Theology in the Raw - 713: #713 - The Porn Epidemic: A Conversation with Noah Filipiak

Episode Date: December 17, 2018

On episode #713 of Theology in the Raw Preston has a conversation with Noah Filipiak. Noah Filipiak has his B.A. in youth ministry and Bible from Cornerstone University, he has his M.A. Interdisciplinary degree from Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, he served as a youth pastor for a year and a half before planting Crossroads Church in Lansing, MI in 2006. Noah is on the Covenant Eyes official blogging team and has several other articles published. Covenant Eyes is an internet accountability service designed to help you overcome porn by monitoring your Internet activity and sending a report to a trusted friend who holds you accountable for your online choices. Use coupon code RAW to get your first month free. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I'm very excited about our upcoming interview with Noah Filippiak. Noah was the founding pastor of Crossroads Church in Lansing, Michigan, and he recently took a job with Covenant Eyes. Covenant Eyes is a software you can use to protect your screens from pornography. And Noah has a really interesting story. He battled porn addiction for a number of years, even while he was a pastor, while he was married, while he was walking with the Lord, you know, and he goes into detail about the nature of porn addiction and why he decided to go full time with Covenant Eyes. And I could not be more excited about this because

I have been deeply concerned, you know, raising four children, two are teenagers, two are preteens. I've been deeply concerned about how can I best protect my kids from intentional or unintentional accidental porn use. Look, pornography sites are aggressively targeting young kids as young as seven and eight years old. So it's not just that my kids might, you know, have the urge to look at porn, although that's absolutely true, but it goes the other way too, where pornography sites are trying to reach our children. So I am super excited to have Noah on to talk to us about this super important aspect of the Christian life. How do we protect our hearts and minds from what is, as you will hear, a very destructive addiction. Now, what's super cool is that

Covenant Eyes is going to offer all listeners of Theology in the Raw a discount. If you want to sign up for Covenant Eyes, the first month is free. The first month is free for Theology on Raw listeners. The code is raw, R-A-W. If you go to covenanteyes.com and sign up and enter the promotional code raw, the first month is free and you could cancel anytime. So you can sign up, try it out, decide, nope, I actually want to love porn. I want to keep watching porn. So you can sign up, try it out, decide, nope, I actually love porn. I want to keep watching porn. So you can cancel the subscription to Covenant Eyes and it won't cost you anything. But if you do find it to be helpful, then you can subscribe.

I think it's as little as $10 a month for Covenant Eyes. When I first met Noah just a few weeks ago and heard that he was doing this with Covenant Eyes, I was like, how could I sign up? And we immediately, I told my wife, I was like, hey, can you contact Noah? And I want our whole family, I want our whole house on this plan because for as little as 10 or 15 bucks a month for a family plan, it's worth it. It's absolutely worth it if I can take just an extra step to protect my family, including my own self and my wife and my kids from intentional or unintentional porn use. So I'm super excited about this episode. Again, the discount is, if you go to Covenant Eyes, the discount is raw and you get the first month free. Okay, let new friend, Noah Filippiak.

And I had to ask him to make sure I pronounced his last name correct. So it is Filippiak, kind of like Philippians, but Filippiak. And Noah, as you know, was a founding pastor at Crossroads Church in Lansing, Michigan, and now works for the, if I could say ministry organization, Covenant Eyes. So Noah, thanks so much for being on Theology in the Raw. Why don't you start by just giving us a, yeah, give us a background on who you are, what your ministry and life trajectory has been, and maybe you can end with why you decided to go full-time with Covenant Eyes. Yeah, absolutely. You would not be the first person to mispronounce my last name, so don't worry if you ever mess it up. Yeah. So for me, I'll give you my nutshell

life story, you know, because my testimony is just woven into that where I was accepted Christ at a young age. You know, my parents were believers and I genuinely loved Jesus from a very young age. Grew up in church. I was a leader in my youth group, went to church all the time, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. I'm going to be 36 next month. And so I say that because it gives a timeline of when the internet was invented, so to speak. There was actually a day when there was no internet, as you know, Preston. Us dinosaurs remember that day. So I'm in seventh grade and this thing called the internet became uh normal to have at home right it was that was when it was getting into everybody's living rooms i guess that would have been the mid-90s at some point and my parents probably

didn't think i would look at porn any more than they thought i would go rob a bank and so it was never talked about and i was hitting puberty right at that time seventh eighth grade started looking at stuff online like swimsuit edition stuff online and I was justifying like is this wrong I don't know I think it is I'm not sure but I sure I sure like it and then that the way pornography works just like a drug so it does the same thing to your brain as like cocaine would do. You need more of it to get the same high. And so that's why pornography and early sexual sin in general, you get a certain stimulus and then you need more and you need more and you need more. So soon it was naked women and pornography. And then I knew it was wrong. I was a Christian. I love Jesus. I think that's part of the misnomer is like everybody looking at porn must love it. Like they're rebelling against God and those sorts of things. And that just wasn't me. I mean, my flesh loved it, but I wanted

