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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
I was once again at a root cause of my sexual problems. They had started when I didn’t know how to handle a disagreement with my natural family. …I was now in the same situation with my spiritual family.
God was teaching me the wisdom I needed to manage my inner life, but this created difficulties in my relationships. The more I studied, the more I disagreed with others. I did my best to be gentle and loving toward them, so I don’t believe I was contentious, but wisdom still created complications. It convinced me that God wanted me to head in one direction – one in which I sought knowledge and understanding – while many of my friends were headed in another – one in which they sought prophetic guidance.[48] Our lives were moving along different paths, and that wasn’t easy for me.
It brought to the surface a deep-seated fear of disagreements. Remember, my first major disagreement was with my parents over the subject of smoking. It had gone so disastrously that it had produced the smoking fetish, which I still struggled with decades later. This was in spite of the fact that there had been no yelling or heated discussion. My parents probably didn’t even realize there had been much of a conflict.
Other disagreements over the years had also left their marks on me. They weren’t the sorts of marks that were externally visible, but I seemed to walk away from each skirmish with ongoing emotional confusion and pain that never seemed to go away. I forgave, I admitted where I was wrong, I died to my own desires – yet something remained in my emotions that added to a growing confusion about life and dissatisfaction with myself.
In the early 1990s, a number of events took place at the church I attend that brought this problem to the surface and helped me to deal with it.
For most of my Christian life, I have had a burning desire to teach the Scriptures, and the early 1990s gave me a wonderful opportunity to do so. I was part of a small church that had recently been planted by a larger church. Our small size gave me the chance to teach regularly in the Sunday services, and I was excited to share what God was stirring in my heart.
Before long, the larger church that had planted us went through major changes. They bought a building, put in place programs, and became much firmer in setting directions for the congregation. A number of people disagreed with the changes, and some of them left the church to become a part of our church. I was sorry to hear about the troubles, but I was glad to be reunited with old friends I had known for years.
Unfortunately, my friends created problems for me. My Proverbs-based message was similar to the message of the church they had left. As they shared what they believed a healthy church should look like, I found myself often disagreeing with them. They felt that anything less than the prophetic prompting of the Holy Spirit might lead us into the wisdom of men, and we would end up replacing spiritual reality with success-driven plans and programs. I, on the other hand, thought that plans and programs could be extremely helpful at times, and I had put a number of them in place in my own life. It wasn’t that I had totally given up on prophetic insights; it was just that I wanted to combine them with other scriptural approaches.
My friends hadn’t been through the sorts of difficulties that had caused me to rearrange my outlook. In fact, their difficulties had led them in the opposite direction. Many of them had grown up in spiritually dead churches that relied on human wisdom. That experience had been so dry and negative for them that they had all but given up on God. He seemed powerless and irrelevant, if He was there at all. It was only when they had come into contact with the Charismatic movement that they realized Christianity could be something far more relevant.
Prophetic experiences provided a living reality that ignited faith within them. This inspired them to give their lives to Jesus, and they wanted to share nothing less than His power with others. They had left the larger church that had given birth to our smaller church because they felt it had turned from its prophetic roots and was steering people toward an approach that reminded them of the formalism, control, and stale traditions of lifeless religion.
I had a different perspective. My childhood experience had little contact with religion of any kind. Also, my personality was free-wheeling, unorthodox, and artistic by nature. My tendency was not to fall toward dry formalism; it was to disregard tradition as an unnecessary hindrance. Over the years, I had grown to suspect that this had contributed to my mental and emotional problems. I was so free-wheeling I rolled right up to the edge of insanity.
Traditional Christianity seemed to possess a practical wisdom I lacked. I was impressed by the fact that those who followed it in previous generations had transformed cultures and built nations. I suspected that somewhere within it was a framework of truth that could help me to sort through my mental and emotional issues. I was hungry for that sort of stability.
So while my friends were pursuing prophetic insights, I devoted my time to studying theology and everyday wisdom. This was not only what was working for me, it was also what I thought God was prophetically leading me to do. He seemed to be giving me the ability to quickly slice through error and discern truth. The mental confusion that had plagued me for years was withdrawing. I was identifying mistaken ideas and working through them to clarity.
I wasn’t sure what to do when some friends were suspicious of this. They were so sincere and dedicated. They spoke with such conviction about the dangers of intellectual religion, yet I felt God was leading me to use my intellect.
