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Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents
<page 23>It is in the heat of this battle that He will teach us the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical skills and disciplines that enable us to leave behind our deeply engrained habits. This struggle is an unavoidable training ground for freedom.
How long, O naïve ones, will you love simplicity?
(Proverbs 1:22, NAS)
Loving simplicity is the first of three “wisdom killers” listed in Proverbs 1:22 (the others are presented in following chapters). All three keep us from tuning into God’s station. The Hebrew word for ‘naïve one,’ pethiy, means ‘simple one.’[14] It is the same word that is translated simplicity later in the verse.
An insight or experience is simple if it is easy to include in your life. It is complex if it takes work and is difficult to master. A naïve one is someone who is not willing to go through the trouble of gaining complex insights and experiences. He or she chooses to stay blissfully ignorant rather than to press into truth.
The above nine words from Proverbs 1:22 thundered through my heart and changed me forever. I had loved simplicity. More than that, I had believed in it as an unquestioned principle of God’s Spirit. If He was speaking a message, I expected it to be simple.
Because of this, whenever He tried to give me the complex wisdom I needed to handle the problems of my life, I overlooked His input and searched for a more straightforward answer. When I didn’t find it, my heart felt that I either must be sinning against Him or He must be letting me down.
I especially felt this way when it came to sexual temptations. Their confusing nature made it seem that God wasn’t giving me what I needed. He wasn’t showing me a simple solution, so I felt He wasn’t giving me any solution at all.
I was missing the fact that I had complicated spiritual and psychological problems for which there were no simple solutions. It was a miracle of His grace that I had survived at all. I felt as if the partial solutions I was finding were forcing me to rely on my own cleverness and strength, but I was deceived about what was happening. It was His cleverness and strength that were entering my heart. My problem was that my love of simplicity was keeping me from recognizing the answers for what they were.
<page 24>In order to illustrate why a love of simplicity is so dangerous, allow me to quickly expand upon the nature of my spiritual and psychological problems. My sexual issues were rooted in a childhood trauma that had never been resolved, and they lay disguised below layers of confusion.
They had grown, over time, into an all-purpose coping mechanism for many emotional issues in my life. Was I fearful? My mind would drift to images that sent soothing sexual hormones into my system. Was I frustrated and angry? A rush of pleasure could distract me. Was I depressed? With a simple fantasy I could stimulate my body with an exotic mix of chemicals that would cheer me up.
When I gave up sexual sin in obedience to Jesus, I suddenly found myself without this multipurpose coping mechanism. I had to learn to handle fear, guilt, anger, and sorrow in a totally new way, and this task was beyond my abilities. In fact, I didn’t even know it was a task that required my attention. I didn’t understand the nature of my problems, the fact that I was a recovering sex addict, or the unique steps I should take to handle my problems.
As a result, my emotions took a turn for the worse, and I found myself fighting to keep them under control. Since following Jesus was supposed to change me for the better, my new struggle made me feel like a spiritual freak. It seemed that I must either have some unexplained grace-nullifying defect, or God must be holding back on me. What else could explain the sensual images that continued to flash before my imagination? And why else would my heart be constantly looking for ways to justify drifting back into forbidden delights? Wasn’t Jesus supposed to free me from those sorts of thoughts? It didn’t make sense to me.
Yet I had hope. Jesus had promised to change me, and I figured that He would do so if I just persevered. But after more than a decade of fighting for this, I had to wonder about what was happening. The battle was more than I believed a Christian should face.
Over time, many of my feelings became so opposed to my faith that I wondered if I was a hypocrite who lived like a saint on the outside but was a fraud on the inside. I had tried just about everything that people claimed would help: I disciplined myself, I prayed, I studied, I was an active member of a Bible-believing church, I avoided temptation, and I let go and let God. All of that helped, but at the same time, the inner battle intensified.
If left to myself, I would have spent my time navel gazing, trying to figure out what was wrong with me, but I had a family to raise. I couldn’t afford to neglect my responsibilities to pursue a personal quest that might be hopeless. So I did what seemed necessary. I put in place new coping mechanisms. I disconnected from my emotions so they wouldn’t get in the way of what I needed to do.[15] Or I suppressed them and found that if I could force them from my consciousness, my fear, guilt, anger, and sorrow receded for a time.[16] I could act as if they weren’t there, and that made it easier to continue on with life.
<page 25>These new coping mechanisms were, of course, mistakes – and sometimes even sins. They were going to come back to haunt me in years to come.[17] And if there had been people around me who were able to help me understand my issues, I might have found an easier path to freedom. My point, however, is that life isn’t that simple. We sometimes don’t have the human support we need.
