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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
<page 15>Where was God? After I had been willing to lay down my life on His alter, why hadn’t He picked it up and reshaped it into something powerful and beautiful?
Over the more than forty years that I have been a Christian, I have seen many fellow believers fall into sexual sins. Some have made headlines: trusted leaders caught in the act who later admitted that they had been trapped for years by desires that contradicted everything they believed and held dear. Others have been valued friends. Some have returned after a season; others never resurfaced.
I remember sitting down with one friend who had left his wife for a homosexual lifestyle. I poured out my heart and shared some of my darkest secrets as I encouraged him to turn back to the Lord. He told me that he still believed in Jesus, but he wasn’t going to come back.
I understood his conflict. I was still fighting my own long battle with wayward sexual desires, and I often felt like I was slowly losing it. I believed that Jesus should change me on the inside, but it never seemed to happen. I wondered if I was going to be able to hang on; and if I did, whether I would ever be able to make sense of the mess in my heart.
The book you are reading describes what happened when my sexual difficulties and emotional problems dragged on into my forties. I had given my life to Jesus over twenty-five years earlier and had fought diligently to follow Him, but the long battle had worn me down. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through another twenty-five years.
It felt as if I was dying on the inside – turning into an obedience automaton. I served God with my mind and body, but my personhood was being lost in the process. There was ever decreasing joy and ever-increasing self-discipline, wavering hope as I marched through a life of duty.
It was as if I was suffocating, and as much as I hated to admit it, the pillow over my face seemed to be the word of God. The Bible told me to obey commands that didn’t express what was going on in my inner being. Years earlier, I had made the choice to side with the truth against my feelings. Now, it looked as if my feelings were being proven right. They had told me that God’s rules were unrealistic – out of touch with the human heart. Obeying His commandments might bring some benefits, but it would smother me in the process. As I felt the breath of joy leaving my lungs, I couldn’t help but recall their warning.
My discontented and rebellious emotions desperately wanted to claw their way into the open. They felt like a suppressed evil monster. I was fighting with everything I could to keep them from bursting onto the scene and hurting everyone around me. I kept them under lock and key, but they were becoming relentless …building pressure …threatening to break out like an alien parasite from a horror movie. The more I used sound decisions to cap them the more they churned and weakened my defenses. If I didn’t find answers soon, they were either going to escape and do their damage, or I might have an emotional breakdown.
<page 16>On the outside, my life looked totally different. I had blessings, success, a wonderful wife, and great children. My devotional life was sincere, I taught the Bible, I led worship, and I honestly spoke of God’s goodness. My heart regularly experienced and shared Jesus’ living reality …in fact, it was my relationship with Him that enabled me to survive. My problem wasn’t that He wasn’t involved in my life. It was that a part of me (a big part of me) was growing to dislike His involvement.
That’s where I was in 1998. I had dedicated twenty-seven years of my life to getting to know God, His word, and His world. Wisdom had poured her spirit on me and made her ways known to me (Proverbs 1:23). My house had been built and its rooms were filled with precious and pleasant riches (Proverbs 24:3-4). But a growing turmoil within me wanted to destroy it all. I was constantly fighting a “teenager within” who said, “You can take your nice happy little world and shove it ….”
I didn’t know why I felt that way. I loved God, my wife, my children, and people in general. I wanted to give everyone the best, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to silence my growing inner revolt.
At the heart of it all was my sexuality. Though I hadn’t sinned in my sexual actions for over eighteen years, desires and temptations continued to plague me regularly. I put guards on my eyes, mind, and body, but my obedience felt like emotional abuse. It was like I had to hate a part of me in order to love everyone else. As I beat back the erotic monster trying to escape from the cage I had built, I felt like the battle was shutting me down and tearing me apart.
It didn’t seem fair. Why hadn’t God set me free? Where was that Holy Spirit power His word promised? Peace? Joy? Why were they leaving me instead of flowing into me? In my more cynical moments, I wondered what kind of a Creator would create a world in which someone could develop the kind of long-term problems I endured. What kind of a Father would leave His child in a war zone for so long?
I didn’t know the answers. I had done everything I could think of to allow Jesus to work in my life. I surrendered daily to His purposes as best I understood them. Still, it seemed like He had left me to rot in my emotional dungeon.
I had spent thousands of hours learning wisdom and knowledge. I found, like Solomon, that this sometimes opens the door to greater grief.
I communed with my heart, saying, "Look, I have attained greatness, and have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge." And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is grasping for the wind. For in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
The wise gain a vision for how the world could be a better place, and they are motivated to try to change it. This can lead to great frustration. (“In much wisdom is much grief.”) They may <page 17>succeed in temporarily turning back some of the effects of foolishness, but they can’t do away with the curse that afflicts this planet.