anything I could do to stop. I would, I would have tried to stop. I tried things on my own to stop. I always felt terrible. You know, after looking at it, I knew I was in sin. I love God. There was always this cloud between me and God when I would worship and you know because I knew what I was doing behind the scenes so to speak but nobody talked about it that's my point is nobody in my church ever talked about it nobody in my youth group talked about it and I just suffered in silence because nobody talked about it and to this to this day I'm still like why didn't anybody talk about it and I got caught when I was 16. My parents found the history on our computer. I thought I would be done. I was very, I was a wreck. I was very convicted,

but I soon learned how to erase the history on the computer and I was back at it. Right. Again, we didn't have anything like covenant eyes on our computer. There was nothing like that. It was just like fend for yourself. You shouldn't do this. So stop, don't do it. And that's often the message you do here in the church when it is talked about is don't do it. Just stop. And it's like, if I could, I would. So got to college. Went to Christian College, Cornerstone.

Great experience there. Had some freedom from pornography because I got in some really good community. I finally had some accountability with some guys that I trusted and was actually talking about it for the first time. But then into my marriage, my wife and I, we got married young, right out of college. We were both virgins when we got married. This is sort of phase two of my testimony where I had a lot of entitlement going into my marriage because of some sexual purity books that I had read. And they basically said, if you were a virgin and you weren't looking at porn, your marriage would be this utopia, were a virgin and you weren't looking at porn, your marriage would be this utopia, specifically sexual utopia. And I'm not sure I even love my wife because the books, they taught me to view

my wife as my sex, you know, my way to get sex. That's what we do in the church. People are struggling with purity. If you're single, just get married, then you can have sex. The answer is always sex. That's always the answer. And so you get married and you think the answer is always going to be sex. And so as a guy, you're like, okay, that's what you, that's what you exist for to your wife. Well, that doesn't go very well. So big part of my testimony three years in was thinking about getting a divorce. I had already started a church, senior pastor, and I was looking at trading it all in just to live a life of, you know, promiscuity. That's really where God opened me up to himself, really broke me, humbled me. That's kind of the base message that I talk about now when it comes to how to actually

talk about sexual sin and sexual purity. So we can talk about some of that. But that got me to this point. Now, 14 years into my marriage, I love my wife more than ever. I love her actually as a human being and as a person, not just as a set of body parts, which is what Christian sexual purity books taught me to view her as. It's so freeing now to be where I am in my marriage. Just started working for Covenant Eyes this year after publishing Beyond the Battle, doing a lot of work with guys and with churches already on the area of pornography, sexual sin. It was just a perfect fit. I still attend my church. I'm the youngest pastor emeritus you've ever met. And I preach once a month, but work on staff now for Covenant Eyes, just getting to continue what was started earlier this year with Beyond the Battle. So when were you a pastor

and obviously married when you were still either addicted or using porn? I mean, is that long into your ministry? Yeah, I fell back into it. So I got free from porn like when I was 19 at Cornerstone, clean, so to speak for, you know, years. I don't remember exactly when it started back up again, but it was sort of like that crutch of comfort that I would go to in the past. And so I was married a year or two. So I was 21 when I got married. It was in the first couple years of my marriage when I started to dabble back into it. I had no protection on my computer. There was no Covenant Eyes that I was using. There was nothing like that. I was just, again,

trying to do it all myself. And because of that, it was there, was having problems in my marriage. I was feeling like I just had this void inside of me. I didn't know what that was. I didn't know how to fix it. And so porn was there. It was convenient. I knew it. And I would dabble back into it. It wasn't until I called up my best friend from college. We used to talk about purity stuff all the time. We hadn't talked about it in years. And I was like, hey, I'm, I'm struggling again. And that was when I started using covenant eyes and having real accountability again. So it would have been year two or three of my marriage. And that would have been about year one or two of my church plant. Yeah. Wow. Can you give us an, I guess, uh, and I don't, we don't need to go

super graphic or whatever, but i just want to get like can you can you describe the the the addictive nature of of porn and i in i'm just let me just say it you're going to give some statistics in a little bit i hope i mean probably more than half of people listening to this are either regularly using porn or are addicted to porn unless they are some anomaly to the statistics which I don't think my audience is. So let's just say more than half of you, at least more than half of guys, maybe a third of the women listening to this are regular users or addicted to porn.

