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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
… The right word at the right time — beautiful!
(Proverbs 15:23, The Message)
Because I didn’t know where I had come from, I didn’t appreciate the incredible miracles that had sustained me through this long, drawn out war. Rather than seeing what God had done, I felt He had let me down.
In the fall of 1998, at the time when the trouble in my family was starting, I went to a youth retreat with two of my children. The speaker was a prophetic man who regularly received prophecies concerning people’s lives.
I remembered the previous time I had heard him speak. In an attempt to avoid having to deal with my unresolved questions about prophecy, I wore what I called “prophet proofing.” I dressed up in a beat-up old jeans jacket that made me look like I was barely saved. When this was put together with my obvious discomfort with prophetic ministry, I’m sure I looked like a backslidden Christian.
Since I was in reality committed to Christ, I figured the man might be confused by the contradiction between what his eyes saw and what his heart felt. If he wasn’t one hundred percent certain he was hearing from God, he might skip over me. Or maybe God would just tell him not to bother.
…For whatever reason, he prophesied over my wife sitting on one side of me and the man sitting on the other – and skipped the backslidden looking guy between them!
At the youth retreat my attitude was different. Prophecy was no longer a threat to me; I knew how to benefit from it. I came wondering if God would speak to me.
After prophesying over several young people, the man came to my two children. He gave surprisingly accurate descriptions of their character along with messages about God’s call on their lives. At the end of the two-day set of meetings, he prophesied over me. Very few people knew about my struggles over the years, so when he spoke about them, I knew he hadn’t heard about them from human beings. In fact, one friend at the meeting, who had known me for close to twenty years, heard his words and thought they didn’t describe my life very well.
The prophecy started:
The Lord would say, son, you have seen the impossible, for I am the God of the impossible, and you have brought me such joy because you have never limited me. You've never limited me because of any background limitations in your life. You've never limited me because of any financial limitations in your life. You've never limited me at all. You've said, "God, it's not whether I can do it or not, it's whether You can do it or not." And I have seen son that you have been a man of faith.
I couldn’t remember how many times I had been on my face before God saying, “I have no clue how to do what You want me to, but I know that You can do it through me.” Over the years, Jesus had brought me past countless roadblocks, especially in the area of my sexuality. I had come to know Him as the God of the impossible. My family was a miracle. My job was a miracle. Every day was a miracle.
Hearing God say that He was pleased with my trust comforted me. Though I knew that He had helped me, I didn’t know how He felt about it. The difficulties of my life often came from my own internal resistance to His ways rather than from external circumstances, so I wondered if my limitations were real or imagined.
Should I have just shaken them off and moved past them twenty years earlier? Was my continuing struggle a result of some deep hypocrisy within me? Was it a sign that God found me so hard to work with that He had to keep me under constant discipline? Perhaps the problems my children were having were just the latest consequence of His disappointment with my life.
It was nice to hear that I had brought my Father joy. I wasn’t a wayward child who deceived myself into believing I loved Him. I was a son and a man of faith. Not only had I believed that He would get me past my sins, but when I hadn’t received the help I thought I needed, I patched together whatever I received into something that kept me moving forward. I knew that sayings like “Life is a tightrope over hell”[38] and “Life is a street-fight”[39] weren’t the best ways to live, but they were the best I seemed to be able to do. I practiced them in faith, trusting God to bless my efforts and eventually lead me into something better. It was nice to hear God say something positive about that.
The prophecy continued:
You have opened wide your life on several occasions. You've let me change you, and you've let me lift the heaviness of the years gone by off of you. And there's something about your life, sir. You broke even generational curses that were over your family lineage when you came into the Kingdom. You came in violently. You came in against all odds, and God cleaned you up. You were just in darkness and heaviness of spirit, and God picked you up and pulled you out of the muck and the mire, and He lifted off of you a generational curse of heaviness and depression that was all over you. And he reassembled your lives.
You’re somewhat of a miracle. The Lord says that you should have probably even died earlier in your life because there was such a spirit of destruction over you. But God has done wonderful and marvelous things by bringing you into the Kingdom.
When I heard the words, “you broke even generational curses that were over your family lineage,” I began to sob and continued to do so throughout the rest of the prophecy. I wasn’t really sure what a generational curse was,[40] but I knew that God was telling me that what I had been fighting was more than just a monster of my own making. My temptations and emotional struggles weren’t figments of my imagination. They had been passed down to me from my ancestors, and though my sins had played a part, there were forces at work that were beyond my control.
In spite of that, God had come through. He had brought me in against all odds and made me somewhat of a miracle. His grace had saved me and reassembled my life.
