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Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents
I expected an unconscious miracle …Instead, God was offering the miracle of enabling me to study, experiment, fail, learn from my mistakes, and try again and again as He taught me about life.
By the time I entered the 1990s, I had been free from outward sexual sin for ten years. The inner conflict associated with leaving them, however, was still draining me. The following is a fictitious diary entry that will give you a peek into the kinds of thoughts and feelings that circulated in my heart between 1990 and 1997. I believe it will give you a unique look into the struggles of a sincere Christian recovering from dysfunctional sexual desires and addiction.
Dear Diary,
I saw something tempting today. I tried not to make it into anything sexual, and I think I sort of succeeded. Of course, it feels like I am handling this problem in the wrong way. I stayed under control by bullying my emotions into hiding. I willed myself into a condition where I could believe that it wasn’t a problem for me. I desperately want this gnawing temptation to be gone, but I suspect that all I have done is to learn enough mental gymnastics to push it into the background.
(I’m never this honest with myself. It is much safer to pretend that since I really don’t know what total freedom feels like, perhaps I have almost achieved it. Maybe what I experience is close to all that God has to offer. But I’m not going to play that game today. As scary as this sounds, when it comes to my emotions, I am going to admit that I feel pretty much the same as I did shortly after I gave up this sin. I have just learned how to suppress it better.)
Later, I was trying to do my job assignments. When they were boring, I wanted to sin. Then when my stress grew, I wanted to sin again. Other fears led to more of the same. …It’s always the same. I can’t seem to escape from this plague within me.
Why is it still here? I try to have simple faith: “God said it: I believe it – I surrender; He lives through me – I behold His glory; He changes me.” Why isn’t that working? I’m not changing – or at least I am not changing on the inside. In fact, I’m afraid I’m losing ground in my heart as I gain ground in my actions.
It’s so hard to avoid doubt when it looks like God isn’t doing His part. It has been over a decade since I acted on my temptations or allowed myself to dwell on sinful sexual thoughts. I’ve done everything I know of to walk with Him and get this threat out of my life. Yet it is as if all I am doing is building better cages for the monster.
I don’t even bother telling anyone about it anymore. The few times I have tried to open up to my wife I have hurt her. Maybe I am just a freak who can’t love her even on my best days. If she knew the full extent of my current struggles, maybe she would think that I am unfit for marriage. I avoid every sin I know how to, but maybe the real me is just so twisted that I will always break her heart.
Once every few years I mention my struggles to a couple of friends for accountability purposes. I believe in that, even if it doesn’t seem to help with the day to day issues, but for the most part I have stopped talking to people about this. Why should I risk doing more damage than I have already done? It’s not like anyone out there has answers. I’ve looked for them, and I have never heard any Christian address this sort of issue.
So there’s nothing to do but to push my way through another day. I have a family to care for. If I try to talk about my problems, it could harm them. What good would it do to injure the people I treasure most on this planet, especially since I still might not find answers? I have to pull myself together and lay my life down again. It’s worth doing that even if it drains me. What other good choice do I have?
I certainly hope that humbling myself in this way will help me to get past my anger against God. Sometimes I am so upset that I all but blurt out, “Either promise it and do it, or don’t promise it at all! Your word says that You will renew me, and I assume that includes my sexuality. Well, do it already! I know that what I am saying is disrespectful and wrong, but it is how I feel. How do you expect me to handle life when I step out in faith and the evidence before me seems to say that You have let me down?! And then I have to scramble to squash my heart in order to force myself to do what is right. That’s the only way I know of to protect my family. It’s no wonder more people don’t follow You. You make this way too hard!”
I need to stop thinking like this. I know the Scriptures. Somehow (and I’m not sure how, but somehow) this is my fault. God is always right, and by faith I choose to submit to Him. Besides, what other hope do I have? I’m too messed up to fix this on my own. I’ll destroy everything I love. He also still meets me regularly with His Spirit when I seek Him, worship, and read His word. He is involved in my life, and that keeps me going. I just have to take the frustration one day at a time and trust Him to show me what to do about it.
