The importance of hating the sin

Reading Ezra 9 this morning, I stumbled across something which I realised was key to my progress in overcoming PMO: Hating my own sin was never enough for me. I learned to hate the sin of PMO in general, and all the forces in the world that enable it.

The context of this passage is that the Israelites had been mixing and intermarrying with the other, sinful nations and giving into their corrupt, ungodly days. A snippet from verses 6-7 (though the whole chapter is relevant):

“I am too ashamed and disgraced, my God, to lift up my face to you, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens from the days of our ancestors until now, our guilt has been great. Because of our sins, we and our kings and our priests have been subjected to the sword and captivity, to pillage and humiliation at the hand of foreign kings, as it is today.”

But Ezra didn’t do these things himself… so what does he have to be ashamed of? The answer is that it was not enough for him alone to turn away from the sin… he hates the sin itself and it tears him apart knowing that those around him - who are supposed to be God’s chosen people - are giving in to it. He wasn’t guilty of these particular sins himself but he hated that the sin was in the world. I am guilty of PMO, but even though I'm in my best ever streak, it equally breaks my heart to know that many others aren't even trying to give it up.

• In my journey to recover over the past year it became clear to me just how manipulative the porn industry is. To some extent it doesn’t need to manipulate… the sexualisation of marketing material, film and TV characters, magazine content, etc. etc. gets our juices flowing. Society as a whole sets us up, and the porn industry knocks us down. But we never learn. And the porn industry knows we never learn. That’s why it’s such a lucrative business. We are absolute suckers for it.
• Not only this, but it struck me how the porn industry seizes any technological development and finds a way to exploit it. The availability of our sexual desires at the click of a mouse button, instantly downloaded onto multiple tabs on super-fast broadband, wasn’t an issue for former generations, so they weren’t ready to defend us from it. If we are not careful, we will likely be equally unprepared w.r.t protecting our own progeny from whatever technological advancements come next. Just the other day I stumbled across an article about gaming peripherals that were designed to deliver sexual thrills, serving as outputs for whatever evil is happening in-game (I didn’t read the article, just saw the title and summary come up on a regular gaming feed, which presented it as ‘funny’ news). More than likely the porn industry is investing in virtual reality technology too, and who knows what else.
• Porn industry aside, people love to share stuff for free. People are so turned on by a piece of content that they can’t wait to show it to others. They’ll curate a collection on Pintrest or Deviantart or somewhere and allow anybody to view. They’ll create their own fetish content and upload it to the same, just to share their passion with the world.
• That said, some of this is ‘free’ stuff are likely released by the porn industry trying to draw us in. I’ve certainly been tempted to purchase videos that were ‘leaked’ onto YouTube but later taken down, with the source becoming my only means of return.

Anyway, I have digressed a lot from my original point. What a sinful world it is where people exploit our weaknesses to lure us into addictions they know perfectly well will not satisfy us but destroy us. What a sinful world it is where people share lustful content for free and not The Good News of Jesus Christ.

Seeing the full extent of this evil for what it was, and realising that there was a time I didn’t even care, reinforced my hatred for it as a whole and by extension put it in my heart to give up entirely. I may be approaching 200 days clean at the time of writing, but there are people out there giving in on a daily basis while others enable this behaviour either for profit or because they want to ‘evangelise’ the objects of their sexual desire. It makes me angry, sad, and it breaks my heart, just as Ezra was heartbroken about the state of Israel and the sin to which it repeatedly return.

Please join me in praying against this evil.