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Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom
The spiritual climate is now ripe for an epidemic of addictions of every kind.
Our knowledge of God, both conscious and subconscious, is affected by our culture. A Christian culture tends to teach the truth, while an ungodly one tends to suppress it. If the culture replaces God with an image, then some of the children, who have a difficult time listening to God’s revelation over the example of those around them, will be given over. When sexual desires kick in, they won’t have the wisdom to direct those desires correctly. They may not consciously choose any particular flavor of immorality, but their lack of godliness leads them astray.
I believe that this is what happened to me. I don’t think I was stupid enough to consciously choose to be enticed by something that has been an embarrassment to me my entire life. I didn’t look at a menu of sexual choices and chose a smoking fetish. I was blinded by my bad worship mixed with the bad worship of those around me, and I fell into whatever abnormal desire the circumstances of my life led to.
North American culture has become ungodly. Many of us walk around from early childhood in the darkness of futile thoughts. About eighty years ago (around the 1920’s) many in my grandparents’ generation turned away from the God of the Bible and mixed false worship into their Christianity. This trend had been around since the enlightenment, but it won out in America early in the 1900s.
Interestingly, the thing they didn’t like about the God of the Bible was that He performed miracles. They wanted the morality of the Bible, but found the miracles together with some of its doctrines a little hard to stomach. They came up with vain ideas to explain how they could accept only the parts of God’s word that they liked.
Though they did this, there was still enough of the knowledge of God in people’s hearts that not many were given over to sexual sins.
In my parent’s generation (the 1940’s and 1950’s), the knowledge of God continued to slowly drain away as false gods like greed and materialism took control.
By my generation (the 1960’s and 1970’s), ungodliness had reached a point where a sexual revolution broke out. My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were shocked. They complained about the immoral young people and didn’t realize that they had laid the foundation for our indulgent excess by rejecting the true God.
Many from my generation have gone far beyond our parents and grandparents in driving the truth of God from our society. We have pushed Him out of the schools, the courts, and much of public life. Our culture tries to make Him a God who can be worshipped in private, while giving the false god of permissive-love center stage in public.
The spiritual climate is now ripe for an epidemic of addictions of every kind. We have not only sexual obsession, but also substance abuse, and even conditions like anorexia.
A flood of pornography has fueled the spread of sensuality to thousands. With easy access on the internet, videos, and magazines, it is obvious that people are being given over on a grand scale.
Sex is everywhere in American culture: advertising, TV, movies, the way young people dress, act, and speak. …The everyday experience of many now resembles the kind of pornographic world I grew up in. Large numbers of sex addicts are trapped under its pervasive, enticing spell.
I believe that God allowed me to go through what I did a generation ago, in part, so that I would have the tried and tested understanding to write about what is going on today. When I consider everything He has done in my life, I strongly suspect that He has worked in my heart for years to give me a message for such a time as this.
I know the false god of permissive-love; I once worshipped and served him. He fills you with empty promises of love and acceptance while you follow the siren’s song of desire. Then, when you find yourself caught in a neverending death spiral of lust, he smiles and tells you that your problem is that others don’t accept you for who you are.
He will leave you to die in your sins. He is a powerless liar. You will cry out for a way to escape, and he won’t answer. You will seek for wisdom and won’t find it. Only the true God can save us from our sins.
Some of what we are seeing frightens me. I recently took a class on child abuse in which the instructor had worked with sex offenders. She told us about a young man who was sexually drawn to young children. He spent his time watching cartoons and kid’s shows to stir up his sinful desires.
It was a chilling revelation. Here was a young man for whom cartoons and kid’s shows had become like pornography. What a horror for our children; what a tragedy for the young man. Thankfully, the instructor got the courts to step in before he could carry out the plans forming in his heart.
The story frightened me, but at the same time I thanked God that when I was given over, I had fallen into something comparatively harmless. My experience could have been much worse.
Along with these “abnormal sexual sins” (as if any sin is normal), there are the traditional favorites – fornication (sex before marriage) and adultery. Fornication is so common in our culture that many don’t think of it as a sin. All of these flourish because ungodliness has blinded us, robbing us of the foundation for wisdom and leaving us prey to our own foolishness.
I believe I was a Christian during the eight years when I continued to be given over to sexual impurity. I know it sounds strange that God would give one of His children over to something like that, but hopefully I have made it clear how this could be. Though I believed in Jesus, the sin of ungodliness continued to darken my understanding, leaving me largely defenseless before my desires.