Hearing this reassured me, but that wasn’t the main reason I began sobbing. My emotional release had to do with the tremendous amount of pent up guilt and angst I had brought into the meeting. My family problems were inspiring a flood of new doubts about my life. Much of what I had tried to build was being shaken, and the devil was pouring out a tirade of accusations against me. He was saying that even with God’s help I was incapable of finding answers. I feared that my turmoil was about to tear me apart and spill its poison on everyone.
When God told me I had broken curses, something inside me broke. I suddenly found the courage to believe that He really was winning the battle. Faith rose in my heart, and my guilt and fear dissolved into tears. In spite of what I saw, the hand of God was on me, and He would save me in the future as He had saved me in the past.
I was surprised that the prophecy said that as a young man I had battled with a curse of heaviness and depression. I thought my problem had been with sex, not despair. I didn’t realize that the two were closely related. Sex and smoking were the medications I tended to seek in order to deal with the heaviness and depression. I was ignorant about addiction, so I had never seen the connection.
The prophecy confirmed what I had suspected about my life. The forces that had come against me were overwhelming. I wasn’t just pretending that the battle was intense; it really was an impossible war. I had come in violently with darkness on me. God had picked me up and pulled me out of the muck and the mire. I probably wouldn’t even be alive if Jesus hadn’t saved me. Between the smoking fetish and my emotional problems, something would have killed me. It was only because Jesus had lifted the curse off of me that I had survived.
Hearing all of this gave me hope in my current crisis (which had left me feeling suicidal only a week earlier). A renewed attack of heaviness and depression was coming against me. Demonic forces were telling me that I was going to crack under the stress – that my weakness had at last reached its inevitable breaking point. God was letting me know that He had handled these sorts of difficulties before in my life, and He would do it again. He delighted in me and would preserve me.
The prophecy continued:
But you have been a man who many times in his life has not understood direction. You've felt as if you're just lucky to be here at times, because you've not known where you've come from or where you're going.
The Lord shows me that there were several periods of time in your life where you didn't know what tomorrow would bring, and you struggled and you picked yourself up by your own bootstraps.
I did feel lucky just to be in God’s kingdom. I felt as if I was different from almost everyone else at God’s banquet. I wandered around the feast grabbing as many delicacies as I could, but I wondered why I couldn’t sit at the table and enjoy them like other Christians. Why was I dealing with perplexing sexual issues that others never discussed? Why did so many of my brothers and sisters become nervous when anyone even talked about the sort of darkness I faced every day?
I had survived and pulled myself up by my own bootstraps, and God was letting me know that this was a good thing. I had been afraid that it showed me to be less than a conqueror, a second class Christian. What a blessing to hear Him put a positive spin on what could have been viewed as my ongoing spiritual incompetence.
The words of the prophecy reached deep into my wounded heart. God was giving me the context in which to view my life. He was encouraging me that He was pleased with my willingness to walk through the battle.
Part of the message was that I didn’t know where I had come from or where I was going. I wasn’t sure what these words meant until many years later when I joined a support group for Christians recovering from sexual addiction. As I read what various ministries were saying about the subject, writer after writer told me that the life I had lived was all but impossible. In order to do what I had done, I needed to have support that wasn’t available at the time.
I had walked away from a horrible sexual problem with no one to teach me, no one to consistently share in my struggles, and little knowledge of what I was facing. Then I had continued in purity for more than a decade (1980 through the mid-1990s) without being able to get away from my major source of temptation – being around people who smoked.[41] On top of this, during most of the struggle I hadn’t known that I was dealing with an addiction. I just thought I was weak somehow.
Because I didn’t know where I had come from, I didn’t appreciate the incredible miracles that had sustained me through this long, drawn out war. Rather than seeing what God had done, I felt He had let me down. I questioned why He hadn’t given me what seemed to come effortlessly to so many others. I wondered why I struggled and had to pick myself up by my bootstraps. Until I understood the hopelessness of my situation, I failed to see the abundance of grace that had carried me through it.
The prophecy then encouraged my wife and me.
And you and your wife have been survivors. I don't know anything about you, but you have survived. And you're an unusual couple, because you didn't have the right support that you needed at times. And I feel like you two have made it on your own many times just relying on God, but that's the strength of your life now. You and your wife have virtually had to depend on God. You have virtually had to live by faith.
And at times you were not comfortable with that. You said, "Lord I'll take anything else but this lifestyle." And it's been grueling at times for you, but you've persevered. You and your wife have persevered – in fact that would be a good name for you, "Mr. and Mrs. Perseverance," but you've persevered through thick and thin.
And I'm supposed to tell you that one reason why you’re here this weekend is to hear the word of the Lord. You need to know that Heaven is on your side.
Without the help of people who knew how to minister to my problems, my wife and I didn’t have the right support we needed. We had to make it on our own many times just relying on God. Neither of us was sure of what was happening. Was our marriage heading toward failure or were we sincere children of God persevering through difficult trials? Either option seemed possible. Did the pull of my smoking fetish mean my love for my wife was a lie? Was it a sign that I was forcing myself to do the right thing because God told me to rather than because I desired her?