Solomon is an example; he blessed many while he ruled Israel. They enjoyed peace and wealth that few had experienced at any time in history, but Solomon couldn’t fix the real problems. Sin and death[18] were as much of a plague after he left as they had been before he came.
What's there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? …Life's a corkscrew that can't be straightened, a minus that won't add up. …I hate life. As far as I can see, what happens on earth is a bad business. It's smoke — and spitting into the wind.
(Ecclesiastes 1:3; 15; 2:17, The Message)
Solomon fell into despair over the fact that he couldn’t make the corkscrew straight. He couldn’t change the world. In fact, in some ways it changed him.
As Solomon grew older, his wives beguiled him with their alien gods and he became unfaithful — he didn't stay true to his GOD as his father David had done.
(1 Kings 11:4, The Message)
I identified with Solomon’s disappointment – and with his temptation to disobedience. I had been able to bring some peace and prosperity to my family, but I was seeing that deeper issues continued to plague us. My years of service to God hadn’t freed me from the poisons spreading in my own heart, and they couldn’t keep my wife and children from the struggles they faced.
I was angry. I started to hate life (Ecclesiastes 2:17).
Many years earlier, I had memorized my way through the book of Proverbs.[19] Shortly after that, I did the same with the book of Ecclesiastes. These two great works of Solomon spoke to two disconnected parts of me. Proverbs touched the part that wanted to prosper. It inspired me to devote my time, effort, and money to being the person God had called me to be.
Ecclesiastes touched the dark side of me, the side that scared me. What good were blessings, even spiritual blessings, if they didn’t make me happy? With as much as I appreciated the good God had done, it wasn’t going to be enough if it didn’t set me free on the inside.
If a man begets a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with goodness, or indeed he has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better than he (emphasis added)
<page 18> The saying that I had adopted for this part of my life was, “Life is a street-fight.”[20] I never knew when some dangerous emotion or unclean spirit was going to hit me over the head with a brick. I fought my way through the attacks, denying what seemed natural to me in order to do what was right. I stood on God’s word. I believed it, practiced it, preached it …when all else failed, I forced it down my throat! I had hoped that doing this would eventually lead to peace.
It hadn’t; the street-fight had only escalated.
I was tired of it, and I was mad at the God whose word seemed to have given me no other good option. The “Proverbs” part of me still wanted to hang on in the hope that someday it would all work out, but the “Ecclesiastes” part wanted to declare God to be an unfit tyrant who had no right to tell me to do the impossible. Solomon’s two books refused to come together in my experience. Just as the incredible hope of Proverbs was followed by the surprising despair of Ecclesiastes, so it was in my heart.
I did my best to suppress my growing discontent, hoping it would disappear before it overcame me. I had a family to raise, a job to keep, and a ministry to share. I couldn’t afford to neglect those in order to pursue questions for which I might never find answers. I pushed through, becoming like a robot when the duties of my life forced me to, becoming angry when it seemed like that was the only way to keep going.
I didn’t think a loving God would allow it to be that way, yet what could I do? I had tried to live differently, but I hadn’t been able to make it work. I had complained in prayer, but nothing changed. The only option left seemed to be to develop the toughness to keep moving forward.
I did have one way to make my battle less difficult. I could shut myself away from the world. The hornets’ nest within me stayed quieter if I avoided the enticements around me. I learned to find refuge in my home – away from the TV, radio, and sinners that barked their temptations on every side. Fleeing them cut down the pain.
Then one day the world came to me. My children entered adolescence and brought modern day America home with them. My careful guidance over the TV, radio, and friends broke down, and I couldn’t handle the influx of rebellious voices.
My wounded and suppressed “teenager within” screamed to be let out. It wanted to either join the upheaval or intimidate it into silence. My heart refused to remain in forced submission. Even worse, as the hornets’ nest began to swarm out of control, I had trouble keeping it from attacking whoever was nearby.
I had spent over twenty-five years trying to escape from the world. Once the full assault came, my carefully erected defenses fell within a few short months. I tried to contain the swarm; I angrily forced my emotions back into their cage, but that strategy no longer worked.
Where was God? After I had been willing to lay down my life on His alter, why hadn’t He picked it up and reshaped it into something powerful and beautiful? Why was He now allowing my inner turmoil to be shaken from its grumbling submission into angry defiance? I didn’t know, and as always, I knew I might never know. He was God, and He didn’t have to explain Himself. Also, in spite of my best efforts to serve Him, I had more than enough sins left in my life to deserve any evil that came my way.
<page 19> There wasn’t much to do but to continue to rely on Him, give Him all I had, and see where He led me. I was going to fight the street-fight until the end. Unfortunately, I was so worn out by it all that I almost didn’t care how quickly that end came. I just wanted it to be over.
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