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So just use some discretion when listening to this next broadcast. And let me add this: and if you do listen with your kids, talk about it after with them. Right. This is an important conversation to have with maybe older kids, just depending on what you're thinking. But we just wanted to give you a heads up.
From a parent's point of view, you don't want to envision your children engaged in this, right? It's a sad horrible. Horrible reality. And so it's not the first thing your mind goes to when you're thinking of parenting. And I spend a lot of time helping parents kind of get into that messy, dark, sad world of what could happen and then start locking those doors down, especially for younger kids, so that they never do.
Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifetoday.com. This is Family Life Today. All right, we've got Jacob Valk on Family Life Today.
And Jacob, I don't know if you know this, but I don't think I've ever met anybody. That we learned over lunch, you met. married in six months. Yep.
So we we managed to Do met engaged. Married. got a house and then found out we were expecting all inside of a year. Which is pretty crazy. In ministry, having a job, and you're getting your doctorate.
Yeah, yeah. It's a busy life. I guess so. If you're doing stuff that you love, stuff you're really passionate about, then that's great. I like having a packed schedule.
I'm so grateful for all the stuff God's going to do. I mean, do you move pretty quick on the projects? As a ministry? Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking, you met that girl and you said, you get something. I'm not messing around.
You get things done. I think, oh man, I don't know if I can say this, but we can edit anything out. I think getting married was a, at least because basically, because my wife Katie is so fantastic, getting married was an easier choice than some of the projects we've had to choose to do from a ministry. Yes. Tell our audience, what do you do?
Because yeah, you're right. Yeah. I mean, with, I mean, so I'm here. I've got, you know, into the light ministries. We are just passionate about God's good design for sexuality.
And so one of the great threats, one of the great dangers attacking God's good design is the issue of pornography.
So what Do as a ministry, is we make like films, documentaries, video series, all centered around helping people find freedom from pornography and then love God's good design for sexuality. How did you get into this?
So, I'm here chatting with you guys. The second half of the ministry, his name's John Michael Bout. We're like, we're we do everything together, kind of like partners in crime. We were friends, we grew up together, and in Canada, yep, yeah, in southern Ontario. You guys are younger.
How old are you guys? I'm 28. He's 25. You're Gen Z. Gen Z.
I'm just the here that makes it. Oh, are you glad? Are you proud of that? Are you not? I think, like, I have the sense of humor of someone from Gen Z.
That very weird, kind of nonsensical humor. I definitely fit in with that. But man, there's something going on with Gen Z. Yeah. of a revival yeah well we were talking a little bit about this yeah um the ministry went to CrossCon and I got to talk to Hundreds of young people, younger than me, about some of them like 18 to 25, some of them were almost a decade younger than me, and asking them and talking to them about the issue of pornography.
And it was amazing. I expected when I would bring up the issue of pornography that most of them about as quickly as they could would be looking for the ceiling, you know, trying to twiddling the shit. Shame, embarrassment, awkwardness. There was that. But on the whole, these young kids looked me straight in the eyes and just said, I hate pornography.
Wrecked my life, wrecked my friends' lives. What do I do about it? How can I help my church, my family, my community? And how do I find freedom myself? Clear and honest about the issue.
And that was really refreshing. Is it different from what you've seen before? Maybe I've seen a mix. I've traveled in lots of different communities, been to different churches, and you'll always have a different range of reactions. I think this one was, you know, Cross is very young, kind of restless and reformed, kind of the end of that movement.
And. I don't know, they're just not afraid to call sin sin. And also just Got a lot of energy, and they say, I need help, they need help, yeah. And I mean, obviously, a different generation, even your generation, compared to like mine. Yeah, if you were an adult man in my generation that struggled with pornography as a Christian man, which a lot of us did, I did.
You usually had a story, and I know this because I talked to a lot of guys at our church. Your story went something like, Yeah, I was a kid, I was eight, I was nine, I was 12, I was whatever, and I stumbled upon a magazine, yeah, or somehow I found a it was very rare, but it happened, and then there was this like grip, you know, that got in you and maybe came out later. But your generation and the next generation, they've grown up. Almost every second of their lives, right? With access.
