How do we get to the heart of encouraging someone who struggles with pornography and provide steps to their freedom? Biblically speaking, we understand that this area of sexuality involves the spiritual, the emotional, and the physical. This biblical goal is oneness (Gen 2:24). We are created for relationship with God, and relationship with others. However, we so often neglect this need for God and the natural tendency to worship. We seek things, looking, hoping that they will make us complete, happy, and whole. The problem is that filling our lives with things other than God cannot make us complete nor will they take God’s place.

God reminded Israel of this fact in Jeremiah 2, “For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” (2:13). Throughout the Old Testament, Israel turned to other gods and worshipped idols.  However, these false gods never satisfied, fulfilled, or served the Jewish people. These idols and gods represented power, money, and sex.  They only created more emptiness and despair.  In Judges 10, the sons of Israel finally realized these idols were worthless and a slap in the face of God. (see Judges 10:12-16). Eventually, Israel repents and worships the Lord, and they are made complete in Him alone.

The same is true in pornography. So often, we are looking for satisfaction and fulfillment. Relying on pornography to fill the loneliness, sadness, feelings of failure, or insufficiency is never the answer. For the moment, these images seem to satisfy. Seem to take away the hurts.  Seem to make us feel better and medicate our struggles. Yet, after the chemical rush is gone, the emptiness, loneliness, and pain are worse. Not only did it fail to solve the problem, it intensified it. Pornography can never take the place or fill the God-sized hole we strive to fill.

So, what is the solution? We have to understand that pornography cannot be a god or an idol. Recognize that we will never be filled, completed, or satisfied by it. It's like an empty cistern. In John 4, Jesus talks to a Samaritan woman at a water well who had sought an alarming number of relationships with different men for satisfaction. Jesus lovingly tells her that He is the Living Water who fulfills all needs. “¹³ Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”

We must seek the Lord to be satisfied. ONLY in Him are we to be completed and made perfect. In John 15:5, Jesus gives us that beautiful hope in Him: "I am the vine, and you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me, you can do nothing. So, let's run to the source and seek the Bread of Life - Jesus the Messiah. We worship the God of life alone. After all, He makes clear - “I am Yahweh, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another or My praise to idols.”

(Isaiah 42:8, 48:11, 45:18)