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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
<page 116>This new approach allowed me to work with myself rather than against myself. It helped me to better recognize that God had designed me at the deepest levels of my being with a purpose.
When I was tempted toward the smoking fetish, my feelings would tell me that to follow them was to enter into the most wonderful experience possible. They portrayed themselves as something beautiful – the fulfillment of my wildest dreams. To turn away from them was to betray my heart, to give up on a wonderful part of myself.
If those sorts of feelings scare you as much as they did me, you understand why I reacted to them by figuratively pushing myself into a corner and slapping myself: “What is wrong with you!? How could you be this stupid!? Christians aren’t supposed to feel like this. Do you want to destroy everything that is good in your life? Do you want your wife and children to suffer the consequences? Why do I have to live every minute of my life with someone as messed up as you?”
Unfortunately, this reaction didn’t fix my problems. It only pushed them down where they became worse. What I instead needed to do was to see my feelings as valuable even if they were misguided. I had to recognize God’s grace in making them devoted, powerful, fixated, unyielding …because that is what lifelong marriage demands.
This was a hard truth for me to grasp. Although I had believed in the beauty of my emotions for a long time, it was difficult for me to see that beauty while they threatened my family and overwhelmed me with “evidence” that my “orientation” was unchangeable. Allowing them to surface made me feel like a pervert and discouraged me to the point where I believed I couldn’t hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. Their presence felt like a form of rebellion. So while I spoke in faith about God’s wisdom in making them, I couldn’t figure out what that meant.
As I shared in the previous three chapters, God had now taught me to hear His Spirit while the worst tendencies of my emotions were surfacing. With His help, I was able to control my actions while enduring the temptations they brought, and this helped me to see what was behind them. He opened my heart to understand how they were supposed to fit into my marriage and what it meant to have Him empower and guide them. That made it much easier to perceive their beauty.
I discerned more clearly the difference between what God had intended and my distortions. I hesitantly said to myself, “Though I won’t act on the smoking fetish, I am glad that God created the abilities within me that fell to it. I am no longer going to reject those abilities simply because they tend to show up in a form that is inclined toward the fetish. They are misled, but they are still an essential piece of His plan to make the mystery of becoming one flesh last for a lifetime. I’m not a freak; I’m a man whose sexuality has gone in the wrong direction. My desires have potential; I just need the Holy Spirit to guide them into love mixed with truth.”
<page 117>This new approach allowed me to work with myself rather than against myself. It helped me to better recognize that God had designed me at the deepest levels of my being with a purpose:
To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven:…
a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; …
a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
(Ecclesiastes 3:1; 4; 8)
Yes, there's a right time and way for everything, …
(Ecclesiastes 8:6, The Message)
The Hebrew word for ‘purpose’ is ‘chephets’, which means “pleasure; hence (abstractly) desire; concretely, a valuable thing ….”[82] Though the desires listed in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 are primarily God’s desires built into creation, some of them are also desires expressed through our hearts, for example the desire to weep, the desire to laugh, the desire to dance, and the desire to love.
There is a time and way (or proper expression) for every one of these “valuable things.” They are more than just random personal delights; they are created within us to enable us to accomplish a part of God’s work. What we need is for Him to day by day open our eyes to see His times, seasons, and ways.
These verses exposed my mistakes. For most of my life I had tried to force my desires in the right direction, and when they didn’t cooperate, I disconnected from them and suppressed them. Now I was learning to work with them by God’s grace. He was teaching me when and how to express them, delay them, or deny them – all while He reshaped them into what they were created to be. He was helping me to understand why they were there and what to do, and not do, with them.
The message of Ecclesiastes 3:1 and 8:6 became a new vision for my life. As it took hold, it was nothing less than the end of self-induced emotional abuse. I learned to treasure the person God had created me to be, in spite of the sinful threats I saw in myself. The burden brought by the ugliness of my inner turmoil began to slowly melt away as my Father taught me to see that turmoil as a stage in the development of His beauty in me.
This transformed my experience of Him. For years, the practical reality of loving others seemed to rob me of the ability to feel His love for me. Denying my sexuality for the sake of everyone seemed so difficult that I didn’t know how to handle the resulting conflict without beating my heart into grumbling submission. I did my best to live the golden rule, but doing so seemed to require me to be cruel to myself.
Now I was in a place where I could both live love and feel it. Discipline and joy joined together as the logjam that had dammed up my emotional growth for decades was at last broken. The Holy <page 118>Spirit opened my eyes to see the many subtle ways in which I had erred. He helped me to make hundreds, perhaps thousands, of adjustments that came together into a major personality makeover.
As a result, I began to feel what God felt toward me. I stopped seeing myself as an annoying misfit who could never get life right – someone whose only realistic hope was to painfully force himself to do what he knew he should. I started to see myself as a child who was designed for His Father’s work. There was a time and way for every purpose God had created within me, and my faith that I could walk in His plan grew steadily.
This ended another one of those nasty cycles of addiction. I hadn’t known how to cherish and nurture my emotions, and this had led them to rebel against my lack of care. Then when I saw their rebellion, I reacted by mistreating them more fervently. Unfortunately, that pushed them further in the wrong direction. My inner life spiraled away from the character that I was so desperately trying to enforce on it.
