The only way the church will turn the tide on the porn epidemic back is if we address it with our kids, before the world gets to them. We have to prepare them for the sex saturated culture that they will be exposed to and teach them how to deal with it; if we don’t the statistics show your kids and mine have a 50/50 chance of turning into a porn addict (See How Many Porn Addicts are in Your Church? for a look at the numbers). Those odds are too risky to bet our kids’ future on.

Some of you may be squirming at the thought of addressing the topic of sex with your 10 year old, but there’s no avoiding the fact that our children will be exposed to pornography (that is, unless we move our families to a monastery in Nepal and go into isolation). We have to face the reality of the culture we live in today, and take the initiative to equip our youth for the battles ahead.

Preparation starts in the home, before they’re ten years old. I told my son about sex when he was nine, and eased him into the subject of pornography by saying that it’s “pictures of naked people.” We’ve discussed the Biblical framework for sex a number of times, and he understands that pornography is a warped, satanic distortion of what God intended it to be. We’ve discussed how destructive and widespread porn is in our culture; my son knows he will be exposed to it, and that hiding his temptations or trying to fight them on his own will give lust the power to rule his life. We’ve talked about the need to avert our eyes from sexually inappropriate images, and he’s caught on. This past summer I took him to see a movie in a theatre, and when a trailer was shown for the “Dukes of Hazard” (which shows women running around in hot pants,) my son saw me turn my head away – and he did the same without me saying a word.   (We have to model what we teach.)