It's there. The access is so easily. Readable. I talked to one guy who put it the best I've ever heard it. He said it's easier for a young person today.
To find pornography, than it is to get a glass of water, because at least you have to get off the couch to get a glass of water. And that sounds hyperbolic. You're like, oh, that's a nice phrase, but that's, but it's not. No. Every device, every screen in your home is a highway to pornography unless you do something about that.
Which, among the different things we do as a ministry, is one of the messages I want to send to parents is like, you have to think about the devices in your home because, like you guys said, the average age of exposure is eight, even seven years old to hardcore explicit pornography. And it's found, it comes across the phone or device innocently, usually, is that true? Yeah, especially for a young person, right? If they don't know, they don't know what they're looking for, they're not really looking for anything. But I mean, here's an example: I, at my home, homeschooled.
So, you know, it's not just a public school thing. It's like even homeschool. My younger brother was searching for a website that he knew that was perfectly fine. It was just a website about films. And he misspelled a single word in that, and that you.
URL. and it popped onto a porn website.
Now my mom had Had conversations with all of us. And so he had a roadmap for what to do. He knew, first of all, that Covenant Eyes would flag it, so our accountability software. He knew, second, so that so mum would find out about it. Yeah.
But he also knew he shut it down. Walked over to mom and said, Hey, mom, this is what's happened. This is what happened. You know, I typed this and it popped up. And he knew my mom wouldn't blow up at him or get angry because she said, If you see something, come talk to me.
I'm not going to get angry with you.
So he had a pathway forward, and he was like 14 or something like that.
So it turned out to be a largely non-issue. But for someone who's not thought through these things, that could be a... What is this? I'm curious, I guess, and I could just start the process, right? For every parent listening.
That was a great discussion on Here's the conversation that should take place. And if you haven't had that conversation, it should happen yesterday. Yeah. There'll be a lot of different parents listening to this. And I'm always cognizant of the parent with the older kids who feel like they've blown it.
And so right away, it's like my answer is always, here's how you talk to your younger kids. Oh, that's good. But it's never too late to start. Right. So if you have a 17-year-old, this is probably there, maybe they're struggling.
Yeah, we can start there. Yeah. That would be like you can, if you're thinking to yourself, you know what? They might be struggling. I'm not sure how to start this.
One really disarming and honest way is an apology by saying, you know what? There's a lot of things I wish I'd talked to you about God's good design for sexuality and the dangers of pornography earlier. And I didn't, and I wish I had. I'm sorry about that. I'd like to talk about these kind of things more with you.
And then start those conversations. Easy to say, hard to do, right? I just put a nice little conversation. People are like, okay, I got that. What's the next sentence?
But I. I think it's disarming to just say, these are conversations I wish I'd had earlier. And they are going to be a little awkward and difficult. Yeah. For sure.
Well, what would you say after that? Like, hey, have you struggled? Do you ask the question or do you just say, how can I help? I would ask the question. Because if we're talking 18, 17, 18-year-old, they know what's up.
They know what pornography is. They've known about it for a long time. Whether they're actively struggling or they're not, they're perfectly comfortable. Comfortable is an odd word, but their friends talk about this. And so if you ask, are you struggling?
And every parent here knows the relationship they had with their child better than I do, obviously. They're not unaware of this world. And so, asking them, Are you struggling? You know, you'll maybe get varying degrees of honesty with that, but letting them know, saying, Hey, if you're struggling, I want to be on your team in fighting this. Not afraid, not afraid to call sin sin, but I understand maybe you got hooked on this, not really intending to.
And so, we're not going to excuse sin, but but also know that pornography is addictive. And if you don't feel like you have anyone to talk to, you can get caught in a pattern of this that's really hard to get out of.