Would that be an actual ballpark? So I mean – Yeah. So maybe for those who don't struggle with it or maybe those who do struggle with it are trying to analyze, why do I keep going back to this? Can you maybe unpack specifically the addictive nature of porn use and why it's so addictive? Yeah. And I'll back up a second on some of those things you mentioned. One thing that's interesting,

Barna just did a big study called the porn phenomena. And I don't have the exact stats in front of me for that, but what they found, it was really disturbing. A lot of things I would consider porn, like Playboy magazine, for example, porn. That's what I was pretty much addicted to, you know, when I was growing up via virtual, you know, the websites and things like that. This huge chunk of society doesn't call that porn anymore. They have these categories of what do you consider to be porn? And people didn't consider a picture, a seductive picture of a naked woman porn. They didn't picture, they wouldn't call a Game of Thrones to be porn, which is, you know, full frontal nudity, sex scenes. It was, and the younger you get, so teenagers today,

they don't call hardly anything porn. And it's just very, very fascinating. So I'll say that to say there might be people looking at porn, but they don't call it porn, even though it is porn. So I'll say, and back to the statistics. Yeah, the 2014 Barna study said that 64% of self-identified Christian men are looking at pornography at least once a month. So that's pretty regular. That's not even including the guy that's like, yeah, I slipped up three months ago. So two thirds of Christian men, and that matches 65% of non-Christian men. So we are identical to culture. The percent for women, self-identified women was 15% of Christian women versus 30% of non-Christian women. But the younger you go age-wise, that percentage rises higher and higher.

So mid-20s on down, you're looking at one-third as far as women go that are looking at pornography. A couple other stats that are very sobering. A couple other stats that are very sobering. One in five youth pastors and one in seven senior pastors are using porn on a regular basis. They're currently struggling with pornography. That's not someone like me who's like, yeah, it's in my rear view. Part of my testimony, this is like, I just looked at it this morning. You know, this is one out of seven senior pastors. And it's not a shame thing. If you're out there, like you need to know that people have been down that road and there's freedom. Like we have to actually start doing something, you know, about this. So to your question about the addictive part of it, I mean, yeah, the only people that can understand addiction are people that have been in it. You know, I, cause I've never been addicted to drugs and I see people that are addicted to drugs and I'm like, stop, like stop doing drugs. You're destroying yourself. Like you're destroying your

family. You're destroying your kids. You're destroying your life. Like they're in a, they're, they're on a street corner. They've lost everything, but they're still doing drugs, you know? And so, um, pornography can work very much the same way. And sexual sin, it goes past pornography. It goes into all the way down the line. I don't want to be too descriptive, but as far as real-life encounters and call girls and prostitution and all those sorts of things. Because you end up needing it on a biological, physiological level. Like your brain needs it. But there's something deep inside of you that

needs it. And so if you hear a pastor that says, stop looking at porn, you're like, amen. Yeah, I want to stop. But until you figure out what's beneath that desire. So my desire for porn, I do not believe is a desire for body parts. I don't think it's a desire for porn or desire for even an orgasm. I think my desire as this is how God brought me my freedom. My desire was for affirmation. My desire was for validation to be approved to be accepted. That's that was my desire. So I was looking at my wife. Hey, you need to approve me, you need to validate me, you need to accept me. She was not able to do that in a way that only Jesus can. It's not her fault that she's not Jesus.

And I was expecting her to give me the approval, validation, affirmation. Only Jesus can actually give me. And I think that's the same thing with any addiction. We're looking to a substance or to pornography. It gives me a temporary feeling of intimacy. It gives me a temporary feeling that intimacy. It gives me a temporary feeling that I'm okay. I'm validated. And for most men, we're looking for that from women, either from porn, from our wives who can never give that to us. And when we, when we demand,

they give it that to us, um, things are going to fall apart quickly. So, so could it, could it, I mean, so it's not the, uh, just the raw desire for a huge, you know, um, hit of, of just raw pleasure. I mean, it's, you're saying, would you say that there's always, or most likely some really deeper, um, relational or intimate issues going on in your life that need to be unpacked? It's not just like, I love the pleasure of looking at, you know, two people having sex, whatever. Right. Yeah. And I think that's the misnomer, even for people that are using pornography. It's like for a guy, I've heard guys that I've counseled. No, I just like looking at, you know, fill in the blank body parts, whatever, you know, and it's like, no, what's, what's beneath that desire. And I would propose this, the vast majority of pornography, I mean,

99.99% of it, it's a seductive woman or a seductive man. It's a seductive scene. And what you're drawn to is the seduction of it. Most, 99% of pornography, it's not someone who's rejecting you. It's not someone who's insulting you and telling you you're ugly, spitting in your face, telling you to get out of their face. What they're doing is they're creating a fantasy where, yeah, I'm beautiful, you know, and they're sure there's that, we put value on like naked beauty or whatever, but it's that person. It's not just the beauty of it, because if that naked person was just doing the most heinous things to you insulting you and you would not be attracted to that 99 of the time you you would say

no i want someone who's going to want me like i want some i want that beautiful person embracing me that's really what i want and so when i start looking at the porn or the sex scene in my mind i'm putting myself there. I'm the one being accepted by that person. So when I lust, and here's the thing, this is way bigger than just porn. I mean, if you're a guy and you're walking around and you can't look girls in the eyes, you keep looking at their chest, your mind's doing the same thing as it does with pornography. And this is a huge, huge issue that we have to talk about. And again, it's the same idea. Why? Because there's this pre-programmed part of my we have to talk about. And again, it's the same idea. Why?

