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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 49>…any attempt to regain my personality was going to feel like an epic spiritual battle. …To make matters worse, this “epic spiritual battle” was going to look silly and bizarre to the average person looking in from the outside.
It happened one typical August day about three years after I became a Christian, shortly before my seventeenth birthday. I don’t remember anything in particular that led up to it. I wasn’t angry at God. I wasn’t pursuing sin. I wasn’t casting bones or doing pagan ceremonies. I was just trying to live for Jesus and enjoy life like any other day.
In an instant, a cloud of inner demonic voices descended on me. I could feel the darkness and immediately knew something was wrong. I had heard about attacks from evil spirits, so I called out to the Lord.
In the minutes, hours, days, and years that followed, demonic inner voices pressed me with condemnation and confusion. They told me that they were the Holy Spirit, and I was a rebel for resisting them. They insisted that if I was a real Christian, I would trust them and do anything they told me. They were pushy and condemning, which didn’t sound like the Holy Spirit, so I resisted them in Jesus’ name. Doing so helped me to hold on to my sanity, but it didn’t send them away.
The voices often drove me to be obsessive about my faith. For example, one time I was carrying some artwork for a teacher in High School. When a friend walked by, I joked that the artwork was mine. A dark sensation quickly told me I had lied and needed to chase after my friend and confess my sin to him. When I refused and pointed out that my friend knew I was joking, it told me that I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure of that. When I said that my possible lie was too insignificant to justify an awkward confession, it asked if any sin was insignificant to God. The accusations were so frightening and forceful that I had to step into a bathroom to collect my thoughts. I struggled with lingering guilt over the incident for years.
The demons had found an open door to inject blame and fear into my being, and I didn’t know what it was. I stood up for what I believed, but that only limited the damage; it didn’t make the inner voices go away. They told me that this was because they were bringing the heart of God and I was resisting Him. I wasn’t sure how to answer that argument. They seemed more like demons than like God, but demons were supposed to flee when I resisted (James 4:7). Did the fact that they continued to hound me mean that they really were from God?
Along with the pressure to confess little possible sins, I had to deal with the fact that I might at any moment feel impressed to share a random message with someone. For example, I might see a stranger in the streets and feel that I should give them a prophetic word about God’s call on their life. One time, I even felt impressed to stand up in a college assembly and disagree with the person speaking at the microphone.
I didn’t follow that prompting, and I rarely followed any of them. There was so much spiritual traffic making its way through my brain that I kept quiet when something seemed questionable. <page 50>Every time I kept my mouth shut, however, I had to deal with long term condemnation over my choice.
The demons knew better than to press me about actions that I knew were sins. I would simply confess and repent from those, and the argument would be over. Instead, they delighted in harassing me about questionable actions – ones about which I wasn’t sure what I should do. For example, one time I was goofing around with some friends, and the voices pressed me over the Scripture:
and there must be no … silly talk …
(Ephesians 5:4, NAS)
The driving guilt told me that I had been silly (which wasn’t a difficult charge to make against me on any day – I was a teenage guy after all). They said I needed to confess this to everyone who had seen me. I cautiously stood my ground. I believed that there were times when it was OK to goof around, but I had to admit that I wasn’t really sure what silly talk meant.
The spirits used that uncertainty against me: “You’re relying on tradition. Just because Christians don’t usually confess sins like this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. You have to be led by the Spirit – not the standards of your culture or your church. Are you really concerned about what is right in this situation, or are you just afraid to look bad? Face it; you’re proud. You’re unwilling to humble yourself before others.”
If I took their side and said, “OK, I’ll confess,” other voices (or maybe my conscience) would say, “You’re going to ruin your witness by acting like a religious nutcase. You don’t really think that this condemning compulsion is the Holy Spirit, do you? You are just grasping for an easy way to end the struggle.”
I did want an easy way to end the struggle! I was becoming like a man who was being tortured for information he didn’t know. Eventually he begins to speak random answers, hoping that he will say something – anything – that will make his tormentors stop. I was tired of the ongoing interrogation. If I had to look like a religious nutcase to end it, that felt like a small price to pay for peace.
Yet following the demonic voices didn’t bring peace. Every time I caved into their demands, new demands came. Any ground given to the spiritual terrorists only gave them a greater place from which to press their attacks.
