J.C. Ryle in his book Thoughts for Young Men said, “All that pleases for a while is not real pleasure.” Sin is pleasing for a moment, but it is a fleeting moment. It happens, pleasure is felt, and then it’s gone. It must be repeated to continually feel pleasure from the act. This is especially true for sexual sin as its effects last for brief moments at a time. However, the pleasure derived from this category of sin has a deep impact on your body, including your mind. Because of its grip on our minds, sexual sin can be addictive. Sins such as fornication, adultery, and pornography have all enabled sex addiction. With each going hand in hand in the destruction of a person and their personal lives. Beginning in Genesis with the first sexual sin, Lamech’s taking two wives, and ending in Revelation with the destruction of all who never repent of their sinfulness, including sexual sin, we see sexual sin plaguing mankind.

God designed man and woman to be together in marriage to one another (Gen. 2:18-25), and he gifted them with sex to both bring them together intimately and to produce children and multiply. The former would grow them closer together, cementing their relationship, and the latter would allow them to comply with the creation mandate where God said to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28). Sex creates a deep bonding intimacy between two people. Scientists have performed multiple studies and found, just as Hana Yoo, Suzanne Bartle-Haring, Randal D. Day, and Rashmi Gangamma in their 2014 study on Couple Communication, Emotional and Sexual Intimacy, and Relationship Satisfaction, that “sexual satisfaction significantly predicted emotional intimacy for both husbands and wives.”^[1] This is due to brain chemistry.

During and after sex our brains are affected by two different chemicals with one chemical in common, dopamine. Dopamine is the feel-good chemical. It is why we desire to repeat the same actions continuously due to the dopamine rush leaving us feeling good afterward. It is essentially a reward chemical. The other two chemicals are oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin “occurs during an intimate physical relationship” and “is critically important to bonding and trust, especially in women.”^[2] For males, vasopressin initiates the bonding. Neither of the three distinguish between right and wrong, but because of the chemical bond created during sex, breakups can be extremely emotionally harsh on a person. Sex has an extreme impact on our body and brain.

Because of this, it should come as no surprise the same chemical involved in gaining pleasure from sex with another person is also the same chemical involved in gaining pleasure from watching porn, dopamine. Because we have the need to feel good, which is essentially a need for dopamine, we tend to go to the things we derive pleasure from, especially those things which are quick fixes like porn. This eventually, in many cases, turns into an addiction. According to addictionhelp.com 11% of men and 3% of women are addicted to porn, 69% of men and 40% of women view porn online, and 29% of adults 25 and older use porn monthly/often. They found people between 18 and 34 use porn the most in the U.S. If those statistics weren’t shocking enough, they also found 93% of teenage boys and 62% of teenage girls have reported internet porn exposure 

These statistics should shock us, but sadly due to the gradual desensitizing of our minds to sexual sin things such as nudity and explicit sexual acts have become the normal thing. This is due to tv, movies, and now more increasingly, social media depicting everything from nudity to explicit sex to younger and younger audiences. This is by sinful design. Satan seeks to influence man into continually perverting God’s created order. God created sex to be between husband and wife. Satan uses our desires to influence us to seek sex wherever we can find it. Whether it’s stepping outside of marriage in adultery, having many sexual encounters before marriage, or watching porn. There’s a reason sexual sin is so prevalent. It is the easiest to find a quick fix to. 

However, there is a way out through salvation and the renewing of your mind. In our sinful state we love the darkness because we love our sins (John 3:19). We make excuses saying we are born this way or it doesn’t hurt anyone, but essentially it comes down to our love of our sins. We find pleasure in them and will wallow in them gleefully like a pig in its mire. But God didn’t send his son to die for the forgiveness of our sins that we may continue in them. He died that we may have “redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins” and be made “partakers of the saints in light” being delivered from the power of darkness, the power of our sins over us. (Colossians 1:12-13).  

Ephesians 4:22-23 states, “That ye put off the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” Here Paul tells us we are corrupted by our lusts which are deceitful. John Macarthur pointed out the deceit of sexual sin when he said, “The first characteristic of sexual sin is deceit. It never delivers what it promises. It offers great satisfaction but gives great disappointment. It claims to be real living but is really the way to death.”^[3] But through Jesus we have promised eternal pleasure and joy in him. He promises and he delivers. The only way to renew your mind and put off the old man is through knowing Christ “in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace” (Eph. 1:7). 

^[1] Hana Yoo, Suzanne Bartle-Haring, Randal D. Day, and Rashmi Gangamma, “Couple Communication, Emotional and Sexual Intimacy, and Relationship Satsifaction,” Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 40, no. 4 (2014):282.

^[2] “The Brain and Sex,” Medical Institute for Sexual Health, last modified 2024, https://www.medinstitute.org/the-brain-and-sex/#:~:text=Oxytocin%2C%20much%20like%20dopamine%2C%20occurs,after%20a%20one%2Dnight%20stand.

^[3] “John Macarthur on sexual immorality,” Grace Quotes, last modified 2024, https://gracequotes.org/topic/sexual_immorality-general/.