On the most recent episode of Conversations with Elizabeth Johnston, husband, father, and pastor Joshua Boone shared his powerful account of getting caught up in the grips of the pornography industry as a young man and how divine intervention and God’s grace brought him into the fold.
“You don’t know who you are until you know Whose you are,” Joshua explained, recounting how quickly his identity became wrapped up in the shame of the industry, believing the lie that having done porn meant that was who he would always be.
As a young man, the small town boy from South Carolina had dreams of stardom, but after a chance encounter with a group of female performers he landed his first role in the industry and it wasn’t long before he felt that there was no turning back.
Joshua told Elizabeth how much the industry is ravaged by suicide and abuse, with some female performers in particular believing as he did that they can never be defined by anything else.
Shockingly, he said out of women whose real names he knew and who he met personally, 30 have taken their own lives.
The now-pastor also gave a sobering look at the way our society has normalized porn and how this ultimately leads to the normalization of sexual abuse and child sex trafficking.
“Because of the culture being oversexualized, porn’s not a big deal. And if porn’s not a big deal, sexting’s not a big deal. If sexting’s not a big deal, sexual assault’s not a big deal. If sexual assault’s not a big deal, rape’s not a big deal, and all of a sudden we build a culture around the lie that sex is just this thing that happens between two people when they get together,” he explained, going on to detail how cheaply life is regarded within the pornography industry.
Joshua also shared the powerful moment that a bank teller changed the course of his life with a simple question, bringing him back from the brink of suicide and into the arms of His Heavenly father.
You won’t want to miss this powerful and edifying discussion in which Elizabeth and Joshua discuss how to break the cycle of pornography use, the imperative not to miss ministry opportunities in everyday life, how to protect your mind against the things that will pull you away from your calling in Christ, and the ups and downs of being slowly sanctified and reformed in Him.
Listen now:
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