Transcript
A lot of people have asked me, "Why a book on sex and money? Why those issues?" Well, there's a couple of answers for that. One is as I've traveled around the world speaking, these issues come up again and again. Maybe that's a pastor confessing to his own temptation. Maybe that's a parent broken-heartedly admitting that their child has been viewing internet pornography. Maybe that's a marriage that's been broken by unfaithfulness. Maybe it's the dynamic of individual Christians who are in massive debt, who are living beyond their means.
Issues for the Church, Not Just the Culture
So it's my travel around the church to realize these are not just issues of the culture, these are issues for the church. Part of it is personal experience. As we raised our children, we realized these were huge issues of temptation for them and still exist as temptations for me.
But perhaps the biggest driving force for me was the absolute fundamental global insanity of our culture in these areas where we're crazy. I mean, the sexual references in contemporary music are just beyond imagination. The things that creep their way into typical, normal media are just insane. The fact that we're putting knives to the chest of our daughters to give them bigger breasts so they have a stronger sexual self is craziness. We're obsessed.
The fact that many people say that the economic engine that drives the internet is pornography. The amount of hurt and harm and brokenness in sexual addiction, sexual unfaithfulness, sexual abuse, the families and individuals that are dealing with that damage is incredible.
A Money-Crazy World
And money, you don't have to look far to see that we're money-crazy. I believe that the downturn in our economy is not just because of bad banks and predatory Wall Street, but because we've lived beyond our means. We have put money in a place that it should not be. We're living in houses that are bigger than we need, and cars more luxurious than we need, and vacations more exotic than we need. And we're spending, spending, spending, spending, and we have ways of spending money that we don't have. We'll plunk down a credit card and spend money, more money, even though we're barely able to pay the card as it is.
And I became deeply persuaded that that sanity that we need to return to will only ever be found in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. You see, the gospel shouldn't just be an aspect of my life. The gospel should be a lens that I look through everything at my life at. How do I look at sex and money through the lens of the gospel? That's the reason I wrote this book.