She feared that I would someday break down and break her heart. It seemed ironic to me that the more I sacrificed for her sake the less sincere my devotion appeared. The fact that my love was a sacrifice at all put my love in question. Shouldn’t I be glad to give up my wayward sexuality for her?
The devil told me that I was too twisted for what marriage required – that my current emotional meltdown was the inevitable outcome of faking it for so long. I didn’t believe him, but it was hard not to doubt myself – and to be angry at myself for my wife’s sake. I seemed incapable of giving her what a husband should, even on my best days.
But what could we do? Though we didn’t know the answers, we knew God didn’t want us to run from our marriage. So we chose to serve Jesus, each other, our children, and those around us as best we could. We persevered through thick and thin. The prophecy even used the word ‘grueling’ to describe our efforts. I found that strangely comforting. I don’t believe I had ever before heard anyone but me use that kind of word to describe the Christian life.
God was telling us that He had seen our devotion, and He approved. We weren’t faking our love and faith. We were surviving a difficult test by His grace and presence. He had become our teacher, our support group, our accountability partner, and our refuge from temptation.
Heaven was on our side. I desperately needed to hear those words. I had tried to give all I had to Jesus, but it didn’t feel like it was working. I was rapidly running out of ways to hold my life together, leaving me angry and resentful. Was Heaven on my side? It looked like Heaven was giving up on me.
God was telling me that I wasn’t seeing clearly. The armies of the Almighty were all around us, fighting to bring us to victory.
The prophecy moved on to talk about the enemy’s attacks against us.
You need to know that the enemy tried to cut you off. You need to know that there was an attack against you, your wife, your family, and the enemy tried to isolate you, and the enemy tried to ruin you.
And I'm supposed to tell you that Hell hates you because of purity. You've walked in purity of heart and mind. And you've even been a man who's not compromised. You've seen many men compromise their positions, and you've said, "Lord I won't be like that. I'm not going to walk in hypocrisy or shallowness." You've said, "Lord, it's either the character of Christ or I don't want to serve Christ at all."
And so I took you at your word, and I've begun to work deep character, and you've gone through situations, my brother, where you've almost wanted to quit. You said, "Lord it's too hard. We can't take any more of this!" But just when you were ready to quit, God has sustained you.
I can barely describe what these words meant to me. They told me that our problems weren’t just because of my sins and weaknesses, or even the generational curses I had inherited. Though these faults had played a part, something else was at play. My wife and I had suffered under demonic attacks because of our purity and refusal to compromise. Hell hated us. God’s purpose was to build deep character. In the fire of testing over the years, He was making us like Jesus. It was comforting to have the Holy Spirit impress on us that our difficulties didn’t spring from rebellion; they sprang from our prayers.
This insight eventually led to a tremendous change in how I approached life. I had assumed that the attacks had come because I was friendly with the forces of darkness – that I was inviting their assault by not being careful enough. In an attempt to cut off every possible inroad for their evil, I ran from anything that might give them some new entry.
The prophecy implied that retreating into ever greater external safety was the wrong approach. The enemy was vicious primarily in response to our purity, not in response to my carelessness. If I wanted to defeat him, I needed to stop running, turn around, and fight.
The prophecy then described how God had preserved me.
I'm supposed to tell you that there has been an angel, my brother, assigned to your life at around the fourteenth or fifteenth year of your life, there was an angel who came in and spared your hide, and God says that he has been with you ever since.
The man giving the prophecy didn’t know that I had given my life to Jesus when I was fourteen. Even with my early conversion, however, I needed angelic intervention in order to be spared from the evil that attacked me.
The prophecy continued:
And I'm supposed to tell you that many of the frustrations of your life have been because you have not understood fully the plan of God. You have underestimated yourself, and at times you have even passed opportunities by that you should have taken, but you're a calculating man, a cautious man, not a risk taker. But God says where you've lacked faith in the past, your faith is going to double, and then double, and then double, and then double again. I'm supposed to tell you that your later years are going to be blessed greater than your former years.
In this section of the prophecy, God identified a key area in which I had missed Him. I hadn’t understood fully the plan of God. As He said earlier, I didn’t know where I had come from or where I was going. When I heard these statements, I remembered the theology of the subjective voice of God that had come to me only a few months earlier. I became more convinced that God was indeed teaching me how to listen to Him.
I had surrendered to Him with great hopes of being used in His kingdom, but I had instead spent the next twenty-seven years surviving sexual and emotional problems. Over time, I had lost hope of ever finding a plan in that. Life seemed like a street-fight – like pointless suffering. I no longer thought of myself as heading anywhere; I was just staying saved.
