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Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents
<page 7>Before getting started, I need to review some important points covered in the first two books of this series.
When our hearts turn to false gods, we are given over to other sins, including addictive sins. This happens because our idolatry makes us too foolish to prevent our own destruction. In order to find freedom, we must return to the true God, who teaches us the wisdom we need.
Our false gods aren’t always physical idols. They can also be mental images, even a distorted picture of the true God. A mental image I held to was what I call 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 things like theology and worship style when more important issues like human happiness were at stake?[6]
The God of the Bible is the only remedy for our foolishness. We must exchange our false images for a relationship with Him based on truth. As we do, He transforms us. The book you are reading builds on this theme. It describes the part that wisdom plays in our transformation.
God changes us by renewing our minds. We have learned thinking habits that take us away from Him, so He joins Himself to our spirit and teaches us a new approach to life.[7] As we cooperate with him, He opens our hearts to understand His Scriptures, and we see reality from His perspective. We grow to know Him as He is rather than as we imagine Him to be.
This doesn’t occur without a battle. The Bible compares our old ways of thinking to strongholds.
<page 8>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.
In Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, I shared a visual picture that has helped me to deal with strongholds.
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.”[8]
God wants to turn the train around and send it in the right direction. The book you are reading will illustrate how He did this in my life. I faced a difficult struggle with abnormal sexual desires and sexual addiction, but He gave me a new set of tracks based on wisdom.
At the point in my story that I will be describing in this book, it is not important for you to understand the convoluted emotions that drove my abnormal sexual desires. I will not even mention what those desires were in this book. What is important to understand for this point is that I had little clue what was happening. The psychological causes of my problem were hidden from me, its sustaining drives were a mystery, and it seemed to have no cure.
I know that many of you are as mystified by your own issues as I was by mine. Some of you feel that you can’t really follow Jesus until a human being explains to you what is wrong and how to fix it. This feeling can easily lead to hopelessness. If I had held to it, I may have destroyed my life before I found anyone who could have come close to answering my questions. I was a Christian for close to forty years before I found another human being who could explain what was happening to me.
Fortunately, Jesus was more than able to fulfill that role. He met me in the middle of my mess, showed me what was wrong, and taught me His way to freedom. The book you are reading describes an important stage in that journey.
<page 9>The second book of this series, Exchanged Glory II: The OK Stronghold, is devoted to describing a stronghold called the OK Stronghold. It is a way of thinking that causes us to focus on feeling OK rather than being OK.
That book shares a number of OK Busters I put in place to help me overcome my insecurities. One of them was: “I will judge by the truth rather than by my feelings.”[9] The book you are currently reading describes many of the steps I took to make this OK Buster a reality. I had to learn to seek and hold to the truth in spite of my fears.
Another OK Buster was: “I am eternally OK by the blood of Christ,”[10] which was equally important. It would have been impossible for me to truly seek the truth had I not known I was accepted and loved by God apart from how well I lived the truth. Only in the security Jesus bought for me could I face the light that exposed the darkness of my heart.
One final point is that my emotions fought against wisdom on many fronts. I had made mistakes with them (and continued to make mistakes with them) that made progress difficult. To help me move forward, I adopted a saying to keep me focused: “Life is a street-fight.”
… If I wanted to win a street fight, I had to be willing to suffer. I knew that at any minute, some seemingly unfair demon or emotion could sneak up and hit me over the head with a brick. The key was to be tougher than the bricks. If I could by God’s grace outlast the turmoil, I would win. At least for the time being, Holy Spirit inspired reason and will power would carry me toward the prize.[11]
Although the “street-fight” wasn’t the best way to live, it was the best I could do at the time. Its focus on embracing truth kept me in touch with Jesus, and the desperation I felt helped me to rely on Him even when I didn’t understand what was happening.
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