So, saying to your young person, Look, I get it, I'm on your side, I'm not gonna blow up at you, but I want to get you help. Might take a few weeks before that's met with an answer that's actually like, hey, actually, actually, I'm struggling. But I've I know stories from people who their kids have said, no, fine, totally good, zero problems. And then about a day later, come back crying, saying, I'm sorry, I lied. I need help.
And then you can say, you can follow through with what you said and say, I'm not going to blow up at you. I'm not unaware that people can sin.
So let's tackle this. Or I have struggled with this before, or I've been exposed to this. And I know, like, I think with kids that age, that's the time to share your own story. If you've struggled or, you know. If you understand the grip.
Yeah, when we found it on our computer, this is decades ago, but when we found it on a computer, I mean, it was interesting. The first question my wife said, Is this you? You know, like, nope, not me, which means, uh-oh, we got three sons in this house, somebody. And then when we found out who it was, because he said, Yeah, that's me. I always wondered, what will my response be when this happens?
And I assumed it will happen. It wasn't if, it was will. And now it's even a different world. There wasn't a phone yet at that time. But I remember looking at him and My response was, I didn't plan this.
I didn't know what was going to happen. And I cried. I said, Let me tell you, dude. I've been down this road. Let me tell you where this leads.
You know, so it was a brother-to-brother. Like, I'm going to walk with you now, but you just opened Pandora's box and I'll help you.
So, it was really interesting. That was, I mean, I look back now. I was like, I'm so glad that happened because we started a journey and almost a brotherhood. We're like, okay, we're going to do this as men together. It was interesting.
We're going to win this because we both talked to him and said, How can we help you? What do you think needs to happen? He goes, I think I need to be off the computer for a month. We're like, whoa, we were thinking a week.
So his was worse than ours. But that's probably a conversation. This was even before Covenant Ives. There wasn't software yet. Bad on us that we had a computer in the basement.
Yeah, that's like duh.
Well, now they're in their pants. That's it.
Well, and the thing is. You can understand. From a parent's point of view, you don't want to envision your children engaged in this. Right? It's a sad horrible.
Horrible reality. And so it's not the first thing your mind goes to when you're thinking of parenting. And that's how I think a lot of parents just. Honestly, they weren't thinking in these categories. Got a phone or a laptop, put it in the basement.
And it's more the generation, my generation, who actively struggled for most of their teen years that are very key to it. And they go, ah, computer in the basement, I know what I would do with that. And so that's not happening. Yeah. And right.
What's really fun with my job is I spend a lot of time, and our resources spend a lot of time helping parents kind of get into that messy, dark, sad world of what could happen and then start locking those doors down, especially for younger kids, so that they never do.
Well, should you scare us? With the idea of what could happen, should we know those things as parents? And let me add this too as we segue out of that conversation. Like your ministry, like that's a place to direct our kids or ourselves or anybody. We haven't even talked about his ministry yet.
Well, he did a little bit at the beginning. What's helpful? We could give you a little background about how we started the ministry and what we've got going on. And then we'll go to this question.
So I kind of said, you know, John Michael and me, we kind of grew up together, really close friends, friends with his whole family. His story is that he was hooked on pornography from about eight years old. He did have really faithful parents who talked to him about these things, but He still discovered it, kept it a secret, and that was almost a decade of his life hooked on it. He, by the grace of God, had really good friends who were fighting for integrity, and he put this sin to death with the power of the Holy Spirit. And so he found freedom.
My story is that I had a really great mom. Who talked to me about the issues of pornography very early? And I remember. Her telling me, I was about eight years old, and she was like, You know, Jacob, we've told you about this thing called sex. And I was like, Yeah, yeah, you did.
Got that one. It was weird, but you told me. And then she said, you know, there are some videos online of people having sex. And it's very sad that people film those videos. Christians shouldn't watch it.
But if you ever see it, I want you to know you should shut that down. And then come to me and talk to me about it, and I won't be angry with you.
Okay. And honestly, she probably should have done it earlier, but you think these days, maybe this was 20 years, 25 years ago. I don't know. What age do you say now? Yeah, at least.
