To side with the world is …

By: Bill Johnson

 

Some of you that pay attention to our regular email alerts may have noticed that I have been taking up the pen (as one of our staff writers) to regularly address the deleterious impact of pornography upon the lives of people – young and old – men and women – children.  This is my fifth entrée.

Some may say, “Are you kidding me?  In times like these when our culture is so embattled from within and without?”  In case you haven’t noticed, this ministry has spent significant time addressing international and national threats for some time.  But make no mistake, we are rotting from without because we have been rotting from within for a long, long time.  As men and women have turned their backs upon the Lord over a number of years, millions have yielded their hearts and eyes and lives to filthy things.

God’s nudges. How he gets a person’s attention:

The year was 1985. I was still a teacher in the public schools in Fremont Daisy Brook Elementary, yet I had a regular sense of a call upon my life for a number of years.

President Reagan was in the White House.  His Attorney General was Ed Meese.   Pornography was flourishing via dial-a-porn, pornography in the mail, the advent of XXX rated videos, “family video” outlets having adult back rooms, pornography in convenience stores and gas stations.  Pornography and obscenity were rampant and there was little push back from the Fed.

There had been the formation of a Pornography Commission to study the effects of pornography in 1967 under then President Lyndon B. Johnson.  The commission continued into the early years of the Richard M. Nixon administration.  The report was released in 1971.   Even President Nixon decried the results:“So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life.”

This commission was widely heralded as a “WHITEWASH.”   Further, though President Nixon stated there would be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut, little to nothing was being done to curb the rapidly growing multi-billion-dollar industry.

Dr. Dobson, on his radio program Focus on the Family, had begun regularly to talk about pornography’s deleterious effects. His radio broadcasts were powerful. And I was paying attention!

Having been once upon a time addicted to pornography, I was encouraged to hear Dobson speak so boldly about how pornography was destroying marriages. There were little anti-pornography groups beginning to get started.

Our new little organization began calling itself Citizens Against Pornography.  In my hometown of Fremont there was a community newsstand in the middle of downtown and it prospered selling Hallmark Cards and candies.  However, this community favorite also sold a wide assortment of pornographic magazines.  It had upwards of 35 various pornography titles, with several copies of each.  Much to my dismay, I discovered that it had sold pornography for many years (I wasn’t born and raised in Fremont).

An older gentleman by the name of Bud Bulson and I went to the owner of the store to discuss our concern.  It was my first entrée into such activism but it wasn’t to be my last.  Not by a long shot.  We forthrightly, but kindly went up to the store owner and urged him to discontinue selling pornography.  He stated rhetorically to me, “Well, you are the only public-school teacher that I know that is in favor of getting rid of this.”    Our concern went nowhere despite discussing the destructive nature of the pornographic images of Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse, and many other magazines.

In 1985, we began publishing a humble 1 page “newsletter.”   People became aware of our concern.  I had several men tell me that in their high school years in Fremont that during lunch break they would walk downtown and they would see those pornography magazines and to that day different images that they saw would still come back in their minds.  The power of images.  This is what pornography is created to do – to draw, titillate, degrade, addict, corrupt, undermine.  Truly, pornography in all its forms is Satan’s tool.   Many Americans have turned their backs upon God – some long ago, some in recent days, and some even in this very day.

To side with the world is to stand against God.  How foolish it is for Christians who are destined for eternal glory to be consumed with and taken in by an ant-God and anti-Christ system that is doomed to destruction.  ~ A Radical Comprehensive Call to Holiness ~ Joel R. Beeke and Michael P.V. Barrett

Stay tuned.  I’ll be carrying this conversation forward with much more to come.  Remember: Our help is in the Lord!  Look to Him.   Ask God for His help and presence in your life.

Until next time.

Sincerely,
Bill Johnson

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