Video coming soon. The video teaching for Day 44 is still in production. Read the full lesson below, it will be added here as soon as it is ready.
In the 1990s, a Russian art dealer walked into a flea market in the American Midwest and bought a gaudy little gold egg for a few thousand dollars: basically scrap value. He didn't want it for what it was. He wanted it for what it was made of. Gold. He planned to melt it down.
For years it just sat in his kitchen. He almost did it, too: almost fed it into the furnace like it was nothing but raw material.
Then someone finally looked closer. That "gaudy little egg" turned out to be one of the lost Imperial Fabergé eggs: a masterpiece commissioned for a czar, worth tens of millions of dollars. For years, a priceless, irreplaceable object sat in a kitchen being valued only for its melt weight, because nobody actually looked at it. They looked at what they could use it for.
I think about that story a lot, because I think it's exactly what pornography trains us to do to people.
The problem isn't exposure: it's reduction
There's a well-known observation, sometimes attributed to Pope John Paul II, that the real problem with pornography isn't that it shows too much. It's that it shows too little. No relationship. No story. No awareness that there's an actual person there, just a body.
Sit with that, because it reframes everything. We tend to think the problem is exposure: too much skin, too much image. But the deeper problem is reduction. A whole person, an eternal soul, flattened down into nothing but a vehicle for sex.
The uncomfortable part
That same reduction can happen even when you're doing everything "right."
Stephen Arterburn talks about "bouncing your eyes": looking away fast from anything immodest. Some of you need to hear that one. It's a good tool right at the beginning. Use it.
But here's the problem with bouncing your eyes forever: if the only thing you ever do with a woman is look away from her, she's still not a person to you. She's a threat: an object to avoid instead of an object to use, but still an object. You've traded one flat category for another.
I'm still working on this myself. Earlier today, I saw a woman crossing the street, dressed in a way that caught my eyes. I noticed two automatic responses ready to go: the old one, "I could look a little longer," and the one I've trained myself into, "I love Jesus and my wife too much for that. Look away."
Obviously the second one is better. But something bothered me about even that response, because I'm not sure it's how Jesus sees her.
This is a process, not a switch.
Community walks this Level 6 shift with you, so you don't have to figure out the third way of looking alone.
The Pharisees who called themselves "bruised and bleeding"
Some of the strict religious teachers in Jesus' day were so committed to avoiding lust that they'd walk around town with their eyes closed any time they were near people, so they wouldn't risk seeing a woman. Because they couldn't see, they'd walk into walls, trip over things, bruise themselves constantly, and they wore those bruises like medals. That was their proof of holiness.
Does it surprise you, then, that they were appalled when a sinful woman came in and washed Jesus's feet with her tears and her hair? Of course they were offended. They'd spent their whole lives not looking. And Jesus was sitting there, looking right at her.
Jesus was never defined by what He avoided. He didn't dodge the women everyone else either condemned or used. He let her come close. Scripture doesn't tell us exactly how He looked at her, but we know it wasn't condemnation, like the Pharisees. And we know it wasn't lust, like the crowd probably assumed. It was something else entirely. A third way of looking. One most of us have never actually practiced.
A third way of looking
I once read about a Christian man from over a hundred years ago who kept a journal of turning ordinary moments into prayer. He wrote that whenever he had occasion to see a beautiful woman, he would ask the Lord to make her spirit as beautiful as her face.
That's not avoidance. It doesn't turn your eyes or your heart away from her. It re-values her, right there in the moment, according to what actually matters to God: her soul, her spirit, not her surface.
I think that might be the deepest transformation God has for any of us on this earth. Not eyes that never look. Not a heart that never notices. But a heart so filled with Christ that when it does notice, it moves toward reverence instead of reduction, toward love instead of lust or judgment.
That's the third way of looking. And starting today, that's what we're practicing.
This is Day 44 of Victory Over Pornography. Continue to Day 45 →