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Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom
I am a man who, as a devoted Christian teenager, watched his life slowly slip away into the grasp of sexual sins.
Please bear with me while I describe some embarrassing facts about my youth. This isn’t easy to write; it probably won’t be easy to read, but I don’t know how to say what I believe God has given me without letting you know the nature of my sexual struggles. People have often commented about me that I am honest and transparent, and that I don’t fit into the traditional Bible teacher mold. When I hear this, I sometimes think to myself, “If they think that was being honest and transparent, I wonder what they would say if they knew the details.” In this book, I need to tell you the details.
My sexual problems started with puberty. For some reason, from the beginning of my attraction to girls, seeing them smoke was erotic for me. It went beyond just thinking that it was attractive, or even sexy. It enticed me in a way that nothing else did, much like the effect that pornography has upon most men.
In addition, the thought of joining in their world by smoking myself was also electrifying. This created a great deal of temptation for me, because I didn’t need to see anything in order to become sexually aroused. All I had to do was to imagine myself smoking.
I didn’t consciously choose this sexual “orientation.” It just seemed to come with puberty. It led me into acting out by myself before I even realized what I was doing (which I will refer to as privately acting out whenever I need to mention it in this series of books).
As strange as this sounds, my sexual desires felt natural to me. No one had led me into them, and I didn’t really feel that I was being perverse. I could very much relate to the mistaken feeling that many homosexuals have that they were born with their sexual orientation. Though my orientation was obviously not entirely genetic, it seemed like it was.[7]
I know this all sounds bizarre, so bizarre in fact that you may feel like putting this book down before you finish the first chapter. I encourage you to keep reading. God sometimes uses a person’s foolishness to present His wisdom. I trust that if you continue, you will find that He has given me useful insights into what is going on in our sex-crazed society, and perhaps in your own life.
With the resources of the internet, I have learned in the last few years that there are many people who, like me, have what is called a “smoking fetish.” There are websites dedicated to helping them enjoy and feel good about it, offering support along with pictures and videos of girls smoking. I’m glad these sites weren’t available when I was younger.
A smoking fetish was extremely difficult for me to deal with because the “pornography” that turned me on took place in front of me every day. (Remember that thirty-five years ago it was legal to smoke just about everywhere, so almost any place I went, I would see people smoking). I have never really looked at official pornography. To be honest, as a teenager, it didn’t tempt me. I could see the sights that excited me most in a restaurant or outside my high school.
When I read about the smoking fetish websites, the piece of information that most caught my attention was the description of what was on the “pornography” videos. Some of them were simply videos of girls smoking. There were no sex acts or nudity. It confirmed to me what I had begun to suspect, that the temptations I had faced as a young man were more difficult than what most young men faced. “Pornography” for me (smoking) was everywhere. I didn’t need to look at a book, rent a video, or hire a prostitute to see it. For a person with typical sexual desires to face similar temptations, they would need to live in a nudist camp.
I wasn’t an openly rebellious young man, even before giving my life to Jesus. In fact, with the exception of getting drunk a few times at the age of fourteen, which I hadn’t heard was wrong or dangerous, I rarely did anything against the rules. At least one mother used to say to her daughter about me, “Why can’t you like a nice boy like him?”
Though I grew up in a non-Christian family, I believed in a god who I thought was the same as the Christian God. He created the world and loved us all very much. He treated people kindly and without harsh judgment, and I tried to imitate him.
As I mentioned, I started drinking when I was fourteen. The first time I got drunk, I wandered over to my friend Rich’s house and had a good time with him and his brother as we laughed at my stumbling actions.
A few weeks later, I ended up at Rich’s house again, drunk and with a bottle of wine. I offered him a drink, but he didn’t want any. This surprised me.
A few days after that, Rich and I were playing basketball together and talking. Our conversation moved to a decision he had made that summer. At a church camp, he had dedicated his life to Christ, and as he explained what God had done for him, I learned truths I had never heard before. When he finished, I decided to follow Christ.
Many areas of my life changed quickly. I became excited about Jesus and gave up partying, swearing, and living for myself. In a short time, I was gladly telling my friends about Him. Yet in one area, the smoking fetish, I didn’t change, and I actually became worse over time.
Early on, there may have been an opportunity for a fairly easy solution. I remember thinking as a young Christian that I should stop privately acting out, but I never put that conviction into practice. Maybe the temptations were small enough at that point that they could have been handled by a simple decision of my will. I will never know until I go to see Jesus. Before long, my desires were so out of control that even my most earnest efforts didn’t seem to do any good.
One Sunday when I was sixteen, the Pastor of the church I attended said that he had been to a Full Gospel Businessmen’s breakfast and had heard a speaker who had an “unusual anointing” from God. He had invited the speaker, named Art Katz, to our church for the evening service. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by an “unusual anointing,” but I was intrigued that evening when the church filled with people from a local Charismatic group. I wondered if anyone would speak in tongues.
Art Katz preached on the question of whether the church today was like it had been in the book of Acts. It was something I had never thought about. After ninety minutes of fascinating stories, he concluded that we weren’t. Then he said, “and I think it is one of the greatest reproaches against the church today.”
This statement caught me off guard. It had never occurred to me that we could experience the kind of walk with Jesus that the early Christians had. I had been studying the Bible for a couple of years, however, so it made sense that we should. Although there were some obvious changes caused by the fact that the first apostles didn’t live among us any more, I saw no reason to expect that the work of the Holy Spirit revealed in the New Testament wouldn’t continue today.