My diary entry shows that although I had gained victory over the outward expressions of my sexual sins, I still didn’t know what to do about the inner fire that fueled them. As a result, I spent a good deal of time squelching unnatural thoughts and actions that tried to ignite in my heart.
An analogy that I find helpful for understanding my situation pictures me as a man who had been locked in a prison. God had come to me and liberated me saying, “Come to an airstrip that I have prepared for you, and I will help you to build an airplane so you can fly away to safety.”
When I got to the airstrip, He worked with me to build the shell of the plane, but I was having trouble with its engine. My former captors came and began to throw rocks and bricks at me while I worked. The shell of the plane gave me some protection, but the rocks and bricks broke the windows and struck me. I found myself being wounded while my former captors called for me to return to them.
In this analogy, my freedom and the shell of the plane represents the victory God had given me over the outward expressions of my sexual sins. I had found some protection from ongoing temptations and accusations (represented by the rocks and bricks), but it wasn’t a permanent place of safety.
My trouble with building the engine represents the fact that I didn’t know what to do with the war that still raged in my heart. I endured it, but I found no way to rise above it. Flying symbolizes a mature understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit that would have enabled me to find freedom from the frustration and pain. I struggled as I tried to walk in it.
To continue the analogy, God had provided a manual which told me how to build the engine. The manual represents the wisdom of God that would allow me to more fully walk in His Spirit. He had also provided all of the materials I needed to complete the plane, which represents the work of Jesus Christ in making me a new creation.
Everything was in place, and God was working with me. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to read the manual. Even worse, I didn’t know that it was necessary to know how to read it. Then as God tried to teach me, I couldn’t understand Him. I had a magical view of life in which I expected to simply stare at the manual and God would miraculously build the engine. When that didn’t work, I chided myself for my impatience and concluded that if I stared at it day after day and believed hard enough, God would build the engine a little at a time.
That didn’t work either, so I got mad at God. I felt He wasn’t doing His part, and I said, “Either promise it and do it, or don’t promise it at all….”
I didn’t understand that I was too confused to appreciate what He was doing. He was helping, but I was having a tough time making sense of His help. I expected an unconscious miracle: one that didn’t require me to develop skill with what was happening. It might be instant or incremental, but it wouldn’t force me to learn wisdom. Instead, God was offering the miracle of enabling me to study, experiment, fail, learn from my mistakes, and try again and again as He taught me about life. He wanted to show me how to work with my mind, my emotions, my sexuality, and whatever else affected me. He wanted to give me the skill to rise above my foolishness.
I didn’t expect that I would need to be that involved in my transformation. His lessons seemed too complex, and they didn’t produce results fast enough. Following them made me feel like I was doing the work in my own strength, and I knew that my own strength could never get the job done. So I expected to one day wake up changed (or to wake up changed a little every day) rather than to walk through a long drawn out process of growth in maturity. I had a simple view of life, and I expected God to work within that view.
Getting back to the analogy, other people didn’t seem to understand what was happening with me either. I wondered if I was misreading my feelings. Perhaps I was exaggerating my predicament. After all, I was no longer in prison, and I had some shelter from the rocks and bricks. How bad could my issues be?
I decided to act as if I was doing fine. I told myself that with a few more adjustments, my plane would be ready to fly. In fact, for all I knew I was flying already. When my friends came by, I minimized my problems and spoke of the areas in my life where I knew that God was working. I didn’t want to be a sissy and alarm them over my “minor” wounds. I could handle a few broken bones and bruises. God had everything under control.
Do you see my predicament? Not only did I lack the answers I needed, I lacked the skill to find those answers (I couldn’t read). On top of this, I was trying to convince myself that I was already in good shape (maybe I was already in the air). Finally, I had shut myself off from the help that others might be able to give me (I told my friends that I was doing fine). I also was not going to discover a Christian ministry for sex addicts for more than a decade into the future. It would be a long time before I would find human help that specialized in my sorts of problems.
I was incredibly naïve about what I was facing. I didn’t know what would happen over the next few years. The strain of the struggle was going to cause me to slowly lose my optimism. The rocks and bricks would feel like pointless suffering. That’s why the metaphor I eventually settled on wasn’t one of hope, like building an airplane in order to fly. It was that life was a street-fight. I was being mugged for no apparent reason other than this was the way my life was. There was nothing to do but to bear it and hope that it would someday change.
