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Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom
<page 65>When I viewed God, I tended to see Him through the lens of existentialism. He was the God who helped me to be myself. … What I could hardly fathom was the thought that God would want me to go through the turmoil of acting against the person I felt I truly was.
When I was twenty-nine, two years after I started seeking God for healing, a series of events transformed my life.
The first involved my job. A large project at the company where I worked fell far behind schedule. As a result, the small project I worked on was moved to another city so that my coworkers and I could join the large project.
I loved the small project I had lost. It was an invention I had dreamed of working on since college, and I was its team leader with control over the technical decisions. It was the fulfillment of years of hope and hard work in my career.
I hated the large project I was forced to join. It was based on technology that was fifteen years out of date, and it required me to deal with ten years’ worth of neglect in its design and implementation. I had always thrived in “start up” programs, where I had a chance to set directions and plan for the future. I didn’t know how to work on something where these sorts of decisions had been made long before, and I had to live with the consequences.
At night, I would pray and get my heart straight with God. During the day I would lose anything I had gained and burn with anger. In no time, I went from being a good performer to being an attitude problem, and I couldn’t find a way to stop it. I wanted to quit the job, but my family needed the money, and I lived in an area with no other comparable opportunities. My heart was in disarray, and my walk with the Lord went quickly downhill. Life was a tightrope over hell, and I was falling off.
I was embarrassed that I was having so much trouble. All around me, my unsaved coworkers were adjusting with little difficulty, yet after serving Jesus for fifteen years, I was unable to handle this small trial. It reminded me of my difficulties with sex seven years earlier. My life was once again out of control.
The timing of my failure affected me deeply. I had just spent two years pursuing God with an intensity that I had never before known. The source of my failure wasn’t a lack of prayer, reading the Bible, or any other spiritual discipline. There was something else at work, and it was a mystery to me.
I felt like the two years I had spent seeking God had been a waste of time. It seemed like all of my time with the Lord had little value for practical life. I was wrong, of course. Looking back, I now believe that those two years laid the spiritual foundation for the work God did in my life over the next seventeen years and more. I had touched His throne, and He was answering by <page 66>allowing a set of circumstances that would send me in a radically new direction. I didn’t like it, but it was what Doctor Jesus had ordered.
In Chapter Five, “Images,” and Chapter Six, “Therefore God Gave Them Over,” I described in detail the theme of this book. Ungodliness (bad worship) produces a deep foolishness in our hearts that causes us to be given over to other sins, including sexual lusts (Rom 1:22-24). I wrote that I had replaced the true God with the false god of permissive-love. This mental idol robbed me of the power and wisdom I needed to overcome sin, and I believe God allowed me to go through eight years of frustration and failure in order to expose this deception.
Now for the second time, I was facing a crisis caused by ungodliness. This time, I believe God allowed my job situation to fall apart so I could see that I still had false gods that were clouding my view of Him and robbing me of His power.
I had been greatly influenced while growing up by a philosophy called existentialism. The simple form I held to can be summed up by the sayings, “Be true to yourself,” and “Be all that you can be.” I believed deeply that people should be free to express themselves and not be forced into someone else’s mold.
I found it easy to reject traditions and social customs. Peer pressure gave me little trouble in high school; I didn’t feel anyone had the right to keep me from being myself. Life was a celebration of the heart, and I wanted to live it to the fullest. Why should I cripple myself by bowing to the control of others?
When I viewed God, I tended to see Him through the lens of existentialism. He was the God who helped me to be myself. If He wanted me to change, He wouldn’t do it through pressure from the outside but through an inner transformation. I interpreted this to mean that He would speak to me deep in my spirit, and from there His truth would spread through my emotions to my thoughts and actions. It all made so much sense to me, and sometimes it happened like that, but over the years, I noticed that many times it didn’t.
I don’t think I was trying to avoid necessary pain. I was ready to suffer for Him, but I expected my sufferings to be the kind that came from expressing my true inner self against the forces of the world. I knew that in order to be all that I could be, I would sometimes have to fight against the harsh pressure to conform to unrighteousness. I was ready to do that.
What I could hardly fathom was the thought that God would want me to go through the turmoil of acting against the person I felt I truly was. I couldn’t picture Him telling me to deny my deepest inner feelings and force myself to do the right thing by an act of my mind and will.
