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Exchanged Glory II: The OK Stronghold
The following is a quick review of the first book of the Exchanged Glory Series, Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom.
In chapters one and two of Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, I described the first twenty-two years of my life. I battled with a sexual abnormality that, for me, turned scenes from everyday life into pornographic images. The details aren’t important to the book you are reading, but you should know that the temptations made my walk as a Christian very difficult. They were part of a complex web of spiritual, emotional, and mental instability that continued to drag me down for many years.
I had to deal daily with a contradiction. When I looked at myself and asked, “Who am I sexually?” I came up with an answer based on an orientation that seemed to spring out of my inner being but made little sense. When I looked at God’s word and asked the same question, I came up with a different answer. The Bible told me I was a new person who should be able to see sex for what God created it to be. I followed God’s word as much as I seemed to be able, but a part of me felt like obeying Him forced me to live a lie.
Many common teachings didn’t seem to work for me. I heard people say, “Christianity is a religion of the heart, not the head.” Some went as far as to say that if we listened to our heads we would be deceived, while our hearts would steer us to the truth. I finally threw up my hands and said, “I have no idea how this could work for me.” What seemed like my heart was hooked into a sexuality that went against God and common sense. My head was the only thing keeping me sane.
In Exchanged Glory II: The OK Stronghold, I will tell how I made progress against these problems. I came up with an approach to my heart and head that worked for me, and I put in place a set of principles that started to clear away the confusion.
In these chapters of Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, I told how I came to understand God’s wrath and mercy. When I was at my lowest point, after years of prayer, effort, and counsel seemed to have failed, God came through in a surprising way. I learned that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and my life began to change. I gave up sinful sexual actions, and I gained enough control over my thoughts to live a fairly normal life.
These chapters also introduced the idea of mental idols; they are false gods that we make up with our minds. When we worship them, we are committing the sin of ungodliness (bad worship). I described a mental idol I believed in, the false god of permissive-love:
He was first and foremost nonjudgmental. He understood how hard it was to be human, and he had no desire or need to punish us for our weaknesses and little sins. After all, if he didn’t “grade on a curve,” who could get into heaven? He sent only a few very evil people to Hell, like Hitler for example.
A part of me found a God who threw people into eternal torment for disobeying the strict standards in the Bible repugnant. A ruler on earth who judged by that kind of standard would be considered a vile enemy of mankind. What excuse did a ruler in heaven have for acting in a way that violated the basic tolerance and kindness we expect from ourselves and others?
If I were to name my image, I would call him the false god of permissive-love. He could be worshipped with hundreds of different theologies: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, agnostic, etc., but under the surface he was the same caring guy. He loved people and wanted them to get along. How could he worry about little details like theology and worship style when more important issues like human happiness were at stake?[6]
Exchanged Glory II: The OK Stronghold speaks more about the false god of permissive-love. He has tremendous influence in American society and is part of the ignorance that is in us (Ephesians 4:18). I will describe how we compromise with him and sow the seeds that lead to sin and addiction.
In this chapter of Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, I introduced the main theme of all five books in this series. Ungodliness (bad worship) leads to other kinds of disobedience.
They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand. So God said, in effect, "If that's what you want, that's what you get." It wasn't long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. …Since they didn't bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous… (emphasis added)
(Romans 1:22-24, 28-29, The Message)
The plague of sinful addictions we are experiencing is linked to our ungodliness. God lets us run loose into unhealthy behaviors because we worship images like the false god of permissive-love. He gives us over to destruction and judgment.
He isn’t cruel in this, however. When we turn from Him, we destroy the foundation for healthy thoughts, feelings, and actions. The resulting foolishness in our hearts leads us into all sorts of unwise activities. He lets us run loose through a very predictable process where we blind our hearts with a false god of our own choosing, and this makes us too dull to handle our desires. As Ephesians 4:19 implies, He gives us over to behaviors like sexual addiction by allowing us to give ourselves over.
Who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. (emphasis added)
There is hope in this, however. If we were given over because of bad worship, then good worship will lead to recovery. As we rediscover and respond to the God of the Bible, we will be set free.
In these chapters of Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, I talked briefly about the addictive mindset:
…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 wellbeing.
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.[7]
I will describe the addictive mindset in much more detail in Exchanged Glory II: The OK Stronghold. I believe it leads people into many compulsive behaviors.
These chapters also described what I call “willful sins” and “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.[8]
The distinction between these two types of sins is helpful for understanding our relationship with our Father in heaven.
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. …
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.[9]
Exchanged Glory II: The OK Stronghold builds on the relationship with God I described in the above passage. It attempts to help us grow in our ability to work with our Heavenly Father.
In these chapters of Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, I described my struggle to walk in the truth that I was dead to sin and alive to God. It was hard for me to understand in any practical way how I had become a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17). My sexual difficulties together with problems I will mention in Exchanged Glory II: The OK Stronghold had damaged my personality. The world was a frightening haunt of demons in which my powerful impure desires where constantly being stirred. I dealt daily with temptations that were far different from what I expected a “dead to sin and alive to God” person to face.
Sexual addiction is stronger than addiction to cocaine and harder to break than any other addiction.[10] It takes faith for a person going through withdrawal from it to believe that he or she has changed. It is only by the grace and mercy of God that I survived. I had to find freedom at a time when I couldn’t get away from my temptations. I also didn’t really know how to talk to anyone about what was happening.
I adopted a saying to help me deal with my situation, “Life is a tightrope over hell.”[11] It helped me to remember my need to remain humble and to run to God’s throne of grace for help. Being careless about my relationship with Jesus wasn’t an option.
The “tightrope over hell” helped me to survive my problems for many years until a job change knocked me off of it. I will continue with the story of my job change in the first chapter of Exchanged Glory II: The OK Stronghold. It became a major springboard that God used to launch me into many changes.
In these chapters of Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, I shared that I learned to replace wrong ways of thinking, feeling, and acting with right ways. I wrote about spiritual strongholds and compared them to train tracks through our hearts.
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.”[12]
The metaphor of train tracks is one that I will use throughout the books of this series. It has been amazingly useful to me for understanding my tendencies toward sin. It has helped me to appreciate why it can be so difficult to change. God had to rearrange the tracks through my heart so that I could think, feel, and act in line with His truth rather than my own knowledge of good and evil.
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