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Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom
I had totally dedicated my life to Jesus, obeying Him as much as I seemed able. He has promised that when someone does this, He will reveal Himself to that person.
I remember one set of events that was particularly confusing. One day during my second year in college, I was reading in Psalm 91 when verse 7 seemed to jump out at me.
A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it shall not come near you.
I said to myself, “This is the promise of God for me concerning my sexual sins. Not only is it in the written word of God (the standard by which I judge everything else), but I feel the Holy Spirit has spoken it to my heart to confirm that He wants to do this in me. God is telling me that He will protect me from falling into privately acting out.”
In order to make sure that the promise would be fulfilled, I did everything I knew of to cooperate with the Lord. I believed the word with my heart and confessed it to others, even telling my Christian friends about my embarrassing sexual orientation. I diligently walked in obedience in everything I could, fully expecting Him to hold me up with His power.
After a few days, I fell and was devastated. I had done absolutely everything I knew of to trust God, and it very much seemed like He had failed me.
It wasn’t just that He hadn’t answered my prayer; it was that He hadn’t answered my prayer to keep me from sin. If I couldn’t trust Him to do that, what could I trust Him for? I hadn’t asked for money, fame, or some vain thing, or even for something like ministry which would appeal to my spiritual pride. I had trusted Him to keep me from falling to lust. It was one-hundred percent within His will, yet every bit of evidence seemed to tell me that He had let me down.
I wondered if there were other promises He would fail to uphold. What about forgiveness? Or maybe everything I had believed for the past five years was a lie. Maybe there was no God.
I had to decide whether I was going to give up on being a Christian. Should I cut my losses and search for a new set of beliefs?
After wallowing in indecision for a few days, I decided to trust Jesus in spite of what had happened. Somehow, and I couldn’t imagine how, He was right and I was wrong in this situation. Hopefully, He would help me to understand someday, but even if He didn’t, I would follow Him. To express my heart, I wrote this song.
Life’s not always been what I wanted it to be
My problems didn’t end when Jesus came to me
There’s even times when I have not liked who God is
But I knew He was right, and so I stayed with Him
Chorus:
For Jesus is real. He is Lord
Jesus is love. He gives His all
When problems come my way what else can I do
But love Him and serve Him
But love Him and serve Him
And follow Him for He is God
There were times it seemed that God did not come through
There were times it seemed that His word was not true
But through those times the Lord was working hard on me
And in His time He came and truly set me free
The last two lines were written in faith. I hadn’t experienced them, but I believed they would happen in God’s time.
The song showed the reality of God’s presence in my life during the early days of my faith. I had totally dedicated my life to Jesus, obeying Him as much as I seemed able. He has promised that when someone does this, He will reveal Himself to that person.
He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.
I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen deliverance from my sin, but I knew the Holy Spirit lived in me and Jesus was manifesting Himself to me.
He frustrated me, because He would show Himself in ways that didn’t seem to deal with my real problems. He would bathe me with His love and glory as I worshipped Him, and then seemingly ignore the fact that a short time later I would fall to temptation. I couldn’t figure Him out, but I was glad He was with me.
My times of worship were often so wonderful that a friend once thanked God that when I walked into a room, I sometimes brought the presence of God with me and changed the entire atmosphere of the room. In spite of my problems, the hand of God was on me.
There were extremes in my life, distraction and confusion, but also God’s joy. Years after writing the above song, at a time when I was walking in the fulfillment of the promise I mentioned above (that a thousand would fall at my side and ten thousand at my right hand – so I eventually concluded I heard from the Holy Spirit; I just got the timing wrong), I wrote a follow-on:
Now my heart knows the peace you can give
But I still remember when it hurt so to live
Days of confusion, believing an illusion, yet somehow I could see You
You gave me a song of joy in my sorrow
You gave me a hope I’d have a tomorrow
In all my distressing I had such blessing, ’cause I had You
For You are my friend with me every hour
And You give me hope and You give me power
Lord You are the treasure beyond any measure. Lord I love You
Now I’m more happy, but life still is trying
My problems are different, but I still need dying
And You’re rearranging, yet one thing’s not changing, I still have You
And You are my friend with me every hour
And You give me hope and You give me power
Lord You are the treasure beyond any measure. Lord I love You
Later in this book, I won’t talk about the forgiving love of God as much as you might expect. The time came when I learned how to be less of a messed up kid whose sins the Lord overlooked. He showed me how to emphasize other aspects of His nature, like truth and judgment, which brought me to greater freedom.
