Porn For Breakfast

Based on my experience there is no greater evidence of man’s need for a Savior than lust.  Different men lust after different things, but I fall into the vast silent majority who know lust mainly as the elephantine pull of sexual desire.

It is easy and tempting to minimize the impact of lust in our lives.  Psychologists say lust is a manifestation of healthy impulses that should be indulged and sated before it becomes unhealthy.  For comedies, it’s a punch line.  For marketers, it’s the inspiration for an ad pitch.

But wiser men know lust as something fearsome and loathsome.  To paraphrase a favorite quote from C.S. Lewis, the man who gives in to temptation readily knows nothing about it.  Only the man—or woman—who resists temptation and feels its full power can claim any level of expertise.

My education on the topic of lust got a graduate level lesson one morning in Las Vegas.  It was morning, and I was walking the strip in search of Starbucks and coffee.

Even though the hour was early, it was hot and the city was already pulsing with everything that gives Sin City its identity.  There were trucks carrying mobile billboards with 30-foot photos of near-naked women.  A high-def, jumbo television on the side of a casino displayed a simulated sex act.  A man on the corner shoved a flyer in my hand promising no cover charge and women who are totally naked 24 hours a day.

Let me state for the record that I hate Las Vegas.

Las Vegas aroused two polar-opposite responses in me.  I was saddened and repulsed by all the overt, suggestive imagery.  At the same time I was with each step along the strip growing desensitized and accepting of it all.  Like the toad in the pot, I was getting hotter in Las Vegas’s steamy waters.

Lust is lethal because unchecked it drives men and women to the ugliest of selfish acts.  Lust demands that self be satisfied, no matter what.  Lust drives us to use people as objects.  Lust blinds us to where all we see in others are physical attributes and nothing else.  There is no personality and no soul--just skin.

At the extremes, lust drives some people to heinous acts of enslavement, murder and torture--things unspeakable in their horror.  Thankfully those who drift that far from the moral center are few.  Yet I can’t help but feel as our culture becomes increasingly sexualized, these evil aberrations are more and more common. There are predators roaming free among us, and like cancerous cells, they are multiplying.

Not falling to the level of sex trafficker or child molester does not let any of us off the hook.  A little lust is a little evil.  As Jesus taught, to lust after a woman is as sinful in the eyes of God as adultery.  That’s a painful truth that merits thoughtful meditation.

Familiarity breeds acceptance.  The longer the unguarded mind wanders the artificially green and glitzy desert of sex and lust the more acclimated we become.  We live with it.  We breathe it.  It becomes a part of our daily diet.

One morning I was in Palm Springs, another artificially green place I loathe.  I woke early and—again—went looking for a Starbucks.  (I confess that do love coffee, but I don’t think I lust after it.)  I found my Venti dark roast and blueberry scone and sat down to eat and check email. 

At the table next to me sat a man who was startling in his ugliness.  It wasn’t really his physical features I found repulsive, it was his demeanor, his aura.  This guy was giving off a very bad vibe.

He had a computer, too, and he made no effort to conceal what was on his screen.  He was clicking through a series of pictures of naked young men.  Porn for breakfast.

I did not want his screen in my field of view, so I moved my chair.  But then I could see his predatory eyes, widening and narrowing lizard-like with each successive click.

There is nothing endearing about a dirty old man.  There is nothing healthy or amusing about an endangered soul feeding on the bodies of others. 

And that’s what lust is.  It’s an invasion of the body snatchers.  It’s a roaring lion feeding on a fresh carcass.  Its something to be feared, understood and resisted.  It can be done.  That’s where the Savior comes in.

The Bible teaches that there is no temptation that we cannot resist because, if we look for it, God will always provide a path of escape.  I know from experience this is true.

I was a meeting in Washington D.C. (a different sort of desert) and a group of us went to dinner together.  There were 12 in our party seated around a long table.  Across from me was an attractive, charming woman who seemed overly interested in all my stories and too amused by all my jokes.  The signals she sent did not need amplification.  There was lust in the air. 

The 12 of us were all at the same hotel, so we walked back and got on an elevator together.  As the elevator ascended, one by one people stepped off until, left to ride to the upper floors, were just this one woman and me.

She stepped closer and asked me if I wanted to come to her room.  At that moment the elevator stopped and the door opened.  My path of escape was right in front of me.  I did not pause to see if it was my floor or not.  I bolted for safety, went to my room and called my wife.

I am acquainted with lust and temptation.  I’ve seen them from the dark side as well as the light.  Lust occurs naturally in the human experience, but like arsenic, which occurs naturally in the soil, it is not good for us.

Lust is a prowling lion seeking someone to devour.  I worry about a culture that treats it so casually, with so little fear.