Starting that night, I went on a six month emotional high as God’s spiritual world opened up to me in ways I had never imagined. The words of the Bible came alive. I spoke in tongues, prophesied and, with great excitement, told as many people as I could about Jesus.
Unfortunately, problems were forming beneath the surface that would soon rise to attack my naïve zeal.
After six months, just before my seventeenth birthday, my life changed forever in an instant. I was sitting outside, as happy as I had ever been, when I felt an invisible shadow of oppression and confusion descend on me. I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but it seemed like a cloud of demons pushed their way into my heart. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I didn’t expect it to last long. I would stand in faith and resist the devil, and he would flee from me as the Scriptures said.
In the days that followed, I found I was unable to sort through simple moral questions. If I acted a little silly, a condemning internal voice would tell me I had ruined my witness for Jesus and needed to confess my foolishness to all who saw me. Giving in to that voice brought another inner voice that told me my witness was ruined by following the first voice. No matter what I did, fear and guilt plagued me.
It was so stupid. It shouldn’t have been a problem, but there seemed to be no escape. I discovered that one of the difficulties with mental illness, even mild illness like I was suffering from, is that you don’t understand how you got into your confusion. This leaves you with no map to help you find your way back out. When you lose your mind, you’re not sure where you left it.
The battle dragged on and on. After a few months, I began to realize that there would be no easy answer for the voices. An older friend helped me through some of the more difficult times, but I was starting to face the fact that my old life was gone. The new reality I had to deal with included a long fight for my sanity.
One day I sat in a chair in my parents’ house, crying as I considered my options. I wasn’t suicidal, but I was tempted to ask God to take my life and end my misery. Instinctively, an optimistic thought rose up and said, “It’s not that bad. You’ll be all right soon.” My heart sank as I realized that for the first time in my life this instinctive response was wrong. It was that bad, and I wouldn’t be all right soon.
I only knew of one hope: somehow Jesus would set me free. I wasn’t sure how, but I trusted that He would eventually restore me.
Though I was depressed, I wasn’t in such bad shape that I needed institutional treatment. A good Christian psychiatrist might have been able to help, but I didn’t know any. I survived by holding on in faith and forcing myself through each day. The duties of a teenage young man weren’t that difficult, but they felt oppressive and painful to me. I kept hoping, believing, and working for deliverance, but it came slowly.
Along with this “invasion of the voices,” I lost a great deal of control of my sexual desires. I managed to remain a virgin, but my mind was overcome by a constant stream of sexual urges that drove me almost without ceasing. During the next few years, it seemed that the only times I wasn’t thinking about sex were when I was playing basketball or worshipping God. As soon as these activities ended, the cloud would descend again and overcome me.
I kept waiting for God to set me free. I believed I was a new creation in Christ, but to my dismay, the scenes of girls smoking that entered my mind during the day played back in my mind at night, making it difficult to resist temptation.
Still, I stood on the promise of God’s word that old things had passed away and all things had become new. I expected God to manifest the freedom He had purchased for me some time in the next few days, weeks, or months.
While waiting, I fasted, prayed, and begged God to help. He seemed to ignore my cries. There were times when I would get down on my knees and ask for deliverance only to rise up and fall to temptation.
I wasn’t sure what was going on, but there wasn’t much to do but to continue to love Jesus as much as I felt I could. His word told me to surrender everything to Him, and I did my best to do that.
So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.
When I didn’t have a ride to church, I hitchhiked there.[8] When a friend told me that hitchhiking was illegal, I started walking (about eleven miles) and trusted God to send someone to pick me up. He always did. He also helped me to put entire books of the Bible to music and memorize them. I gladly devoted myself to His work and stayed away from parties and other situations that normally trap teenagers.
In many ways, my life was full of God’s power and blessing, but in others it was oppressed and broken. I could touch freedom for a time, but I couldn’t hold on to it – especially when sexual temptation came, which was often.
My experience during those years was one of growing hopelessness. I found the Christian life increasingly frustrating and unworkable. This is not the testimony that Christians usually give, but I want to honestly describe what happened. There were wonderful times and terrible times, and I think it is important to present both.
I have known others who have struggled with stubborn sexual sins, and it hasn’t been easy for them either. A number have given up. It can be disheartening when the disciplines that work for other Christians don’t seem to work for you. You feel you must have done something horribly wrong, and you wonder if God has rejected you.
I am a man who, as a devoted Christian teenager, watched his life slowly slip away into the grasp of sexual sins. I felt helpless to stop it. I faced a humanly impossible situation – a pornographic world and no one who could tell me what was happening.
In this book, I want to let the hopeless know that there is always hope with Jesus. If He can save me from my overwhelming problems, He can save anyone.
I have sometimes heard people describe how God quickly and miraculously delivered them from sin. I have been glad for them, and have appreciated their ministry, yet they rarely seemed to be able to offer me much help.
Unfortunately, through no fault on their part, they sometimes made me feel condemned. I figured that since I couldn’t get what they had, there must be something wrong with me. As God’s ways became clearer to me, however, I stopped feeling condemned. He was doing something different with me. For some reason, He was taking me on a different path.
With some sins, Christian disciplines like reading the Bible, praying, going to church, and trying to obey don’t appear to work. This doesn’t mean that those disciplines aren’t an important part of the process of attaining freedom; it’s just that more needs to be added. Jesus Christ is the answer, and those disciplines are part of knowing Him. But the person with stubborn sexual sins may need to get to know Jesus in ways that others seem to be able to get by without. A lack of knowing Jesus shows itself differently in different people. For sex addicts, unfortunately, it shows itself in extremely destructive behaviors.
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