How could the Holy Spirit be leading them in such a seemingly contradictory direction from me? I began to wonder if any of us was really hearing from the Holy Spirit.
I had run from conflicts for most of my life, and I wanted to run from this one. Dealing with it was so upsetting and confusing to me that I wasn’t sure what to say. My mind raced; I mentally shifted back and forth between wanting to verbally attack others at one moment to burying my feelings at another. My creative instincts went into overdrive, trying to find some way to resolve the disagreement.
At some times, I fell to quiet cynicism. While my friends talked about the Holy Spirit giving us freedom, I was tempted to think of them as the “prophetic police.” They seemed to enforce a standard of anointing[49] that intimidated me out of exercising my freedom to make mistakes while following what I felt God was guiding me to do.
I believe some of them feared I was giving up on the Holy Spirit. At one time, a friend publicly shared what he believed was a word from the Lord that I was becoming too intellectual and just needed to listen to God. Another shared privately (with totally appropriate concern) that I used to be one of her favorite teachers, but I was losing the power of God when I spoke. Someone else stood up in the middle of one of my teachings to publicly disagree with me.
I didn’t give up on trying to work with my friends, however. At one point, I gathered the courage to write a paper in which I described what I believed. I handed it out to a number of leaders in the church and hoped we would be able to talk about it and come to agreement. I had little doubt that we would succeed. We all loved the Lord, and I couldn’t imagine that this little trial would cause any lasting damage.
Almost immediately after I handed out the paper, a number of people, including some to whom I had given the paper, left our church to start a new one. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Their reason for leaving had nothing to do with my paper (they disagreed with our elders on some issues), but I was still stunned and wounded. I had finally tried to speak what I believed, and disaster had quickly followed.
This stirred the Unprotected Heart Stronghold within me. It brought back the feelings from the time that I had stood up for what I believed with my parents regarding smoking. Once again, I had spoken my mind and a part of my world had fallen apart.
In the months following the split, I felt a bit as if I was a child of divorce. People who I had known and loved for years were suddenly gone from my life, and I had to fight from falling into total cynicism about the prophetic approach I believed they had used. Their actions seemed to confirm my worst suspicions, that those who rely on “what the Holy Spirit is saying today” were just looking for a way to avoid being obedient to what He had said in the Scriptures. In this case, it seemed that my friends wanted to follow their own hearts rather than the clear commandments of the Bible concerning unity among God’s people.
I had never before felt such Anger and Sorrow at church. I was upset with my friends who had left, but I loved them and knew I should forgive them. I eventually tried to do this by letting my disapproval settle on the prophetic approach rather than the people. First it had hindered my ability to openly share, and then it had contributed to a split that had left me in pain.
I felt unprotected. It seemed as if a person could convince themselves that God was telling them just about anything, and what could I do to convince them otherwise? They would make a decision that left me in pain, and I would be left to deal with the fallout.
This led me to seriously explore whether there was a good scriptural basis to believe that God continued to speak to anyone today apart from what He says in the Bible. And if He did, how could we know who was actually hearing from Him and who wasn’t?
As far as I knew, no one else who remained in our church was even considering these questions. Most of them continued to talk about the dangers of intellectual religion, man’s tradition, and relying on good ideas – all at a time when I was exploring those subjects. They didn’t see the church split as a failure in our fundamental approach to Christian living, but as a failure to implement that approach properly. They believed we should press in even more to hear what God was saying.
I no longer had the heart for this. I feared that each person would become convinced of something different. Who could possibly decide between all of the conflicting opinions?
Previously, my experience at church had been one of participating with others in a joint quest. We were together digging deeper into God, pursuing a shared journey into His fullness. Now, though all of my friends in church continued to stand with me in our joint pursuit of God, I felt out of place. I was exploring questions that weren’t high priorities for them, and those questions were so emotionally charged within me that they made me feel separated from my friends.
Nevertheless, I chose to stay with my spiritual family and to slowly learn how to share with them. They had been lifelong friends, and I knew I shouldn’t leave them. I did my best to act “with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, …keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:2-3).
God was working it for good. I was once again at a root cause of my sexual problems. It had started when I didn’t know how to handle a disagreement with my natural family. I was now in the same situation with my spiritual family.
I, of course, had no clue that this was the case. In fact, I felt as if God was ignoring my sexual issues at this time. Still, He was making His way down to the core of what plagued me.
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