Because there's this pre-programmed part of my brain that tells me that in that fantasy, I think that woman is attractive and I want her to want me. And so I'm going to think about her wanting me. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to think about her accepting me and wanting me. And until that void is met in another way, it's a thirst that can never be satisfied. And we'll just continue to try to get it to be satisfied. Let's jump to Covenant Eyes. Can you give us a little bit of a description of what Covenant Eyes is? I mean, before we met,

I just heard about it. I knew about it from a distance, know I've got four kids growing up in this really this cultural age and it's just they're getting bombarded with all kinds of stuff I mean porn is obviously a massive part of that but I remember hearing about it I was like oh my gosh I need to immediately get this because I'm constantly concerned for how do I protect my children growing up in an age where there's going to be you know bombarded with all kinds of stuff including porn that's going to absolutely just wreck them I mean people that become either regular users or addicted to porn it would be on par with being addicted to drugs even just even from a neurobiological standpoint from a brain standpoint I mean mean, it's very similar.

And like, you know, I would never give my kids a crack pipe and a lighter and say, you know, hey, you know, you have a crack pipe, you have a lighter. This is going to bring you the most amazing temporary pleasure you can ever imagine. But don't do it. Now, go ahead and go to school with a pocket. Like, I wouldn't do that. But from a chemical standpoint, that analogy, I don't think is too extreme. Do you? I mean, we're dealing with a very similar thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And in addition to that, I would say a way that porn is worse than crack would be it also for girls, it's teaching them that they are nothing more than body parts. And it's teaching guys that girls are nothing more than body parts. And it's teaching guys that

girls are nothing more than body parts. And we've seen how that's manifested itself over and over in our personal lives and in our macro level, you know, culture. And so pornography is training up a whole generation of young men who just see women as nothing more than body parts. And sadly, women have that same desire to be accepted, you know, by a man. And so think about teens today. And here's back to the covenant eyes. I want to be respectful to parents. And so I want to say this carefully, but parents are so naive today with like the statistics about sexting, for example, for teens, like you can think your kid is the one exception to every rule out there.

Like there's all these stats. If it's 99% of kids, and I'm not saying that's the stat for sexting, but if it were, yeah, your kid might be the 1%. If it was 99% of kids, your kid, but I promise you if every listener here thinks their kid is the 1%, that's not how statistics work at all. So you don't know if your kids are sexting one another and girls send more sex than guys because they meet a guy and they want, they like the guy. He's cute. He's this, he's that. And he says, send me sexting pictures and I'll see if I want to talk to you more. And the girl's young.

She's doesn't, she's just very vulnerable and immature. And she's like, well, I like this guy. Maybe this is normal. And so she sends him naked pictures of herself. And he spreads them around to his friends. And it's like, if my daughters are doing this, not even that they're like these horrible people doing it, they're getting sucked in.

They're being manipulated into doing this. I want to know that they're doing it so I can protect them, so I can be their dad. And, you know, so don't be naive about what your kids are doing with their phones, Instagram, Snapchat. These are pornography hubs. I mean, these are huge. Pornography is morphed. It's not just on the browser anymore. It's on social media. It's everywhere. So here's what Covenant Eyes does. The base of Covenant Eyes is accountability software. It creates a conversation. It creates accountability. And so when you go to a website, those websites are tracked and rated. And so if you go to an explicit website, it's going to get

put on your email list. My wife is my accountability partner, so she gets a list of all the websites that I'm going to. On March 5th, Covenant Eyes is coming out with Screen Accountability. Screen Accountability is revolutionary. It's basically protection that's catching up with the internet age. Screen Accountability actually has an algorithm built into it. It's artificial intelligence, the way Facebook can tell you who's in your photos before you tell it. It does the same thing and it identifies pornography. So Covenant Eyes will look whatever's on your screen, your kids screens, their phones, their tablets, their laptops. if they're in Instagram, they're in Snapchat, if they're texting, sending sexting messages, all those images, the screenshot itself gets put into the algorithm. Pornography gets detected. It gets blurred out and then sent to the accountability partner. And so you will see exactly what your kids have on their phone blurred out. It's very secure, very safe. So any

private information that's online can't be read. You can't read text or numbers or anything like that. And for me as a guy who struggled in the past, and to this day, I genuinely can say I don't want to look at pornography, but I'll tell you right now, and I say this because I don't know a guy, many guys maybe that wouldn't be the same way. I'll be reading an article on ESPN.com and some sports article. And at the bottom of those articles, everybody knows how this is. They put those thumbnails of the top 10 hottest women Olympians or something like that. I don't click on it and I don't want to look at it, but it's there. It's on my screen. And there's definitely times I have it on my screen longer than I should.

Right. And so for me, I'm just like, why would I not want this extra protection in my life to know that like my wife is literally right next to me every time I'm online. That's what screen accountability is. And that's the next generation of Covenant Eyes. And so you also can add a filter to Covenant Eyes, which does block out websites. The filter is optional, but the core product really is the accountability saying, why would we as Christians have our onlines be a secret? Like that doesn't jive with any discipleship model that I know.