Well, I have a modified version of this, which we'll get into for a little bit different age categories. There's certain things you can tell a five-year-old that are pretty close to what I just said and aren't. In a sense, hey, you know, God made boys and girls different. And sometimes there are videos of naked men and women on the internet. And if you see them, you know, a five-year-old can handle that category.
But my mom, my mom told me about that. And I knew that Covenant Eyes was on my devices.
So I knew that whatever I saw, my mom would see. And that wasn't a terrifying thing for me because it was so early. I was like, that was the condition on getting a device in my home. If you want a phone or a laptop, it's got Covenant Eyes.
So great. And Covenant Eyes is, that's one of the best. There are plenty of other ones out there. And tell our listeners what Covenant Eyes is. Oh, right.
So Covenant Eyes, they're an amazing software provider, Christians who run it. And basically, what they do is they make. Accountability software that monitors, filters, and blocks. All the content on your devices and sends that information in proper, appropriate ways to like your parent or friend's device. Or husband or wife.
Or husband. Exactly. Whoever you pick. And so you can set that up to monitor what you watch online. And they're really good.
They have a lot of AI software that will scan a whole like computer. And if it sees something sketchy, or even not sketchy, but questionable, they can send blurry screenshots back to your accountability. Oh, I never thought of how AI has improved that. Very. I'm John Michael, I'm his accountability partner, just because we keep, you know, he has a struggle with pornography for years and years and years, but we keep each other accountable.
And sometimes, you know, I'll have something pop up on my phone that's blurred and I'll look at it. Oh, it's totally innocuous. It's like it's like a shirtless dude from like a surfing commercial or something. And it's totally fine. But it questioned it and just gave it to me to double check.
And I can slightly unblur it and see, oh, that's totally fine. You know, it's whatever. And it's sensitive, but on the good side, you know, so. But then for me, I never got hooked on pornography. I'm one of the rare Friends of my peers who never had that as part of his story, and I'm so grateful for that.
And that's why I'm just on fire to help parents talk to their kids about it because I want. The five-year-olds in our congregations today to be able to get to 25 and be able to walk down the aisle, not perfect, but be able to say, Hey, my parents took this so seriously, I never got hooked on porn and not drag that into marriage. Wow, that's pretty much what gets our heads out of the marriage. That is a good vision. You know, fall is when small groups start back up.
No, fall is when football starts.
Well, small groups start back up too. And if you're a group leader, You've been thinking about pulling some couples together for a marriage or family study. I hope you're thinking that. And this really is the best time of year to grab materials. Yeah, I mean, you can get them right now through the end of August at Family Life.
All the workbooks for our small groups are 25% off at familylife.com/slash shop. And there's no discount code needed. You just go there. You can pick from like the art of marriage or the art of parenting or vertical marriage. They're all video studies and the workbooks are included.
And I'm telling you what, you want to be a part of a group. It's phenomenal to watch God work in your family room. And it's so easy. It's plug and play. Yeah.
And I feel like we've done almost all of these studies. You guys, they're so good. And it's hard thinking like, what can we do this year? We have the answer for you and it's on sale. We've got you covered.
25% off at familylife.com/slash shop. You said you worked on a documentary. What did that look like? Yeah. So that kind of brings us back to John Michael and I were friends.
We're like 18, 19, trying to help our friends who are struggling themselves. 18 and 19. You guys are trying to help your friends. Yeah, and ourselves at that point, too, to be honest. Yeah.
You know, we're all just work. We're trying to figure this out together. We're young, we're dumb, starting accountability groups, helping do conferences and stuff. And John Michael tells this story often. He would buy copies of books that we loved, drop them off at friends' houses, and they wouldn't get read because it's a book that says pornography on it.
So that's kind of going in the background of my head. A few years go by, I go to school at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for my MDiv at the time, and I met a guy named Tim Challeys. Yeah. Tim's awesome. Amazing.
