Fathers Take Hope Fight Porn

This is an excerpt taken from http://www.challies.com/christian-living/hope-in-a-pornified-world

A New Generation of Parents

There is another thing that gives me hope. My generation and the generation that follows were raised by parents who had no real sense of the world their children would grow up in. We cannot blame them for this because no one saw the porn culture coming. Our parents did not see the seismic shift until it was too late. What it means, though, is that few Christian parents (and dads especially) raised their children to deal with porn saturation. We were taught the birds and the bees, but we were not taught about how to deal with bombardment by pornographic pictures and pornographic messages.

But these generations of men are now raising children of their own, and I know that they are raising them in an entirely different way. I know because I am among them. We are not raising sons wondering if they will someday encounter pornography; instead, we are raising sons and equipping them to deal with thewhen rather than the if. Already I am preparing my son for the inevitable reality that at some point he will be invited to look at pornography, at some point he will encounter it, and he needs to be prepared. He needs to know what pornography is, he needs to know how it will harm him, and he needs to be equipped to run the other way. As my daughters grow up I will seek to instill similar messages in them, telling them of the expectations that they may be burdened with in such a world as this.

This generation of dads will not assume that their boys or girls are getting through life unscathed. Instead, we will be asking our boys what they are seeing and what messages they are receiving. We will not let our kids have computers in their bedrooms, assuming that they know how to handle them responsibly. We will remember the way we struggled, we will remember what pornography did to us, and we will move heaven and earth to help our sons and daughters avoid it. We will pray unceasingly that God will protect them from seeing what they should not see.

Those of us with daughters will challenge our future sons-in-laws, asking what they have been exposed to and demanding that they detox, that they reshape the false messages pornography has taught them, lest they extend harm to our girls, lest their history become our girls’ history. We will not take for granted what our fathers took for granted. We cannot and we must not.

We will fail at times, and our children will still see things, do things, experience things that will grieve us. But we will help them detox from the smut, we will give them gospel hope, we will help them seek and find forgiveness and freedom.

Amidst all of the pornography, amidst all of the despair, there is hope. God gives hope through the gospel, and God gives our children hope through us, through this generation of fathers who cannot afford to be naive, who simply cannot take porn for granted.