I don't know. Right. Yeah, my wife. So we have it for a whole family. We're trying to figure out how to apply it to my stuff because given my research. Oh, yeah. It's so funny. We have such an open household relationship, probably more than most families.

So we can have these conversations and it gets interesting. But, you know, I'll be doing research on, you know, ancient Greco-Roman pedophilia. Because I'm trying to understand the ancient world. And sometimes, yeah, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm on sites where it's, you know, looking at sculptors and vases. I mean, it's all like archeology, but some of this stuff is pretty nasty looking, but, um, you know, it's, it's, uh, we, we've tried to figure out how, how can I still do my historical research and ancient sexuality and not have some of those sites that are, you know, maybe they, maybe they sound worse than the outcome, but anyway, we're trying to

navigate that. But, um, yeah, you know, what I love about, well, let me, um, I got so many things I want to dive into, but so, so with this accountability software, I, would you say that this is kind of half of, half of what people need to do? Like if you just have the accountability software, you don't focus on your heart, you don't focus on the deep down stuff that, you know, the deeper issues that need the Holy Spirit to transform, then that's not the sort of end all solution.

But it is a really helpful way to help you in a sense, get back on track or not fall into something that could be incredibly addictive. How would you kind of relate this sort of letter of the law accountability software with the heart change that needs to happen? Yeah, that's an essential question. And I'll use the same word twice in a row. I would call Covenant Eyes an essential tool to the whole process, right? So I don't think Covenant Eyes or a tool like that is going to change your heart. If you want your heart change, you have to do both. You have to do the heart change work,

which would be the type of stuff I write about in Beyond the Battle. I do seven-week small groups with guys. And for seven weeks, they're online groups, so anybody can join that's listening. And for seven weeks, we just talk about the heart change stuff. And these are guys, some have never looked at pornography. Some of them are looking at it every day. It's about how we view women, how we view ourselves. We talk about our identity in Christ. If guys are single, there's so much discontentment in their singleness. If they're married, there's so much discontentment in their marriages. And the analogy that I use often is, if you go to a grocery store on an empty stomach, what happens? You buy tons of food you don't need.

Tons of food you don't need. What type of food? Fried, fatty. What type of food, right? You're type of food right you're like i got six boxes of donuts in my car i have no idea how that happened right two pieces on the way out yeah yeah you've eaten half of them before you get to the register yeah and then so you take that same sort of analogy and then and then you say okay what about you've eaten five helpings of thanksgiving dinner and you just roll onto the couch and a burger king commercial comes on the tv and you can't even move because you just ate so much pumpkin pie and turkey, are you going to get in your car and go to Burger King to get a Whopper?

That was just so good. Yeah, I knew where you were going with this. You're stuffed. You don't want it. You just are like, yuck. Why would I ever want that? I'm so full. And it's the same thing with pornography.

So if we have that need inside of us, that we desire that intimacy, we desire that affirmation, validation. It's just like going to the grocery store in an empty stomach, we're going to be buying porn, our eyes are always going to be looking if as a guy, I'm gonna be looking at women to make me feel in my fantasy world, affir and validated and if you're a woman you could you know it would be the same way the other way around we're just always so thirsty and hungry for validation and affirmation but the truth of the gospel is we are sons and daughters of Jesus we don't deserve it he's a holy God we deserve hell we don't deserve anything from him but instead we got his mercy we got We got all of his mercy.

And so we just unpack like what that treasure of mercy really is, that when he looked at you, he says, I love you. Like you're my beloved son, my beloved daughter. When the father looks at you, he sees the perfection of Jesus on you. You can't be any more valuable than that in his sight. And if we can focus on this value that Jesus earned for us, and I can eat from that every day, that's my feast. That's my Thanksgiving meal. When I see the Burger King commercial, the pornography, I don't want it anymore. That's my goal. I want to get

people to the point where they don't want it anymore. The only way to get there is with the essential tool alongside of Covenant Eyes, Because if you're drowning in this stuff, you have to be able to get your head above water before you can even grasp some of these concepts. And there's a guy in my group. I don't know. Maybe he'll listen because he'll see this link. He'll laugh.

He's in my group. And he would like refuse to put Covenant Eyes on his computer because he's like, no, no, I want to not want it. I want to not want it. I want, and I'm like, great. But you keep looking at porn. I no, I want to not want it. I want to not want it. I want, and I'm like, great, but you keep looking at porn. I get that you want to not want it. I want you to not want it too. I haven't wanted it for many years. I still use Covenant on my computer. So there's a pride, a sinful pride factor we can have too, where it's like, I'm above this. I don't need this. I want the, I want the cure, not the symptom. It's really a matter of both. It's like, you got to deal with the branches and the root at

