Boundless Pleasure?
God created pleasure. Our culture is obsessed with pleasure. And the consequences are devastating.
According to a research summary on porn and public health, over half of 13–24 year olds search for porn on a weekly basis. By university age, 93% of males and 62% of girls have viewed pornography. Among the boys, nearly half of them had first encountered porn before the age of 18 (NCOSE). Porn addiction leads to health problems, increased aggression, and decreased decision-making abilities (NCOSE).
And yet, just last week, an advertisement during the Super Bowl flippantly compared food to porn.
As a Christian and a future social worker, I care deeply about the destruction and social breakdown that porn addiction is creating. Porn addiction is just one result of the pleasure addiction of our culture. So if God created pleasure, how did something so good become so bad?
God did give us pleasure. As Psalm 16:11 says, “ You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (ESV).
But the danger is in our distorted view of pleasure. As Paul Tripp writes in his book Sex and Money,
“There is an overarching philosophy in Western culture that tells us that authority destroys freedom and rules wreck pleasure…. This view says that eating is no fun if you’re being told what to eat. Sex is no fun if you’re being told how, when, and who you can have it with. Money is not pleasurable if you’re required to spend it in certain ways… [but] boundless pleasure is a deception. By God’s design it doesn’t exist, and if it did it could never work” (Tripp 60–61).
This is our problem with pleasure. We are pursuing the deception of “boundless pleasure” as Tripp put it. And that is what has lead to the epidemics of porn addiction, debt, and gluttony that we see in our culture today. Let’s not take this lightly. It’s not funny to say that something is “food porn.” Pleasure is a beautiful gift from God, intended to draw us to him.
Let’s look at our own lives soberly and realize our own thirst for pleasure outside of God, and the consequences it could have. Let’s be people who recognize that pleasure must be worship. “It’s only when your heart is controlled by a higher pleasure, the pleasure of God, that you can handle pleasure without being addicted to it” (Tripp 61).
Further reading:
This is a fascinating message about the Christian view of pleasure, specifically through the lens of the writings of C.S. Lewis https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/christian-hedonics
Sources:
Ellis, John. “Super Bowl Commercial Makes Light of Porn Addiction.” 2 Feb. 2019, pjmedia.com/faith/super-bowl-commercial-makes-light-of-porn-addiction/
Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Crossway Bibles, 2001.
“Porn and Public Health: Research Summary.” National Center on Sexual Exploitation. endsexualexploitation.org/wp-content/uploads/NCOSE_Pornography-PublicHealth_ResearchSummary_8-2_17_FINAL-with-logo.pdf
Tripp, Paul David. Sex & Money: Pleasures That Leave You Empty and Grace That Satisfies. Crossway, 2013.