I didn’t know this at the time, but my grounded shell of a plane was turning into a death trap. The injuries I was sustaining were warping my heart. My growing anger and resentment were signs of a festering sickness within me. Bottling it up might have been good for my family, but I was covering over a wound that could someday become fatal.
Without God’s intervention, I wasn’t going to survive the many years until help arrived. I would have eventually reached a point where I felt I had only two options: First, I could return to my captors by falling into some sort of addictive medication like drugs or sinful sex. This would allow me to anesthetize the wound and find some relief – but my family might fall apart in the process. Second, I could die in the grounded shell of a plane.
Even with God’s intervention, I almost fell to this second option. In the fourth book of this series, Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose, I will describe how I approached an emotional breakdown. This would have been like dying in the shell of the plane. Although I refused to turn back to sin, I could have lost the ability to continue through the pain. Fortunately, the breakdown never occurred. God had spent many years preparing me for that day, so it turned into a transformation that brought freedom.
How did God prepare me? Using the analogy of the airplane, He taught me how to read the manual and build the engine. When the breakdown approached, the lessons I had learned gave me the ability to fly by the Spirit of God into healing. The engine kicked into gear, the plane took off, and my captors were left angrily chasing me down the runway.
The book you are reading is an account of how God taught me to read the manual and build the engine. Although the rocks and the bricks were coming through the windows, Jesus was busily explaining to me how life worked. He opened my eyes to see His wisdom, and the excitement of His lessons sustained me and prepared me for the approaching adversity.
What do I mean by wisdom? I define it as “skill for living.” When we are able to gather the information we need, understand how it fits in with God’s overall scheme for life, and apply it to our specific circumstances, we are wise. The Bible plays a key role in this process because it provides the foundational truths for wisdom, but wisdom is larger than just the contents of the Bible. It also includes the sorts of practical insights we need to express God’s truth in our everyday lives. If we work with computers, wisdom gives us the ability to learn how to use them. If we raise children, it gives us the ability to train their growing personalities. If we minister to those who are bound in sin, it gives us the ability to understand their weaknesses and help them to find the way out.
Wisdom provides what we need in order to understand God’s view of life and put it into practice. It includes theology, spiritual insight, common sense, practical knowledge, skill with our emotions, and everything else involved in seeing how to live God’s way on the earth. He has made His grace available to us. Wisdom gives us the ability to receive and share that grace.
I have talked to men who have said, “I became involved in recovery from sexual addiction, and it worked for over a year. Then I started to slide again. I have tried to get back what I have lost, but I can’t seem to hang on to it anymore.”
I believe that their problem is often that they have made the grounded shell of a plane their goal. They are content to control their actions through support groups, counseling, accountability partners, or whatever temporary solution is available. They don’t realize that the rocks and bricks will eventually wear them down.
We were created to fly, but we often settle for a way to endure our wounds. I believe this is a tragic mistake. For many of us, it won’t work for a lifetime. We were designed to hold the wisdom and power of the Holy Spirit. He wants to build into us His character and freedom; nothing less than His best can meet our needs.
Gaining this kind of new life can be difficult, however. We often make mistakes as we attempt to walk in it, and as the long struggle wears us down, we are tempted to compromise the promise of God. A lack of faith and vision can grow within the difficulty of the battle. We become afraid to hope for the kind of freedom that Jesus offers, so we try to convince ourselves that enduring with the help of friends is good enough.
It will never be good enough. God’s plan is for us to continually draw closer to Him and walk into greater and greater freedom. Growing intimacy in His love is the only lifestyle that we were designed to enjoy. Anything else misses the mark.
Please don’t think that my words mean I am opposed to human help. I encourage people to seek out support from others, and I also try to give it. But as a “veteran” of more than thirty years of successful recovery, I know that only God can sustain our hearts. People can share a part of that burden, but they can never fulfill the role that He is meant to fill. Only the Holy Spirit can give us the ability to deny the lusts of our flesh.
I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.
It is as we walk in the Spirit that we “fly” with God. He enables us to rise above problems that previously held us down, so we can enjoy true freedom.
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