the same time. You can't just do one. Cause that's just behavior modification. What's the point of being free from porn? If you still want it all the time, that's not the freedom Jesus has for us. So tell us real quick about that. I talked about this in the intro, but the, the, the discount or the, the deal you're offering our listeners for this. Yeah, appreciate you guys doing this. we believe you're going to be like, yeah, this is awesome. I need this. And if you're using it for yourself, the freedom that you're going to feel when you're online, when you're using it with your kids, you honestly might be like, wow, I didn't know what my kids were looking at. Like, I really need this. So it's a 30 day trial for you for free. You can cancel at the end of that. And there's, you know, you don't pay anything. It's a cove eyes.com forward slash raw. If they

want to go straight there, or they can just go to the covenant eyes website and at the checkout they punch in raw right so it's that's right both of those will get there that's right who um let me i guess flip it around who shouldn't get this software i mean as i as i hear this it's like you know uh an overwhelming percentage of people are already struggling uh yeah another percentage maybe doesn't even call the thing they're struggling with porn. So they don't even come up in the statistics. And then you have a whole world of teenagers who maybe your kids are the most pure people on earth, but that doesn't prevent some other idiot from texting his penis and sending them a picture, right?

They can be totally innocent, but they may, you know, get somebody else that is invading their territory. So I mean, who shouldn't get? Yeah, you bring up the point. You bring a great point because it's not a matter of are your kids going to go out and find porn? Porn is going to come and find them. That's what's going to happen. And so the people that shouldn't get Covenant Eyes on their phone would be, if you're a parent and you want your kids exposed to pornography, I would say avoid Covenant Eyes for sure. If you're someone who thinks that like, maybe two cups of coffee at Starbucks is a better investment of your money than the like,

little over $10 a month it costs you know for covenant eyes uh you know probably stay away if if it's if uh the if you if you because people say oh i can't afford it and it's like yeah here's what i would say yeah i i don't you you spend how much money you spend on netflix yeah that brings porn into your home amazon prime brings porn into your home your cell phone bill brings porn into your home your direct tv brings porn into your home. Your cell phone bill brings porn into your home. Your DirecTV brings porn into your home. Your PlayStation 4 and your Xbox bring porn into your home. But you won't spend $10 a month to keep porn out of your home. Like, you got to recheck your priorities.

So, yeah, honestly, the only people that I would say not to use it is if you're in a generation older than mine that never was affected by porn and you don't have any kids in the house, I don't see that you would need that. But if you have kids in your house, if you've ever been exposed to pornography, you just got to be real about the temptation that's out there for you. If you want to be above reproach, it's a great tool for churches. It's a great tool for churches to give their staff to say, hey, we just want to be above reproach. It's a great tool for churches. It's a great tool for churches to give their staff to say, Hey, we just want to be above reproach. You want to model this to our churches, to our families. So, um, yeah. How fail-proof is it? And I, and let me follow that up with the reason why I asked that because when I was a college professor and we had,

I went, gosh, I mean, 90% of Bible college students were struggling with porn. And I love what you said that they, they came, they came to me in tears saying, I, I, I, I can't stop. And I hate myself for doing it. I'm depressed, but I can't stop. And they're weeping. How do I stop? And, and, you know, I would say, well, just, you know, cancel this, do that. Don't carry your phone around. What did they say? Look, when I'm in the moment, I will find a way to view it. Is there, I mean, does Covenant Eyes give us, you know, 80%, 90% protection or is, I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, if somebody is, is going to look at porn, they're going to find a way, right? I mean, there's, it can't be a hundred percent fail-proof, but how fail-proof is it? Yeah. Well, that's the beauty of the screen accountability and the screen accountability,

as far as your computer, your tablet, your phone, it's fail-proof. I mean, every single thing on that screen is going to get cataloged. You can't get around it. I mean, because that was my story. That was me. And I would find ways around it. My parents had net nanny and I was a filter filter. You can find your way around every filter because the filter is only going to block a percentage of sites. And the research shows if all you have is a filter, you don't have accountability software. It's almost 100% of the homes that were studied using filters. Somebody's looking at porn in the home because if I find a way around the filter, you think I'm protected still. And I found a hole in the fence and nobody knows. And so the beauty of screen accountability is everything on your screen

is covered. You know, you're going to have to find a new, like, so if I'm the addict, right, I know that all of my primary sources of getting porn are now eliminated. And for most addicts, Christians that are convicted about this and that want to stop i think that's all that's needed because it's that it's that it's just a click away it's just a click away and that's no longer available to you yeah okay well what's um what's porn doing to the church i mean as you said before you know hardly anybody's talking about this yet it's obviously like it's the elephant in the room epidemic it's it's chemically addictive it's biologically destructive it dehumanizes women in 2018 we we have this

subtle not subtle we have this widespread untalked about addiction that is radically dehumanizing women both from a female self-perception but also from a male perception it is um i mean i even heard studies that like uh some of the primary connoisseurs of of erectile dysfunction like like pills like viagra are like 22 year olds because we're 25 like young kids can't even get it up anymore yes because they're so that it's so addicted to porn that they don't know how to have sex with with a real person anymore and i'm not advocating you know obviously like i'm talking about in context of marriage whatever but um yeah it's just on so

many levels it's so destructive why aren't we addressing this so like much more vigilantly than we are or even at all or is that why you is that why you transition from full-time to do this full-time i mean because yes yes um jesus helped the church is what we have to pray you know and and what you mentioned about erectile dysfunction is very true kevin and i's has research on their website about that as well and you'll see uh there was there's a commercial i watch mlb tv which is like the way i watch cincinnati reds lose all their games. And I'm very sad, pathetic.