This doesn’t mean that I stopped appreciating His generous kindness, however. It was mercy that made me secure enough to face up to the more severe characteristics of God. I have never forgotten how He held and loved me when I was a mess.
On the other hand, during this time I had to resist the temptation to think that sin was OK. I could have reasoned that since His presence was with me, maybe He didn’t mind what I was doing. Instead, He helped me to keep His word before me. It continually exposed my sins and gave me promises of freedom. I fought hard to not compromise my beliefs in order to justify my actions.
I hadn’t yet found what I was looking for, but I had found a growing relationship with the Savior who promised to give me abundant life. He helped me to believe that He would give me a future and a hope.
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.
During my junior year at college, I sought out counseling for my sexual problems. I talked to a minister who knew the Bible, had a moving teaching ministry, and clearly loved people. I told him that my life was a cycle of falling into smoking and privately acting out, followed by repenting, only to fall again a short time later. He agreed to pray for me and counsel me. We got together regularly for a few months, but he finally realized that all he had to offer me was his prayers and the general encouragement that Jesus had the answers. He wrote me a powerful letter as we finished, and I moved on.
Part of my problem was that I was ahead of my time. In the 1970’s Christians didn’t know about sexual addiction. It was hard to get them to talk to single people about sex at all. I read and listened to everything I could find on the subject, but there wasn’t much. Thank God for Josh McDowell and his “Maximum Sex” talk, which I heard while in college. For me, it was like an oasis in the middle of a parched desert.[9] Aside from that, the only times I learned about sex were when I was able to worm my way into teachings for married people.
I believe that for the most part, sexual addiction only becomes a widespread problem when the right spiritual atmosphere mixes with a supply of pornographic material. In the 1970’s, the atmosphere and the supply hadn’t really come together yet. Even though there was a sexual revolution going on, most Christians could get by with the simple counsel to avoid temptation.
I was an exception. I grew up in a place known for being a center of the 1960’s revolution. This supplied the spiritual atmosphere, and my unique fetish gave me an abundant source of pornography. Because it was hard for me to flee the circumstances that triggered my lusts, I experienced a bondage that few people at that time knew how to handle.
College was especially difficult for me. I didn’t know how to occupy my mind with boring textbooks while temptations were pushing in from every angle. In fact, the pressure of studying made my difficulties worse as my smoking fetish created a host of indirect lusts brought on by the fact that nicotine helps with stress. Any anxiety, like the fear of doing badly in my classes, brought with it the yearning to smoke. This then spilled over into a longing for sex. In time, just the struggle to not fall to sinful activities created enough tension to make me want to do these activities more. Everyday life carried within it a bewildering barrage of erotic enticements.
Because I was so distracted, it took me an extra semester to finish my college classes. During the second semester of my fourth year, I tried something radical to help with my schoolwork. It seemed wrong that I should face such difficult battles while studying. Christians were supposed to have peace in their hearts. So when schoolwork drew me toward sin and turmoil, I decided to pray and seek God rather than doing my studies. I hoped that if I could get in touch with the Holy Spirit, He would help me get past my flesh and would give me the peace that passes all understanding (Phil 4:7).
About three fourths of the way through the semester, it became clear that my plan wasn’t working. My heart wasn’t going to find the stability it sought, at least not in time for finals. I was falling dangerously behind and might fail some classes if I didn’t do something drastic. I decided to allow myself to smoke and privately act out so I could quickly put my temptations behind me and concentrate on my schoolwork.