I was dealing with my problems in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when such support was extremely difficult to find. I needed to take what God had given me and make the most of it, as we all must do. He gives us what is best for us in order to accomplish His plan. If we rely directly on Him, He will use our struggles to build into us the wisdom and faith that equip us for His unique purposes for our lives. While it looked to me as if He was neglecting me, He was actually training me for the job He knew was best for me.
I focused on what I could see clearly. I knew I should care for my family, so I dedicated myself to them. It was a good decision, and one that I believe the Holy Spirit enabled me to make, but because of my unwise coping mechanisms, it added to the complexity of my situation. Now my godly love for my family had become entangled with my suppression of my emotions. It seemed that in order to care for my wife and children I had to hurt myself.
Resentment and rebellion grew in my heart, and this made me feel that I had to suppress even more. Now it was no longer just the sexual issues that were being held down; it was also a host of other emotions that had grown out of mishandling the first emotions. And all this time, I couldn’t understand why my best attempts at obedience seemed to be degenerating into a slow-growing inner rage.
I seemed to be stuck in a slow death spiral. The more I forced myself to follow Jesus the more rebellious I felt, but I couldn’t see any other good choice. I couldn’t just indulge my emotions or they might destroy the people I loved most.
My life was complicated.
I had very little idea what my problems were or why they remained. I did one thing right, however. I chose to walk as closely with Jesus as I could, trusting that His strength was greater than my weakness. …And it was. He led me day by day for years to bring me out of my confusion into His healing.
As He did, I realized the level of wisdom this healing required. I had to honestly face my confusion, my volatile emotions, and my sexual desires. In order to protect my family, I had to do this in a way that wouldn’t spill my issues onto those who were around me. And though this was hard, it was only the first step – and to be honest, it was a step I had taken before without seeing results.
It was only when my willingness to face my emotions was combined with the ability to hear wisdom as she shouted in the street that great emotional change came. I had to develop the spiritual sensitivity to find real answers that no human being could have taught me. Only with the Holy Spirit’s help could I find meaningful solutions.
I don’t believe I would have received those solutions if I hadn’t spent the years leading up to them learning to overcome my love of simplicity. I wouldn’t have had the discernment and <page 26>patience to recognize them when they came. And even if I had recognized them, I wouldn’t have known how to put them into practice. My toxic love of simplicity would have poisoned the process of making them a part of my life. My heart would have lacked the maturity to thrive while uncovering layer after layer of hurt, deception, and bad coping mechanisms.
Fortunately, in the early 1990s Proverbs 1:22 drove home to me the revelation that I was naïve. This caused me to dedicate myself to the principles I am sharing in this book, and God used them to lead me into His answers.
I had wanted to watch Him magically fix me, but He wanted to teach me how to handle my thorny issues. His voice of wisdom encouraged me to embrace the complex task before me. He sustained me as I stayed with His ways even when they seemed unreasonable. Learning them required my time, energy, and endurance. There were years of pressing through confusion until truth became clear. As I relied on His grace, however, He used my trials to teach me how to consistently tune to His station.
I should clarify a couple of points before I move on: First, simplicity is not a bad thing. Some parts of life are simple, and we shouldn’t try to make them into anything but what they are. The problem comes when we love simplicity. In that case, we refuse to deal with those parts of life that are complex. When our circumstances become too difficult, we give up and blame God or others for not giving us what we need. We deceive ourselves into thinking we have an excuse to sin.
Second, I think many Christians give us misleading counsel. They tell us that God’s ways are simple; we are the ones who make them complicated. This misses one of the major facts of learning: when we don’t know what we are doing, a new skill is almost always complicated. That is why we go to school for twelve to eighteen years to learn to function in modern society. Our lives are not simple.
If life in the natural is not simple, imagine how much more difficult life in the supernatural is. It is totally beyond human comprehension and ability.
"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," says the LORD. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”
My experience has been that God’s ways often don’t make sense to me at first – and why should they? They are higher than mine. They might be simple to someone who has experience with them, but I am not that person. Understanding usually comes through a long process of incrementally increasing insight and obedience.
Even when I have started to understand His ways, they often don’t work the way I think they should. I make some progress, but I can only experience part of their promise. Then I need the Holy Spirit to show me the unexpected additions and adjustments that complete the transformation.