Living like that felt like living by my own efforts rather than His power. When I had no other choice, I would fall back on it – as I often did with sex – but I felt that doing so was unspiritual. It was like a second-class kind of Christianity.
On my job, I kept waiting for God to transform me from within so I could feel right about what I had to do. Working from my heart had brought me seven years of success in the past, and I couldn’t picture myself living in any other way. My new job forced me into a style that felt entirely wrong for me. I kept waiting for God to remake me or remake the job. When neither happened, I became frustrated and angry.
<page 67> It was ungodliness pure and simple. I had my own ideas about how God should work, based on the futile thoughts of a worldly philosophy. I was looking for the True God to act like the false god of existentialism,[25] and this blinded me to His grace.
My job was the first event that transformed my life. The second occurred a month or two afterwards – my father died suddenly of a heart attack.
He had been a man who I had many reasons to be proud of. He received a PHD in engineering from Princeton, was a successful businessman, and after retiring became a college professor. He was polite, funny, and well respected by just about everyone, including me. (Now that I have been a father and know what a tough job it is, I appreciate him even more.)
Along with these wonderful qualities, however, my father was a workaholic who rarely spent time with me. His overworking contributed to his early death. When I was a young man, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted from him, but I knew I was missing something. I am sure that his absence contributed to many of my emotional struggles.
My father wasn’t a Christian, and my faith was a source of annoyance to him. He told me that if I was rational, rather than emotional, I would give up on Christianity and become an agnostic like him. This made me very cautious about being rational; I was afraid it would destroy my faith.
Many friends at church reinforced this sentiment when they, with a good deal of justification, spoke of the dangers of philosophy, psychology, or anything else that could undermine the truth. I tried to rely on the Holy Spirit.
My confusion as a teenager certainly didn’t help my father’s opinion of God’s truth. One day, he noticed I was depressed and asked me what was going on. When I hesitated in answering, he asked if it had to do with my faith. I told him it did, and he warned me that if I didn’t give up on religion, I would end up crazy.
I was embarrassed that I had let Jesus down by being a bad witness to my father and decided to avoid future failures by never opening up to my parents again. I continued to be respectful, submissive, and loving to the best of my ability, but I rarely told them anything about my inner life.
You might think that this would have alarmed my parents, but I don’t think either of them noticed. Though we had a fairly peaceful and loving family, we hadn’t shared much of our inner lives before that. When I stepped back, they probably figured it was a normal part of growing up.
Our parents have a way of showing up in our thoughts even when we don’t want them to. In spite of the strain with my father, my inner view of myself was greatly shaped by my relationship with him. Somewhere along the way, without really thinking about it, I took upon myself the <page 68>burden of convincing him that Jesus was Lord. I felt that if I was a good enough Christian, He would see the truth and repent. In a youthful mixture of subconscious love, respect, and a desire to prove I was becoming a man, I carried the weight of this task until his death.
Unless my father was converted in his last moments, I failed. He did soften considerably, but when I shared the gospel with him a few months before his death, he said that he couldn’t make the leap of faith that Christians did when they believed the Bible. With these and other unresolved issues, my father went to meet his Maker, and it took me about a year to recover emotionally.
In spite of the grief I felt, my father’s passing brought a surprising relief. A great burden had been lifted from my shoulders, as I no longer had to prove Christianity to this man who had such an influence on me. I didn’t know how to put it into words at the time, but the battle between faith and reason had suddenly changed. It was no longer intertwined with a life and death struggle for my father’s eternal destiny. It had become more like an interesting question I might want to explore.
This all happened at the exact time that I could see my deficiencies in reason and discipline hurting me on my job. I became upset enough to take the risk of leaving what I considered to be a “Holy Spirit oriented” approach to life in order to try something different. Fueled by anger and frustration, I decided to apply my mind to learning and to see where it would lead me. Was what my father told me really true, that if I was rational I wouldn’t be a Christian? I was about to find out.
When my father died, he left my mother his personal library, which we estimated to contain ten-thousand books. It had self-help books, as well as books on business, philosophy, psychology, humor, and many other subjects. My mother told me she was going to donate them to the college where my father had been a professor, and she wanted me to first take for myself any that I wanted.
The timing was perfect. While I was struggling with my business life, I had the opportunity to search for help in the library of a successful businessman. I took the books that looked like they would be useful and began to study.
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