As I did, I suddenly became a superstar student. Without the distractions of resisting sin, and with the comfort of nicotine in my system, I turned into the kind of worker my parents had always wanted me to be. My grades ended up being fairly good.
It was just one more frustrating piece of a puzzle that had already totally confused me. How could I have resisted sin for years only to get the wrong results in my classes – and then when I gave in for a month, I got the right results? I couldn’t make sense of it.
During the summer break that year, I did my best to control my actions, but my life was at a key juncture. I was scheduled to graduate from college and get a job in a few months, and I was engaged to get married shortly after that. If I couldn’t do my school work without smoking, what was going to happen when I had to do similar work on my job? And if I was attracted to women who smoked, could I really pull off a marriage to a girl who I loved, but who didn’t smoke? My heart didn’t know the answers, but it knew I was running out of time to find them.
When I started my last semester at school, it was in the late 1970s, and I had been a Christian for eight years. My everyday struggle with my smoking fetish was worse than ever, and though I had made progress with the voices that echoed in my skull, they were still a large distraction. I had fasted and prayed. I had confessed my sins and gone for counseling. I knew the Bible better than most Christians twice my age. Still, my life was falling apart.
I didn’t want to resign myself to the possibility that I might not be able to live a victorious Christian life at any time in the near future, but I seemed to have no choice. After eight years of trying to live by the power of the Holy Spirit, I was exhausted. I didn’t know what else to do but to be practical, give in, and get on with life.
During the previous semester, falling to limited sins had helped me with my studies, so I decided to give in to it again. If it became a permanent part of my life, I would just have to deal with that. Doing so seemed to be a better alternative than the contradiction I was living.
I was very open about my decisions with my Christian friends and the leaders of the Church I attended while at school. My two Christian house mates were very nonjudgmental as I described my eight year struggle. A leader at church said that he wasn’t sure how to help me, but I wasn’t committing the kind of serious sins that would require church discipline. Since this was obviously an area in which there were no easy answers for me, he would pray that God would give us wisdom.[10]
I continued to do every other part of my Christian walk as I had before. I read the Bible and prayed, went to Church regularly, and tried to show the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Along with this, I didn’t justify my sins, although I must admit I no longer felt very guilty about them.
In my final semester at college, I had more fun than I had experienced in five years, ever since the cloud of oppression had come on me. I enjoyed caring fellowship, and spent a good deal of quality time with an older man who became my adopted Christian father. In addition, giving into the fetish felt like an expression of the “real me,” and I found myself losing my desire to give it up. I was starting to grow comfortable with my sin.
I was in a very dangerous spiritual place. Others who at one time claimed faith in Christ have walked this path and never come back. It humbles and scares me to think that I escaped while they didn’t. I’m not sure why I got out, but I suspect it had something to do with the fact that I continued to hang on to Jesus and seek Him with all my heart. I also opened myself to the ministry of His church, which was there to love me, pray for me, and counsel me. The people whom I have seen fall back and give up were generally the ones who have cut themselves off from God’s people.
In that last semester, I started to think through some theological questions that had been trying to surface for years. For example, one day I read the following scripture.
And by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.
This scripture seemed to say that every person would eventually be reconciled to Jesus, and therefore hell would become unnecessary. After all, it tells us that God will reconcile all things to Himself. Doesn’t that include rebellious people?
I mentioned this to a Christian leader, and he told me that I was starting to believe a heresy that the church had dealt with very early in its history.
The thoughts that began to form in my heart surprised me. I realized that I wanted a God who I could like, and I was having a very hard time liking the God of the Bible. The Judge who condemned people to hell was an embarrassment to me. What would we say about a national ruler who tortured anyone who didn’t follow Him? Yet we had a God who throws into eternal torment anyone who rebels against Him. How was our God any different than the tyrants who rule on earth?
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