I recently met with a friend of mine who is a new Christian. He’s in his mid 20’s and has a pretty incredible testimony—giving his life to Christ after an upbringing of abuse, drugs, crime and promiscuity. I asked him what areas of his life he still needed to surrender to Christ and his answer was quick and emphatic: pornography on his phone.
My answer was also quick and emphatic: Covenant Eyes.
For some it’s amazing that someone could surrender drugs and crime and even premarital sex to Jesus, but be unable to surrender pornography. As if pornography were the least of all of those evils and thus the easiest to give up. Not that sins are in competition with one another for which one is “worst,” but there is no doubt that pornography is an addiction and is (in my opinion and experience) almost impossible to give up cold turkey, without any outside assistance and accountability.
My friend went on to tell me how he’d go to bed at night, would pray every night, but then wouldn’t be able to fall asleep so would grab his iPhone and before he knew it was pouring over pornography again, only to feel dirty and disgusting afterward. In addition to the chemical changes pornography does to our brains, the reason it’s so hard to give up is because it is both ridiculously accessible and ridiculously accepted in our culture.
My friend is not the only 20-something who puts himself to sleep every night by looking at porn on his phone. In fact, it’s getting to the point in secular culture where this is seen as normal behavior, especially for single men.
If you have naively handed out smartphones to your children without Covenant Eyes installed on them, it’s only a matter of time before their web activities lead them to the alluring and addictive land of pornography.
Is there more to being free from pornography than online purity software? Yes. You need the Church, you need community, and you need biblical guidance to change the wiring of your heart (which Covenant Eyes provides an abundance of free resources on via their blog and e-books). But it’s very hard to put a fire out while a gasoline can is being consistently poured on it. The access to pornography must be stopped before the deeper work can be done.
The beauty of Covenant Eyes is that you can choose to use it as a filter that blocks websites, as monitoring software that sends emails to accountability partners, or as a combination of the two. You also only pay one affordable monthly rate and can then put the software on unlimited online devices (phone, tablet, computers, etc.). Contrast this with a different online purity software I used before Covenant Eyes where I had to pay $40 per month for each device. Covenant Eyes is a deal and a half in comparison.
As I told my friend, you can use my affiliate link and get your first month of Covenant Eyes free. It’s an investment well worth the cost. In all reality, the cost of not using Covenant Eyes and continuing to allow the sewage of pornography into your life is what you really can’t afford.
He is:
Author of Beyond the Battle: A man's guide to his identity in Christ in an oversexualized world
Host of the The Flip Side Podcast
Join an online men's small group led by Noah and team at BeyondTheBattle.net
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I used to have a software that blocked sites but all I had to do was shut it off and then I could access them again. Is this similar?
No. What you will need to do though is have someone else like an accountability partner set up your password for you, as that password will be needed for uninstalling or shutting off.