It took eight years for my dull heart to see past my false god so that a greater measure of godliness was driven in by the word of God, the events of my life, and the Holy Spirit. Once it was there, I had the tools to overcome.
The God of the Bible loves to reach into our darkness and show us light from His word. He comes by the Holy Spirit and transforms us into new people. He is full of hope for the hopeless and joy for the despairing. He reaches out to us and offers a power greater than anything that could come against us.
We must find freedom in His way, however. Though I found some victory when I embraced the God of wrath and mercy, I still had other areas of ungodliness. I wanted a quick “zap” of God’s power to release me. Though I prayed for it and sought Him with all my heart, He answered me in a different way. He set me on a long journey full of insights and touches of His Spirit, but none that set me free in an instant. Instead, each encounter with Him showed me the next few steps on the path. As I took those, I found new help that opened the next door of His grace. The journey continues, as it will for the rest of my life.
Looking back to discover a theme, I find this: freedom comes through knowing Jesus in every way possible, in doctrine, in wisdom, in the Spirit’s power, in emotions, as Lord, as friend. …This is godliness. It is the only answer to being given over to our sins. It releases in our lives the love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness, and self-control it takes to overcome not only sexual sins, but also the many other evils we may have been given over to (Rom 1:28-31).
This series of books is simply the story of how I replaced my images with the glory of the incorruptible God. It tells how I came to know Jesus and found in Him the answer to my foolishness.
Jesus became to me the ongoing inoculation that delivered me from the epidemic spreading all around me. He infused my spiritual immune system with the strength to fight back the virus that had previously infected my soul. While I watched a thousand falling at my side and ten thousand at my right hand (Psalm 91:7), He taught me how to stand (which was the fulfilment of the promise I believe He had given me years earlier – page 18 of this book).
I will close out this chapter by describing how He used the insights I have shared about the God of wrath and mercy to start to break the hold of one of the epidemic’s major symptoms – what I call the addictive mindset.[20] Though it can take many forms, in my case, it looked like this:
I was compulsive about reaching a point where I felt OK about myself. When I looked at my sexual strangeness, I said, “If I could just get this straightened out, I would be able to feel good about my life.” Insecurity (bad fear) motivated me to try to escape from the person I was. I was slowly becoming obsessive about putting my embarrassing sins behind me, thinking that doing so would give me a sense of well being.
When I failed to reach sexual purity, I was tempted to say, “If I can’t feel OK through following Jesus, it’s time to change my approach. Maybe, I need to just do what comes naturally and learn to like who I am.” I hoped that if I could find total unconditional acceptance, it would give me the sense of wholeness I was missing.
If I had followed that path, I would have been settling for a different compulsion. Though I couldn’t see it at the time, the addictive mindset would have trapped me in obsessive sexual desires that would have spiraled out of control and destroyed me.
What was I to do? My confused heart was in bondage no matter where I turned.
When God revealed Himself to me as the God of wrath and mercy, He rearranged my view of myself. I saw the lie of both my attempts to find happiness through obedience and also my attempts to find it through giving in to sin. I found a new definition of “OKness.”
The blood of Jesus was what made me OK, not a feeling. I began to define myself according to my position before God – He loved and accepted me no matter what I felt about myself. I had been trying to achieve a state of mind in which I felt good about myself. My new understanding placed me solidly on truth. I was OK because He said I was. It didn’t matter whether or not my emotions agreed.
This insight eased my compulsion. I didn’t have to constantly strive for what was missing; mercy made me complete. I was loved by God in spite of my evil failures, and that was enough. The addictive mindset was losing its power.
I had believed that God loved me for years. Why hadn’t I been able to find this place of growing peace before? It was because up until that point, resting in my Heavenly Father’s love seemed like little more than a theological justification for sinning. It didn’t change me; it just made me feel better while I disobeyed. I knew how strong my lusts were, and this seemed like too convenient of an excuse for my tendency to wander. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite.
Here’s where I began to discern an important distinction that made an incredible difference. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to have a clear conscience about the changes that led to freedom. I began to understand that willful sins should be treated differently than sins that spring out of foolishness.
A willful sin is one which we know how to avoid. If I had run out and found a prostitute to indulge my pleasures, I would have been sinning willfully. I knew how to stay away from call girls. It would have taken an act of rebellion for me to pursue one.
A sin that springs out of foolishness, on the other hand, is one that we aren’t sure how to stop. For me, when I first understood the fear of the Lord, lust in my heart and privately acting out were sins that sprang out of foolishness. Giving them up seemed like such a violation of my humanity that I couldn’t figure out how to consistently do it. My heart was too darkened to know the way to freedom.
