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Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom
<page 76>A metaphor that I find helpful is to think of a stronghold as being like train tracks. Our thoughts are like the train that runs on them. The tracks wind through our deepest emotions, where a thought often picks up a great deal of energy. By the time it surfaces into our conscious mind, it can have the momentum of a locomotive coming down a mountain. It then picks up additional force from bad thought patterns in our reason. Finally, it presents itself to our will. At that point, it is difficult to stop.
During the time when I was learning to put on the new self, I heard some teachings about strongholds in our minds.
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ…
In military life, a stronghold is a well protected location that an enemy cannot easily conquer. Our thinking habits are often like that. They resist our attempts at change and blind us so we don’t see who God really is. It takes supernatural power and wisdom from Him to break them down. We may need to endure through years of slow progress before we reach major breakthroughs.
My false gods of permissive-love and existentialism were examples of major strongholds that kept me from understanding many areas of life. They exalted themselves against the knowledge of the God of the Bible.
The way I thought about sex was another stronghold. It blinded me, so I couldn’t perceive the unity that God had created in the relationship between a man and a woman. It took years of replacing one thread after another before I was able to understand and appreciate the beauty of sex as God had designed it.
We get free from strongholds when we bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. This is the same as the process I described in the previous chapter. We replace misguided ways of thinking and acting with ones based on God’s truth. We learn to see the world as He sees it and to share His feelings about it.
This is part of Christ living in us and expressing Himself through us. We are doing more than just obeying Him. Since it is His power enabling our mind and will, it is His obedience showing through us – the obedience of Christ (I Corinthians 10:5).
<page 77>A metaphor that I find helpful is to think of a stronghold as being like train tracks. Our thoughts are like the train that runs on them. The tracks wind through our deepest emotions, where a thought often picks up a great deal of energy. By the time it surfaces into our conscious mind, it can have the momentum of a locomotive coming down a mountain. It then picks up additional force from bad thought patterns in our reason. Finally, it presents itself to our will. At that point, it is difficult to stop.
Let’s apply this to a stronghold in the area of sex. The sight of an attractive person causes a physical reaction in us, and if the tracks in our hearts are based on the idea that sex exists for our selfish pleasure, we will subconsciously start to indulge in our hormones. The train has started rolling. Without us even being aware of what is happening, habit patterns kick in that make us want to flirt, imagine, or do whatever will enhance our enjoyment of the potential sexual encounter. Images flash before our mind that create an erotic feeding frenzy, and the coercion of the stronghold feels like a barreling locomotive that seems to give us no choice but to come along for the ride. It takes great grace from God to say, “The train stops here.”
How are we to build a new way of thinking? The old way is well developed and easy to follow. Years of experience have wound the tracks deep in our deceptive hearts so that we can’t imagine thinking along any other path. The new tracks from God are incomplete and uncomfortable. When we try to live along them, we feel fear and pain. They seem unnatural.
I wish I had an easy answer. I learned through experience that overcoming can involve a fight to endure until the new tracks became complete enough to replace the old. With God’s help, I had to obey as much as I could while He added new insights. It took humble persistence and reliance on Jesus to work with Him as He renewed my heart, thought by thought and feeling by feeling.
Though I found God’s grace to control my actions in my early twenties, there was so much distorted emotion in my heart that sometimes it felt like all I could do was to contain the roaring train of my sexual desires. When it was about to burst forth into action, I had to say in effect, “It goes no further.”
My twisted thinking kept me from really understanding what was happening, but I was able to hang on to what truth I had in the middle of my confusion. Then, I trusted God to give me more. I was fighting the stronghold by His grace, but until it was more fully torn down, I could experience only partial freedom.
It was painful to hold on to those first few victories, because the old stronghold still had a great hold in my deepest emotions. I would see sights and have feelings that would get my hormones pumping and set in motion an elaborate set of inner ghosts designed to end in sin. God didn’t immediately show me how to keep that from happening. Instead, he showed me how to put the brakes on and stop the train before it crashed and caused external damage.
My heart was now traveling along two opposing sets of tracks that were at war with each other. To be honest, it seemed unrealistic to guard the new tracks so the momentum of the old didn’t <page 78>destroy them. It seemed unfair to have to remain steady, let alone to gain more ground. But God gave me the daily grace to persist. When temptations came, He helped me find ways to minimize their damage. In this way, I established the new tracks and set the stage for Him to add more in the future.
Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. …Nevertheless, to the degree that we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us be of the same mind. (emphasis added)
Over the years, I added more new ways for the train to travel and tore down more of the old. Most of the time, I wasn’t sure if I was making progress against sexual bondage or not. Getting rid of my sexual stronghold was a high priority for me, but God seemed to concentrate on other areas of my life.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but He was often teaching me wisdom in a seemingly unrelated area that I would later need in order to deal with sexual struggles. Eventually, the tracks came together into a way of thinking that set me free indeed. God knows better than we do the unexpected connections in our hearts and how to fix them. We don’t always understand how the locomotive gains its power, but He does.
As I have come to know friends who are recovering from sexual addiction, I have grown to recognize what I call “the father problem.” In a nutshell, it is that those of us who have had serious flaws in our relationship with our earthly fathers often find it difficult to work with our Heavenly Father. I have already touched on one example of this: when we hear about His wrath, we tend to feel rejection.
When it comes to pulling down strongholds, the father problem once again rears its ugly head. Some of us have been so hurt by fathers that we no longer trust any authority figure, including the King of the universe. We don’t hang on to the hope that He will supply the support, power, and wisdom necessary to renew our minds. His promise of a new life seems like too much to believe. We may try to trust, but there is so much emotional baggage reminding us of past disappointments that we can’t figure out how to have faith.
A related problem is that some of us have concluded that even if God did His part, we wouldn’t do ours. We expect to fail. We are afraid to believe God when His word tells us about who He has made us through our relationship with Him. It is less painful to give up than to risk letting ourselves (and others) down again, so we walk away.
Some will read what I have written in the past two chapters and say, “That might work for someone else, but it could never work for me. I’m too far gone.” Or, we may take a wait and see attitude – “I will believe God can change me when I see Him do it.”
<page 79> That approach rarely works. God calls us to live by faith, which takes the opposite tack. It first believes His promises. Then it works with Him as He fulfills them.
But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
If we want to be changed by our Heavenly Father, we have to step out and believe that He will do what He has said, even when we don’t see it happening. Many times, it is more of a decision than a feeling. We choose to trust that He will find a way to bring us into what He wants for us.
I know that living in this way takes courage, a quality which we may feel we lack. Remember, however, that courage is not the absence of fear; it is the decision to try to do what needs to be done.
The train tacks through our hearts may take us away from faith, but by God’s grace, we can lay down new tracks. It may be difficult and painful, but He longs for us to act like we trust what He has said. He will change our lives if we will walk into His arms, let Him hold us, and work with Him.
He isn’t like the people who have let us down, and He is greater than our tendency to let ourselves down. Give Him your life. He knows how to make His big plans for you happen.
Getting back to my story, I felt that God had led me to study my father’s books. I attacked them with the same zeal and commitment I had used while seeking Jesus in prayer, fasting, and His word for the previous two years. He used them to help me practically apply my faith. I learned how to get control of my time, improve my memory, and be successful in spite of my emotions. All of this helped me on my job.
Since my father’s books were mostly written by unbelievers, I worked hard to be discerning. There was a lot of worldly philosophy in them, but I had been a Christian for sixteen years and knew the Bible pretty well. I was able to sort through many of the ungodly ideas and figure out how the practical steps could be applied within the framework of God’s truth.
When I saw my progress, I looked at my old life and felt like I had been spinning in circles for years. With the exception of the change in my sexual struggles seven years earlier, I had tended to repeatedly cycle back to the same problems. I had been unable to leave my old self behind. Now, I was finding the wisdom I needed to move forward and change. The new self began to slowly emerge.
It took time and patience. At first, the frustration in my heart and the newness of the changes caused so much stress that my walk looked worse than it had been. But in time, my job situation turned around, I became a productive worker again, and my career took off. Also, my Christian walk was much stronger overall. The tightrope over hell had become more like a bridge.
<page 80> The remaining books in this series are essentially a list of the most important lessons I learned after forming my new view of the new self. They are the threads or the train tracks that I have found to be the most important for overcoming sexual sins.
At this point in my story, I was about thirty years old, and I have written one book to describe those years. I will write four books about the next seventeen years. I learned much faster, because once I understood how to gain wisdom, I was able to cooperate with God better.
It had taken me sixteen years as a Christian to, by God’s grace, crawl through my deception and stick my head up above some of the futile imaginations that had darkened my heart (Rom 1:21). Now, I had found a window to heaven to let God’s light in. Over the next few years, that window opened increasingly wide, as I found treasures of wisdom and knowledge in the Father and in Christ that I could never have imagined.
That their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, and attaining to all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the knowledge of the mystery of God, both of the Father and of Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (emphasis added)
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