A few days ago, a friend of mine shared with me a video posted on YouTube which featured a porn star meth addict.
This featured video from National Geographic focused on the spread of the methamphetanie crisis throughout the state of California.
This woman, pictured above, is a porn star. She does her own movies in her home in the Hollywood Hills area. The segment above opens up with the porn actress gettingh ready for her shoot. But before she can "perform", she needs to smoke meth. She has to get high so that she can debase her body before a camera without suffering too much.
She has to "feel good" in the shoot, so to speak.
The next segment of the video records the comments focused on the drug dealer. He is preparing the meth for his client, the porn actress. He can sell a few grams of this poison for thousands of dollars, but he gives the porn star a discount: $400.
She finally gets her drugs, gets high, gets ready for her porn shoot, and then the narrative pans over to San Francisco. There, drug use is at an all time high (no pun intended), especially in the gay sections of the city. The statistics are particularly shocking: 1 in 9 homosexuals have used meth.
Unbelievable.
Here's what stood out for me, though, when I was watching this segment.
I felt sorry for this woman, and I saw her as a lost, decrepit woman. She is a drug fiend. She is dependent on a chemical just to function through the day. She gives away her body in front of a camera. She is a sex fiend, a sex addict. She sells herself to debase herself, and then she sells herself yet again.
It's a cycle of defeat, of shame, of loss, of more defeat, then shame yet again.
But then something else hit me: Am I really any better? Can I say that I am any better?
If anyone were to pry open my flesh, my mind, my feelings, they would see that I am addicted to things. They would see sexual perversions percolating throughout.
Paul was unsparing in how fallen our flesh is:
"For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not." (Romans 7:18)
I remember a comforting word which Pastor Joseph Prince had shared with a congregant in his church some time ago. This man had served time in prison, and before that he was placed in a foster home for at-risk youth. He had failed, fallen, sinned in so many terrible ways. Because of all the sins he had committed, he felt that he could not really come to God, and that he was in a worse-off position than the pastor.
Pastor Prince responded: "You think that I am better than you? The only difference between you and me is that the sin in you came out. The only difference is that the sin in me (i.e. in his flesh) had not come out."
And that just about says it all.
Everyone of us born into this world is a great sinner. We are all dead in Adam.
We can become alive in Christ, set free from sin, reckoning ourselves dead to sin, and alive in the Son!
"11Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.