It's another addiction I have is watching the Reds lose. And it's funny because they, they play the same commercials all the time because it's just the way their streaming system works. And the new one this year was for some company that sells erectile dysfunction drugs. And I obviously don't know the name of the company, not an affiliate for name of the company, not an affiliate for theology in the raw, but basically the whole marketing, all the guys in the commercial

were 30 years old. Um, you know, they all looked really cool, really like attractive guys. And the whole thing was about how like 50% of guys have erectile dysfunction. And then they would say, but 0% like talking about it. And the idea is you don't want to talk to your doctor about your erectile dysfunction when you're 20 years old or 30 years old because of all the porn you've looked at. So you can go to this website and they'll, it's secret. They, they, they send you some computer doctor gives you the prescription and they mail it to you in a discreet box. It's really like what's sad.

So in culture it's becoming normal. The copious amount of porn people are looking at is like, oh, yeah, that just must be what it means to be alive, to be a man, to be this, to be that. And that's the sad part about what you mentioned with the church, where in the church, when I was growing up in the mid-90s as a middle schooler and high schooler, the problem was it wasn't talked about because it was new. It's like, I kind of gave the church a pass because yeah, it caught us off guard, the internet porn phenomena. But today, the problem in the church is where some are just becoming like culture.

I think individually, like the average guy or gal sitting in the church is probably like, yeah, this is just the way it is. You know, this is how my boyfriend is or this is how my husband is. But then the other side of the church, and probably more so, a larger percentage of the church is just like, just stick our head in the sand. If I struggle with it, I'm going to pretend like I don't. And I'm going to ignore the people that do. Because if we just pretend like it's not here, it'll go away. And that's crazy.

Like it's the bondage people are in and that we can't even have the conversation about it without guys feeling like this huge stigma. Like, oh, I struggle with pornography. I want to ask who doesn't? Like stand up if you don't struggle. Not that you're looking at it every day, but that you don't have some sense of temptation around sexual sin around less. And not that it's okay, but if we could just be real, I think it would help so many people

to say, yeah, the church could actually become a place of hope and of healing. And right now on a macro level, it's just fear. There's just so much fear. And I'm like, step up, like, come on, like, just talk about it. And that is what I'm doing now. It's like, reach out to me if you want help on how to do that. That's my full-time job now. Sometimes I feel like one of the frustrated prophets of the Old Testament, like, why aren't these churches listening? You know, but then when you find one who is, you find one that's like, we're doing this. It's so encouraging because you think, yes, like this church is going to be a beacon of hope for the people in the church. And then from there, as you know, with what you're doing around the whole topic of

sexuality, the church can just be a beacon of light for the whole culture to say, like, this is a place of love for people that struggle with their sexuality. And that's what the church is. I mean, could we not be a beacon of hope and of healing and of love and of community? I think we can. I think that's the vision, you know, that we should be living out as a church. Can you talk briefly about the whole issue of shame? You mentioned shame and passing, but with sexual sin, especially, and I feel, I think in the past, like in the purity culture, you know, in the nineties, you know, women that messed up and they were just,

they would just have this overwhelming sense of shame. And now I think, um, for maybe guys and girls, but especially guys on porn, there is a sense of shame. Um, how did, what role does shame play in, you know, uh, this whole conversation? Well, it's a huge role in why people don't talk about it. It's a huge role, I think, why people are even afraid to bring it to the stage of their church. And what I see, and this is what's sad, is that the best conversations happening around shame are happening outside of the church. So there's some very solid parachurch, I don't know their,

but ministry organizations where there's recovery groups and conversations and heal. And it's like normal to talk about there, but don't bring your shame into your, your church small group, you know, that, that sort of thing. And I'm not saying like your, your average church small group with guys and girls. And it's like just this kind of place where you hang out and fellowship, you know, yeah, I'm not saying drop that on everybody, but you ought to have conversation people in your church on the individual level where you can talk about these things with, and the church on the stage level

ought to be creating that culture. You think about shame. I mean, the gospel erases our shame. You think about shame, I mean, the gospel erases our shame. Jesus took our guilt. He took our shame upon him. And how sad is it that on the church we're preaching the gospel, but yet we're saying somehow nobody doesn't cover that sin, that you can be tarnished, you can be damaged beyond repair. I mean, how little of a gospel are we believing in the church when we've embraced that? What about, one more thing and then I'll let you go.