When I learned how to care for my emotions through the work of the Holy Spirit, the cycle lost its power. My heart grew to appreciate the wonder and joy of life.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. … I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice, and to do good in their lives, and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor — it is the gift of God.
It didn’t matter how I felt about myself at any given moment; God was telling me that I was beautiful. I just had to find His time and way to express that beauty. As I did, I would be able to rejoice and do good, knowing that it was His gift that was giving me the ability to enjoy the good of my labor.
I was finally able to deal with a set of accusing evil spirits that had been afflicting me for most of my life.
When a defiling evil spirit is expelled from someone, it drifts along through the desert looking for an oasis, some unsuspecting soul it can bedevil. When it doesn't find anyone, it says, “I'll go back to my old haunt.” On return it finds the person spotlessly clean, but vacant. It then runs out and rounds up seven other spirits more evil than itself and they all move in, whooping it up. That person ends up far worse off than if he'd never gotten cleaned up in the first place. (emphasis added)
(Matthew 12:43-45, The Message)
A vacancy in my life had existed because of my failure to grasp in a practical way God’s love for my emotions. Evil spirits took my abusive approach to obedience and hid themselves by becoming part of it. They knew that I wasn’t going to turn from following Jesus, so they tricked me into allowing them to play a part in my service of Him.
For example, they convinced me that the only way I could avoid sexual sin was to do my best to suppress and disconnect from the feelings associated with the smoking fetish. When I tried to <page 119>disagree, they enticed me toward the fetish and told me that if I didn’t listen to their method of handling the temptations, I would fall to sin and destroy my family.
To be honest, their lies made a lot of sense. I didn’t yet have the wisdom to know what God wanted me to do with those feelings. Suppressing and disconnecting from them seemed like the best option available. So when faced with a choice between spirits of lust that drove me toward sexual sin and spirits of fear that told me to avoid and attack my inner life, I chose the more spiritual sounding demons.
This eventually led to quarantining any emotion that obviously threatened to do damage. It was as if I imprisoned it, along with the unclean spirits that influenced it, in a hidden room within my heart. When I felt the resulting pain and desire for inner freedom, I bolted the door, nailed plywood to the frame, and built a perimeter around it. When the turmoil increased, I pumped tear gas under the door and set up guards for protection. My mind became increasingly preoccupied with pushing down the darkness.
My emotions were suffering from their incarceration with hardened criminal spirits. The quarantined rooms became like demonic slave pits, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. Trying to work through my difficulties would thrust me into a world where my sin-influenced desires grabbed for control of my being – a place where both my misled feelings and the associated evil spirits seemed to defile me just by their presence.
That was a long way from the sweet joy of the Holy Spirit I expected to feel. So I did my best to shut off the dangerous parts of my personality and to compensate by developing strength in other areas.
In this book, I have described two of the first times I peeled away the plywood, unbolted the doors, and allowed myself to face my forbidden feelings and the demons that had been locked away with them. Rather than avoiding the developing disaster within me, I embraced it in a head on battle by the Spirit of God. He empowered and enlightened me to reclaim the rooms that had fallen into enemy hands.
The prayer I shared in Chapter Fifteen, “Sobbing through the Neighborhood,” was the first time.[83] As I opened the door to my anger, I found a mixture of my broken heart, the Holy Spirit’s comfort, and the ranting of unclean spirits. I’m not sure exactly which of my words came from which source. I was giving expression to a part of me that had suffered under years of mismanagement, and both the mismanaged and the “mismanagers” came out together. But the Holy Spirit was able to handle the situation. He protected me from harm and gave me the wisdom and power to clean out the garbage.
When I let myself get back in touch with my sexuality, I opened a second door. I accepted my embarrassing drives and laid them before God, asking Him what He wanted me to do with them. He helped me to maintain enough control to limit the damage to my family, and He showed me how to gradually take back my erotic nature by His grace.
I was learning to follow Jesus in His approach to spiritual warfare. He wasn’t afraid to face, head on, the vilest expression of evil, the devil himself.
<page 120>Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil …forty days and forty nights …
I found Jesus working His courage into me. My fear of demonic forces faded as He turned their attacks into classrooms in which I grew to understand the attitudes that had given them a foothold. He used intense encounters to reveal subtle sins and foolishness that I had missed for decades. I saw what was happening from His perspective, and He gave me the power to overcome the evil spirits that had infiltrated my mind.
I had finally reached a place where wisdom had penetrated my heart deeply enough for me to deal with the dark realities that had haunted me since my youth. God was helping me to remove the “vacancy” signs from my life. The vanquished spirits fled, and when they tried to come back, the invitation had been rescinded. Jesus was in residence!
The process has continued. I have opened many other doors, and God has helped me to slay the evil I found behind them. None has been as dramatic as the two doors I described in this book (anger and sexuality), but each has required me to find God’s time and way to express another part of His purpose within me. The result has been that the street-fight has largely ended, and I have put to rest many battles that once seemed never-ending. It feels good to have my personality back!
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