Many today have an unhealthy love affair with everything John Piper writes. I am humbly learning how not to, as Scot McKnight would say, see things only through the lens of my “maestros.” But the following is just solid, pastoral thinking on the issue of exposure to edgier cultural forms…
And that Piper has said it doesn’t mean that if you are not a conservative, reformed, “glory of God” type of Jesus-follower, this doesn’t apply to you. Listen to me, it does. I believe this is one of the most important issues for many of the “younger evangelicals” who have swung towards a version of cultural syncretism with very little discernment or worse, blurred the lines of holiness for the sake of “understanding culture.”
Don’t misunderstand me. Some are called to things that most Christians couldn’t and frankly, probably shouldn’t, i.e., xxxChurch. This is a unique and specific calling that takes tons of accountability, boundaries, and discernment. I believe if Jesus were around today, he wouldn’t hesitate to be seen with someone from the adult film industry.
The truth is, I LOVE mainstream cultural art forms – probably too much. I have consumed my fair share of it to truly say, as Solomon did, “there is nothing new under the sun.” And in my pursuit of it, I have found, as Piper says in the following post, a “deadening” of my “capacities for joy in Jesus.”
Please read a portion of his recent post, “Why I Don’t Have a Television and Rarely Go to Movies” and ask God to show you how you can love Him more so you can relate to culture:
I think relevance in preaching hangs very little on watching movies, and I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. Sources of spiritual power—which are what we desperately need—are not in the cinema. You will not want your biographer to write: Prick him and he bleeds movies.
If you want to be relevant, say, for prostitutes, don’t watch a movie with a lot of tumbles in a brothel. Immerse yourself in the gospel, which is tailor-made for prostitutes; then watch Jesus deal with them in the Bible; then go find a prostitute and talk to her. Listen to her, not the movie. Being entertained by sin does not increase compassion for sinners.
There are, perhaps, a few extraordinary men who can watch action-packed, suspenseful, sexually explicit films and come away more godly. But there are not many. And I am certainly not one of them.
I have a high tolerance for violence, high tolerance for bad language, and zero tolerance for nudity. There is a reason for these differences. The violence is make-believe. They don’t really mean those bad words. But that lady is really naked, and I am really watching. And somewhere she has a brokenhearted father.
I’ll put it bluntly. The only nude female body a guy should ever lay his eyes on is his wife’s. The few exceptions include doctors, morticians, and fathers changing diapers. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1). What the eyes see really matters. “Everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Better to gouge your eye than go to hell (verse 29).
Brothers, that is serious. Really serious. Jesus is violent about this. What we do with our eyes can damn us. One reason is that it is virtually impossible to transition from being entertained by nudity to an act of “beholding the glory of the Lord.” But this means the entire Christian life is threatened by the deadening effects of sexual titillation.
All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. There is not one man in a thousand whose spiritual eyes are more readily moved by the beauty of Christ because he has just seen a bare breast with his buddies.