Through the prophecy, God was resurrecting a godly suspicion that had been buried in my heart years earlier. Maybe there was a purpose behind my struggles. Maybe I was still on a learning curve in which God was equipping me for His call on my life.
That hope had all but met its end in my current trial. How could there possibly be a plan that included what was happening? Believing in some greater good seemed to be too convenient of an excuse for my lack of power. Doesn’t every rebel think that there is some “grand scheme” behind his wasted life? I didn’t want to use God as an excuse for my sins.
The unexpected turns in my life had so frightened me that I had turned from the message the Holy Spirit had been birthing in me. It had all just seemed too crazy to believe, so I had let go of the part of my calling that had to do with handling sexual sins and emotional problems.
I felt abandoned by God in those areas. It’s no wonder I had become overly cautious and calculating. I had let my circumstances lead me to underestimate what He was doing and pass opportunities I should have taken.
The prophecy revived a dying flicker of lost promise. If the darkness was a part of His plan, I could be confident that He was at work even in the middle of the confusion. I was in a stage of a journey from where I had been to where I was going. He would move in me and increase my faith many times over so that I could enter His purpose.
The prophecy continued:
I'm supposed to tell you that there is a pastoral gift all over you. You do it unconsciously. You love, you pastor, you shepherd people, and you don't do it for pay, you do it because you love God.
I'm supposed to tell you, my brother, that there's somewhat of a healing evangelist in you. The Lord says that there are signs and wonders yet to be performed in your hands. And the Lord says that you're going to minister the evangelistic word of the Lord. I see signs and wonders accompany an evangelistic ministry.
I've got to tell you I see prisoners open their lives to you. I don't know if you have any inroads in that area, but I see even prisoners receiving the word of the Lord through you.
This part of the prophecy talked about some of the ways in which God had reached out through me in the past and would reach out through me in the future. One interesting point to note is that for a time, an early version of my first book, Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, was distributed in some prisons. I believe this is a part of the fulfillment of the prediction that I would share with prisoners.
The part about me being somewhat of a healing evangelist and doing signs and wonders is the one part of the prophecy that doesn’t seem to match my life, at least not so far. Perhaps the word ‘somewhat’ in the prophecy indicates my life would match those ministries in a more figurative sense. God has used me to bring sexual healing to some people, and this is a bit of a sign and wonder to them.
But even if this interpretation is too farfetched and this part of the prophecy is flat-out wrong, I don’t reject the rest of it. Although I believe prophecies should be one hundred percent accurate, I am willing to extend grace if they aren’t. I test all things and hold fast to that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:11-12).
I feel safe while doing this, because I base my doctrine on the written word of God and my actions on what I believe the Holy Spirit is leading me to do. I don’t follow prophecies that don’t seem to apply to me.
Obviously, most of this prophecy was a great help to me. It reminded me of what I should believe based on the written word of God. The trials of my life had discouraged me away from that, and I was now finding greater faith. The prophecy edified, exhorted, and comforted me (1 Corinthians 14:3).
The next part of the prophecy all but overwhelmed me.
You have been a man who has felt passed by. I feel like a key man of God in your life passed you by and didn't see the grace of God on you. But the Lord says, "He – He has not passed you by."
And I'm supposed to tell you my brother that you are on time. The devil tries to say to you, "Oop, you're getting older. You're getting older." And that's true, but he tries to use that against you. And I want you to know, sir, that you are on track, on time, and on schedule with God. And you are going to move in the full counsel of God, and you will know the full destiny of God for your life.
So you are to be comforted. You've come this weekend, and you don't show it outwardly, but there's a burden on you, and the Lord says, "I'm going to lift the burden off of you." The Lord says, "You're a worrier. Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it." Tell your wife, "It's all in God's hands, honey."
I had been losing heart and doubting God’s call on my life. I wondered how I could be in His time table if I was saved at the age of fourteen and was still as messed up as I was all these years later. It seemed arrogant to conclude anything but that I either had never been called to do much or had sabotaged God’s plan for my life. In either case, I was getting too old to do much about it.
The words, “you are on track, on time, and on schedule with God, and you are going to move in the full counsel of God. And you will know the full destiny of God for your life” were almost too good to believe. I felt like they ought to be true, because I really had tried to follow Jesus, but the facts of my life seemed to contradict them. No one who was on time with God could be experiencing what I was.
God was letting me know that He was working it all for good, and I was still marching toward His goal. The prophecy concluded with these words.
And you and your wife are about to take another step of faith. You're going to see God come through for you like never before. I'm going to prophesy houses and lands over you. The Lord says you are going to own and possess houses and lands. What the devil took from you God says, "I'm going to restore." Read the book of Job, because in the end God says Job ended up pretty well my son, because I blessed him for all that he had been through. So shall I bless you for all that you have been through, says God.
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