I know I've had a few friends whose, the husband had a massive addiction to porn and what that did to the wives. I mean, in a couple of cases, it just destroyed the marriage. It was like, she can never look at him again. Certainly wouldn't want to have sex with him again and just it just sent the wife into a tail spin and again i don't want to play too hard into the male female stereotype because as you said before i mean there's a lot more women especially the younger you go that are looking at porn but but specifically when it's a male female relationship where the guy is addicted to porn what is that what word do you have for the wife maybe who is trying to wrap her mind around this this you know horrific thing yeah i think the best thing a wife can do is find other wives who have gone through it

there's more than you think out there um covenant eyes we, we can help you with that. We have some women's resources written by women who have gone through it and who are willing to counsel you and talk to you about it. And there's probably people in your own church that have gone through it. And some of those marriages have held together and some haven't. But I think the biggest thing is to know that you're not alone. And that's the best, I think that's the best advice I can give you. And the reason is, I think I could say something like, oh, I'm this expert on this. But I know that there is going to be a unique pain that that wife is feeling. And for me as a guy, and as a guy who myself has struggled with pornography, it would be, I think, presumptuous for me to say, here's how you should feel.

But I think finding solid gospel grounded Christian women who have also gone through this is huge. The one thing I would say is this. If you find this out about your husband, the best questions you can ask are these. Is he repentant? Does he care? Because if he cares and he's repentant, you are way ahead of the game. However it came out, maybe he confessed to you and you just, or maybe you found him out. But there's so many guys out there, like say your husband confessed it to you,

be thankful that he confessed it to you, even though it really hurts yeah it's really awful and like feel i would say that too like feel allow yourself to feel okay don't even worry about him like feel the pain and the brokenness but be but also know that like that step is a is a step to say there's hope here because my husband actually cares. Like there's so many guys out there that don't care. If I don't care, I mean, they're just like looking at porn. They don't care. They're not convicted.

They think this is normal. They love it. So find out first, is he repentant? Is he willing to get help? Is he willing to talk to your pastor? Is he willing to reach out to, you know, I think of my Beyond the Battle small group is one, there's other groups like that out there. If he's willing to get help, help him on that journey. Where I would be, a different channel, a different path would be if he's not repentant.

And that would be a different conversation. I wouldn't say bail right away, but I would say you're going to have, it's going to be much harder at that point. Well, I would also add, I think, I mean, you're the expert here, but just understanding the difference between non-addictive and addictive sin. The only thing I can compare it to to the only addiction i've experienced was uh i used to i was a ball player growing up and so uh chewing tobacco uh i would go through half a can sometimes a can of copenhagen a day um i was really poor in college if i had five dollars

i would go buy two cans of copi and not eat that day. I remember thinking to myself, me and my roommates were up late at night. We'd always kind of hang out at night and have conversations, listen to music. And I remember throwing in a dip and thinking, I can't imagine. I don't even know what it would be like to have a late night conversation and not throw in a dip. It was almost like there was something else overwhelming me and almost making me do this. Now, I still believe I'm a moral agent, but even the Bible talks about sinning and being enslaved to sin. And it was almost like I am making the decision to take this dip, but it's almost like there's something else inside of me doing this for me. It was so hard to explain.

me. It's just, it was so hard to explain, but I, and I don't know if that's a mild or strong form of addiction, but it was like, it's just, it's so the whole, you know, stop it kind of, you know, approach to morality might work in some instances, but when it comes to addictive sins, it's just, it's just a different, different category. Yes. Anybody who is in that addiction is still morally responsible, but understanding, I think the power of addiction at least can help you see this as as he is both a culprit and a victim to something greater than him would that be fair i again i'm trying hard not to say he's off the hook i'm not saying that at all right at all i'm just saying there's other powers at work here than just why don't you just stop it you know it's it's just not going to, you know, address it. That's a great point. And, and that's where the need to get help comes in. So as the wife, don't say stop it. And if he says, okay, I'll stop. No, he's don't, don't even, that's

silly. Don't do that. Don't believe him. He's got to be willing to get help. And it should be, be outside of your marriage. You know, it can't just be between the two of you. That's not a burden you should carry. I mean, something like Covenant Eyes at that point would be a – that would be like the first step. It would be the most fundamental thing you can do. But to truly get help. Because in an addiction, you look at someone that's addicted anything there's they can't do it on their own they they need to get help so yeah don't i would say that can help you have some empathy

potentially but don't buy any answer of like yeah by my own willpower i can get rid of this because it is an addiction and he probably loves you very, very much and is addicted. Right. And so you've got to get help. And that's just like, we got to humble ourselves and say, I can't do this alone. And forward slash the Elgin to raw or sorry, forward slash raw R A W, or you can just go to the covenant eyes website. And again, you get 30 days of the first 30 days for free. So there's, I mean, go try it out. You can cancel at any time within those 30 days and you're not going to get charged a thing. So Noah, thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks for offering our listeners this, this, this discount and thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks for offering our listeners this discount. And thanks so much for the work you're doing. It's so, I'm just, yeah, it's such an absolute need in the church right now. So thanks so much for diving into it full time. You're welcome. Thanks a lot, Preston.

All right. Take care, bro. Thank you.