<page 27>Addicts especially love simple solutions. In fact, addiction can be seen as an attachment to simple solutions that don’t work. With something as trivial as taking a drink, ingesting a drug, or looking at an erotic image, we feel like we are flying above life’s trials. We don’t have to embrace the pain of learning from others, struggling under failure, and persevering through trials. A simple medication appears to give us an easy fix. Is it any wonder we expect God’s abundant life to come upon us in a similar manner?
To successfully deal with life’s challenges, we need a wide array of spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical skills. It takes years to learn them. This is especially true for those of us who have fallen to addiction. In our case, the necessary skills were either never taught to us, or they have been torn down and replaced by foolishness. Using the analogy of the airplane from the first chapter of this book,[18] we lack the engine that enables us to fly.
God is working with us. He is trying to teach us, but we will never learn His lessons if we demand that they be simple. Our naivety will cause us to look at our complicated struggles and decide that we are hopeless failures who might as well return to our former way of life. Or we will feel that we have done everything we possibly can, but God just requires too much or helps too little.
Overcoming these sorts of feelings is what escaping from a love of simplicity is all about. Our discouragement, fear, sense of abandonment, anger, and self-justification are expressions of our naivety. We want the answers to be obvious, and we become overwhelmed when they aren’t.
God calls for us to stand on His promise in the middle of these feelings. I know from experience that this can be incredibly difficult, and my heart hurts to know that others must face this struggle. Yet by His grace we must recognize the lies and press through until we find His answers (which sometimes feels like surviving until a miracle happens). The harsh discouragement we feel is a deception that keeps us from understanding His tender encouragement and gentle guidance.
It is in the heat of this battle that He will teach us the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical skills and disciplines that enable us to leave behind our deeply ingrained habits. This struggle is an unavoidable training ground for freedom. It is one of the major places in which the Holy Spirit will empower us to build the engine that allows us to fly over our former captors.
Fortunately for today’s addicts, God has provided many tools to help in this task: support groups, counselors, books …. We should take advantage of them. They will guide us as we try to obey, fall short, try again in faith, and learn a little from each experience. Slowly, we will make our way through the darkness to understand what is happening. We will face the difficulty and find His grace to enter His promises.
Then, amazingly, when it all comes together …it seems simple. But this is because the many skills and disciplines that make up freedom have become a part of us.
Mistakes and confusion are part of the learning process. We can’t avoid the complexity they bring or the emotional turmoil they force us to endure. We may be offended by the struggle, but that’s because we love simplicity.
<page 28>As I grew to understand this, I began to see how it applied in many areas of life. One amusing example showed up when I tried to teach young people how to shoot a basketball. By the time I coached them, many had already developed bad habits, which I tried to break. I gave them drills to do, and some would follow my instruction a few times and then say, “This doesn’t work; I like my way better.”
They didn’t realize that a person can’t learn to shoot a jump shot by trying what the coach suggests only a few times. They have to do it thousands of times – to practice until the good habits become like subconscious instincts.
An accurate jump shot is an amazing feat. In a split second of coordination, a person must calculate the distance to the basket; map out the arc of the ball through the air; use almost every muscle in his or her body in the right sequence; adjust for tiredness; take into account the amount of power that comes from legs, arms, and hands (which is different on every shot); and handle the distraction of defensive players. When I consider everything involved, it seems almost impossible, yet good shooters do it all the time.
I can’t really teach it. I can only give players the tools that tend to turn whatever talent they have into skill. Then, I encourage them to practice. They must shoot from different distances, catch and shoot from many angles, and learn to put the ball up after dribbling. It takes years of work. Eventually, however, something amazing happens – their jump shot becomes second nature.
Recovery from sexual addiction (or any addiction) is similar. How many times have we given up on God after trying His wisdom a few times? We say, “This doesn’t work; I like my way better.” We don’t embrace the complexity and difficulty of the task. We love simplicity!
Freedom comes with a thousand subtle and not so subtle insights and attitude shifts. We have to get out on the court of life and keep trying until Jesus, our Coach, opens our eyes to understand what it is all about. We must humble ourselves and cry out for His merciful help. If we seek Him, He will send the right knowledge, circumstances, and whatever else we need. He gives wisdom liberally (James 1:5).
I can’t really teach it. I can only point out the tools that tend to lead to success. We have to go out and find Jesus for ourselves. His word must penetrate our minds and hearts. His strength must sustain us through temptations and confusion. Our heart must grow to know Him in all sorts of different circumstances. It takes years of work.
Eventually, however, something amazing happens. The many skills and disciplines that support a healthy personality become fused into our inner being. Though they aren’t simple, they have become so much a part of us that they seem simple. Freedom from addiction becomes second nature.
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