One other point about these two types of sins is that what seems like a willful sin may actually be a sin that springs out of foolishness. In a sense, our unwillingness to change is always a sign that we don’t yet know Jesus well enough to make His desire for change a part of our heart; He has to work the willingness into us (Philippians 2:13). So rather than relying on our faulty human ability to make ourselves willing, we need to come to Him over and over again, crying out for Him to make us willing. We also need to regularly turn to His word so that He can plant and water the seeds that will grow into a desire to obey. If we are rebellious, the only real answer for our rebellion is for Him to touch us in a way that leads us out of it.
If we don’t humble ourselves and seek Him, our lack of wisdom becomes a willful sin. We are probably either stubbornly hanging on to our own way or giving in to doubt about His ability to change us. These two attitudes are often at the heart of willful sins.
Something in my head had been telling me, “If you really loved Jesus, you wouldn’t have your strange sexual problems. You’re not really serious. Maybe you’re not even a Christian.” I didn’t have a good answer.
Recognizing that some sins spring out of foolishness helped me to find peace in the middle of my imperfection. I could honestly declare that I did love Jesus and followed Him with all my heart. I just wasn’t very good at it yet.
The issues of sin, repentance, and forgiveness became clearer. God hated sin, so I should stay away from any disobedience I could avoid – willful sins. If I indulged in these, I had good reason to question my commitment. They were a sign that I needed to repent and take steps to follow Jesus.
With willful sins, it was important to remember the fear of the Lord. If I committed them, I was still forgiven by His blood, but I was headed in the wrong direction. He might have to bring discipline in order to turn me around before I reached a place where I would face His wrath.
For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world.
But what was I to do when I took the steps to obey and still didn’t change? What about those sins that I didn’t seem able to escape? That’s where the distinction between willful sins and sins that spring out of foolishness became important. In that case, I could trust that confession and seeking Him were enough to keep my relationship with Him solid. I was still responsible to stop sinning, but He was patient with me while I learned how to do that.
I was embracing a simple reality: I didn’t know how to overcome some sins, and I needed to spend time with my loving Father so that He could teach me. While I was growing in wisdom, He accepted me and enjoyed me. He knew that the only place in which I could learn was in His family. Only His warmth and wisdom could open my heart to instruction. Once He had revealed His ways to me, then I could more fully repent.
Rather than separating me from God, sins that sprang out of foolishness became a motivation to draw closer to Him. I was able to come to the throne of grace to receive mercy and help in time of need. My shortcomings reminded me of my dependence on Him for His miraculous work in my life.
In a very real sense, until wisdom had entered my heart, my decision to spend time with Him was all the repentance of which I was capable. Greater repentance would come down the road.
I had to be honest as I did this, however. If I chose to stay away from Him in order to enjoy my folly for as long as possible, that would have been a willful sin – a refusal to humbly seek Him. In the same way, if I refused to change once He had worked wisdom into me, that also would have been a willful sin.
But I wasn’t interested in doing either of those. I wanted to follow Jesus and to be free. I came as a little child with all of my immaturities and problems. Though I was still too messed up to feel especially comfortable in His presence, I did my best to show up and say, “This is who I am. What do you want to do with me?”
Before I began to understand these insights, my emotions had been telling me, “You won’t be OK until your sexual problems are fixed.” Each failure to reach “OKness” left me with greater insecurity and doubt. Guilt began to pile up as I wondered, “What is the matter with me?” Still, I compulsively tried harder. Each new fall led to a greater sense that I needed to escape from myself. I felt like an outcast from God and His world. The addictive mindset was starting to cycle out of control, wrapping my heart with a cord of growing darkness.
Once I knew that Jesus had already made me OK through His blood, I was able to stop focusing on my failure and start focusing on His ability to teach me. My insecurities were held in check, and I was free to relate to God as a Father who wanted to spend time with me, delight in me, and show me how to live.
I’m not saying that my feelings didn’t still tell me that I needed to become perfect overnight, but I was starting to believe that they were mistaken. My Heavenly Father was patient with His children. My inner churning began to subside, and I learned to respond to Him rather than to my emotional turmoil.
The distinction between willful sins and sins that sprang out of foolishness was a key. It allowed me to believe that I, a man who continued to disobey God’s commandments, had a sincere faith. My foolish sins weren’t the same as the willful sins that would have driven a wedge into my relationship with Him. Though they were evil, God saw that I was doing what I could to overcome them. I just needed to grow up and learn His ways better. He was more than happy to embrace me while He showed me His way to freedom.
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