So I asked him about his book, Sexual Detox, and Tim's hilarious. He is like, eh, book's fine. There are better books out there. But he stopped and he said, you know, what's interesting to me? This video problem of pornography, and in answer, we write books.
There could be space for video solutions to a video problem, and I was like, Boom. That was fascinating to me. John Michael and I had worked on film projects before, like my background is more in film and advertising. And so I called him and I said, dude, you're coming to seminary next year. We have a free summer.
What would it look like for us to reach out to all of the names we respect the most who are writing on the issues of pornography and ask them if they would come together as like this dream team for a documentary? And so we started wrestling with what would this look like? And we started planning out some film trips and building out the whole outline of the documentary, all the fun stuff that goes into a film. And we had a couple convictions. We were like, look, first of all, Can we make this free?
So, what we did over the summer is we crowdfunded $85,000 in order to produce, which is hilarious now because $85,000 is not much to make a job. But we pulled it off for that much. And we said we want to talk to men and women. Because we're so done with. It is good to extend the gospel of freedom to guys.
But if you do that to guys only, what you're implicitly saying is the gospel that sets guys free is not for you, women. And we wanted to say both. Are being trapped today and struggling. Like the like, you would know more than I would, but I know it's escalating among women of addiction. We get these messages on Instagram.
They're the most, as we started building this documentary, we were sharing promos and eventually, you know, we filmed it. It's Into the Light documentary. It's for free on our website and it just walks through the process of change from bondage and sin to freedom in Christ. We filmed with Garrett Kell, who's been on the show, Deepak Reiju. Jonathan Holmes was for next one, but just some great people.
And we got messages from these girls on Instagram who would write us these beautiful essays about how they got exposed to pornography and how they struggled and how they didn't think they could talk to anyone in their church. And then some of them would end saying, I found freedom and God is good. And some of them say, I'm still in the middle of it. That was just something we were really key in on early on is to have that as like an awareness. And We're just uniquely at a place where people have paved the road to have those conversations more.
Yeah, so how does the, you know, how does it work for a person struggling? How do they find you? What do they do? Do they watch the videos, go on a course? They just do it with a group, do it alone.
All of them.
So for the person who's struggling, that was our first resource, right? The Into the Light documentary. What we did is we made the documentary so it's like a start the conversation, get everyone on the same page.
So you could watch it like hour and 20 minutes to film. You can watch it at a youth group or a church showing or something. But what we also did is we split the documentary up into seven chapters and we made an accompanying workbook that goes with it so that you can kind of slow it down video by video, really dive into the discussion questions and the workbook so that if someone wanted to do discipleship, one-on-one accountability, they could do that for seven weeks.
So that's kind of how we built that first resource for that. And so I think a great way, if you're convicted of your sin and you're struggling, is to go watch the The documentary first. What's that one called? Into the Light. It's called Into the Light documentary.
We kind of stole the name from the documentary. Yeah. What it does is What the devil loves to do is trap you in immediacy. He doesn't want you to see far, have a vision for your life, understand God. It just wants you trapped in the moment.
And what the doc does, I think, pretty well is gives you that whole process that ends, Garrett Kell ends it. And then David Platt does some even more, which we filmed with, gives you a vision of like, oh, you're free and you're like. plugged into a church and you're helping other people. And then even your freedom could lend you to serve missions and maybe even go spread the gospel further. That's a really cool vision to orient your life around.
And if you're just stuck in the my phone needs to delete apps, which is really important. But if you're stuck there, you don't see the whole picture. And the doc can kind of get that. I tell you what, we got into some stuff today. This is so helpful.
And so needed. Yeah, it is. Yeah, and you need to get Jacob's videos, Parenting and Pornography. You can get it at our website, familylifetoday.com. Just click on the link in the show notes.
And we got him back for tomorrow, so you don't want to miss that. We know life is full of challenges, and families today need biblical truth more than ever. Isn't that true? That is true. And as a family life partner, your monthly gift helps bring the truth into homes every single day through podcasts, events, and resources.
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