’s not right, even though they don’t necessarily understand what that is.

It doesn’t matter that it’s called “adult,” because even as adults, pornography assaults your mind, heart, and body. God designed human sexual desire to be kindled and expressed within a loving, life-long covenantal marriage, and this means human beings were never meant to view people the way porn does. We just aren’t wired for it, and something short circuits in us when we’re exposed to it.

Who first showed you pornography? Was it a friend from school? An older kid or adult? Maybe you weren’t actively shown porn, but someone allowed you access. You certainly didn’t make it accessible to yourself as a kid. Someone brought it into a house where kids lived, someone gave you access to a device where it could be found, or someone posted it online knowing that kids could come across it.

And as a result, you were hurt. That’s what porn does. It takes your good sexuality—at whatever stage it finds you—and it works to warp it, (mis)shape it, and enslave it.

So here’s the assignment: Take what you saw to Jesus. Show him.

1. Find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. In prayer, invite Jesus to be present with you.
2. In your mind, picture when you were first exposed to pornography. See the setting around you, notice who else is with you, picture what you’re wearing. Use your best guess and your imagination to really be there again. Let yourself get in touch with little you. What’s it like for you when the pornography shows up and you begin to realize what you’re seeing? What do you feel in your body? How does your heart feel? What are your thoughts?
3. Now, turn your attention to Jesus. He sees what you’re seeing. And he sees little you. Let little you look at his face. What’s his expression? Is he saying anything? What does he do? Does little you want to say or ask him anything? Take your time here. Can you feel His compassion toward you as the little boy or girl you were? Can you feel compassion toward yourself?
4. Next, ask Jesus to restore the parts of you that were hurt that day, to heal little you.
5. Finally, when you’re ready, thank Jesus for whatever you’ve sensed him doing. Thank him that the little you no longer has to be alone there.

You can do this prayer exercise again with other exposures to pornography as well.

This exercise may feel scandalous to you. But the truth is that Jesus has seen you there already. He can see each person who was with you. He even knows the names of the real men and women in the porn you viewed. He loves each one. To be clear, he is not a little boy or girl joining in. He never sins. He is your Savior who has come to rescue you. Keeping him away from the places you need him most does not help you. He became human for precisely this reason: to enter into every part of your humanity that all you have been and all you are can be raised to life anew. 

And listen, if this post has raised questions or other memories for you, and you want to talk or pray with one of our experienced and trained staff, we’d be honored. Check out our coaching page to learn more.

With you,

Josh