I was recently at an event where Josh McDowell was speaking. He was sharing about the three storms that are converging and are causing our kids to abandon faith.
Those storms are:
1. Epistemological shift
2. The Internet
3. Pornography
He began by quoted the following stat: 9 out 10 kids ages 8 to 16 have viewed porn. He went on to share many other things. He stated that the dopamine hit adults receive from porn comes in around 20 seconds after viewing pornography. Kids in this age demographic get the hit in .078 seconds less than one second.
McDowell said that we should do the following to be proactive in fighting the wave of porn our kids are facing.
1. Tell your kids that they are beautiful and that God made them.
2. Teach them sex is not dirty—we wrongfully apply the misuse of sex to sex.
3. Embed Scripture into the minds of kids.
4. Make sure kids have an adult that can listen to them.
We are not talking about this problem enough in our churches and in our homes. We have to help our kids avoid the life-altering trap pornography provides.
The things McDowell says we should do are right and good, but they must be based on the foundation of the gospel. McDowell said that if you think you can keep your kids from viewing porn online, you are fooling yourself. He said that if you homeschool your kids and think that by doing that you will keep them from being exposed to pornography, you are deceived. Your kids will see pornography at some point, and as parents and leaders, we must protect our kids—yes—but we also must prepare them or we will lose them.
Brutal right.
We as parents need to take steps to protect our kids, but we must never fall into this false belief that our steps to protect our kids are enough. We must avoid this thinking that focuses us on what we do and how we can control the outcomes and trajectories of our kids lives.
To keep our kids safe is very important but must always be secondary. We can get web monitoring software to protect our kids, but we can not change hearts of our kids. We must not fall into the trap of living separate protectionist lives. The church has failed its families and its youth by failing to talk about the problem of porn until it’s to late. Parents fail their kids with their blind optimism, thinking this will never happen to them.
When the church does tackle the problem of porn, they generally go after external issues. They castigate those who produce the product as they should, but they fail to look at the brokenness of their own hearts and desires as they should. The church and parents swing at porn with their warnings and actually end up painting sex as created by God with the same dirty brush that is used to decry porn.
Here is the problem: Sex is beautiful, and we pervert it. The problem with sex is not sex; the problem is you and me. We as parents and pastors have to give our kids a higher view of Christ. We have to paint a more glorious picture of who Christ is. In his famous essay entitled “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” Thomas Chalmers says this far clearer than I ever could. In it, Chalmers proposes that the best way to overcome the world is not with morality or self-discipline. Christians overcome the world by seeing the beauty and excellence of Christ. They overcome the world by seeing something more attractive than the world: Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3) A man who owns an Acura is not interested in a Geo Metro. In the same way, Christian parents try to make Christ and his kingdom glorious. Their children conquer the lusts of this world with a higher passion: The moral beauty of Christ.
By contrast, defensive parents have little confidence in the attractiveness of the gospel. They think the world is more powerful. Fundamentally, they are not confident in the gospel’s power to transform their children from the inside out. They do not believe Jesus’ words: “Take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). They have little confidence in the world-conquering power of the new birth.
Let us as parents and us as pastors never lead the kids in our care in a defensive manner by simply protecting them and just telling them to stop doing what they are doing, but rather that God would help us to make Christ and his kingdom glorious and that would lead us and them to the world-conquering power of the new birth.
