We've heard it a few times.

Not only how pornography is immoral, but about how porn is unhealthy.

There've been studies. Been testimonies. Been countless talks.

You know that stuff, the statistics, black and white numbers and facts.

But many, maybe even most of us, continue down that road.

Maybe we don't believe?

A thing that brings us relief from the pain, pleasure to our numbness, that seems to cast some day on our night, or at least a neon light, can kill us...?

All mankind is a slave to something.

We like to think we are in control of the pleasure, that we can choose to flip the switch, to push the button. But the pleasure is pulling our leash.

Pornography is a cruel master. And we are delusional slaves.

I appeal to you not by those stats on a the razor edge of a page, pages that sting little cuts in our pleasure. This pleasure is not innocent. Every look taken, every sight or site snuck will resound through your life and relationships.

It will radically transform how you value, how you love, those souls surrounding you. By peering at bodies through the safety of the screen, we are slowly teaching our minds to turn immortal souls into objects, objects that, in our minds, exist simply for our pleasure... We are creating physical ideals that don't exist. We are severing body and soul. Taking up a knife when we take up our keyboard.

We are slowly training eyes and mind to never be satisfied, stealing love and life away and out of reach. Why when we can have what we want at the click of a button, would we wait patiently for something promised as better. No longer have we the need for deep love, for self-sacrifice and commitment, for wrinkled hands clasped and long hours given and broken sitting soul to soul.

How will our relationships survive the havoc wreaked.. the self-control spurned?

And we know this from the long days of life. Some things are worth waiting for. Some things are worth paying for, and not with money. Well, you might say. It's all about self. It's all about sex. All about satisfaction. Let's drain this life for all it's worth. It's ripe for the taking, isn't it?

What pornography promises is never given. It promises life and gives death. We sell our precious souls at the table and walk away poisoned.

We are all Eve with the apple, lips smeared with dripping juices, face pale with knowing and damning all the human race with our pleasure taking. The relief, the respite, pornography brings to our hearts is so fleeting. We come away with hearts a little deader, a little more desperate each time. It does not satisfy as we hoped, as we fooled ourselves it would. Be fooled no longer. It is not too late.

What we seek to drain, to suck, will drain our souls.

And despair is all that remains in the wake. Joy is a memory. We are hooked, we are trapped. Or are we?

Life is not all sex and self. It can be so so much more. Of course, sex is a good, beautiful thing. But everything good on earth may be twisted and misused. Everything may become an idol. The honest truth is that if you aren't worshipping the Creator and Savior, you are held in bondage to something that's killing you.

I appeal to you for the sake of your one and only soul to find freedom and see the bad for the bad. Do not underestimate your enemy.

There's this principle that resounds through the atmosphere, that rumbles in the ground, that rings true in canyons and crowds..

As Ann Voskamp says, life comes in the giving and the breaking instead of the taking.

When we rape and plunder, we rape our souls.

We live broken and giving, we are repaid tenfold.

Look into those blue, brown, green eyes and see a soul.

The image of God encased in a body. Memories, melodies, dreams, talents, beauty — every person — enfleshed on this earth.

Beauty is sacred. Beauty is holy. Do not cheapen your mother, sister, brother, father, neighbor, wife, husband. Don't cheat yourself of beauty and love. Of the unseen. Fill your one self with the Living Water.

What lies deeper than the skin is more beautiful, more wonder striking and breathtaking than anything we could ever see with our own two faulty eyes.

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors." - C. S. Lewis