I was largely clueless about what was happening. A book I read at the time by Watchman Nee, The Spiritual Man Volume 3 sections 8 and 9, helped me to understand how passivity had contributed to it,[22] but I knew nothing about the part my dysfunctional internal Parent was playing.
It wasn’t until more than thirty years later that I understood the damage that was opening the door to the demons. The events that led up to and sprang from the smoking fetish had warped the development of my conscience, nurturing emotions, and judgmental emotions. My ignorance <page 51>about how to care for my life had given the evil spirits a set of misconceptions to work with. They simply had to supercharge my tendencies with their evil.
By this point, any attempt to regain my personality was going to feel like an epic spiritual battle. The demons weren’t going to give back the ground they had taken without a fight. They were going to twist my thoughts and disguise their activity with pure guile.
To make matters worse, this “epic spiritual battle” was going to look silly and bizarre to the average person looking in from the outside. Few Christians faced what I was facing, and those who did generally had such severe problems they ended up falling away or being treated for mental illnesses. Was that going to be my end also? I didn’t know, but something insane had certainly infected me and was refusing to leave.
They hurt his (Joseph’s) feet with fetters, he was laid in irons …
Joseph was seventeen when He was sold into slavery, the same age I was shortly after my “cloud of demons” experience. Hope springs eternal in the heart of a naïve seventeen-year old. I wouldn’t be surprised if Joseph expected God to rescue him as the Ishmaelite traders forced him to march toward Egypt. Perhaps an angel would appear and deliver him, or maybe God would alert Joseph’s father to what had happened so he could come with a small army to deliver his son. His brothers might even realize the wrong they had done and show their repentance by coming to save him. After all, Joseph had received the dreams that showed his brothers bowing down to him. Perhaps this little “sold into slavery” incident was how God would fulfill that promise.
Even as Joseph stood on the auction block in Egypt, I can picture him scanning the crowd for a friendly face. God was good at arranging the sorts of coincidences he needed. Perhaps an acquaintance was in town for the day, someone who would buy him and take him home. His father Jacob would spare no expense to reward this acquaintance and welcome his son back.
None of those scenarios occurred. Instead, Joseph’s feet were hurt with fetters, and he was laid in irons. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years.
I kept expecting God to deliver me. I woke each day with the hope that this would be the last day of my bondage. It would be like waking from a nightmare. I would suddenly say, “Wow! That was really scary, but it is over by God’s grace. And what a testimony I now have! I can stand up and say, ‘I once went through a terrible period of oppression when I was young, but it only lasted a short time. If anyone here is suffering under some attack of the devil, why don’t you come over here and I will pray for you ….’”
It was what I expected, but it wasn’t what happened. Like Joseph, I had to learn that the way to freedom is sometimes to find God in the middle of bondage.
As my days dragged on, something happened in my heart. It felt as if God had failed me, which stirred the Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow that had led to the fetish in the first place. In my <page 52>distress, temptations reached a level I had never before experienced, and my aberrant sexuality went into overdrive. I became compulsive in ways I had never before imagined.
I now knew I had to become serious about dealing with the fetish. I had toyed with repenting before, but its out-of-control nature now caused me to see that I could wait no longer. Unfortunately, my sincere attempts at change appeared to be too late. I repented and cried out, but the fetish refused to yield. In fact, it became worse. Though I managed to keep myself from acting out with another person, lust seemed impossible to stop.
I am not alone in this sort of experience. Many young people cry out for deliverance from sexual sins only to find that those sins become more entrenched. Their disappointment causes some to doubt God. They conclude that He either isn’t there or has given up on them. They may try to obey through willpower, but they often fail – which causes them to doubt the reality of their faith. Some conclude that they are beyond help and have no choice but to embrace immorality.
In the resulting hopelessness, many find what feels like love by indulging their sins, living in denial, and experiencing a warm dream world of excitement. Eventually, however, often after many years, consequences take hold. They lose their grip on the discipline that successful living requires. They turn into liars who hide behind a front of respectability. Their relationships begin to crumble, and some lose their marriages; others lose their careers.
Still, many don’t turn around until they “hit bottom,” which means they become miserable enough to do whatever it takes to recover. At that point, they are humbled and ready to receive whatever help is available.
I didn’t want to hit bottom. I wanted to follow the simple logic that had led me to Jesus in the first place. If He was Who He said He was, nothing else made sense but to follow Him, even if it meant giving up the fetish which now held me with seemingly unbreakable chains. Why should I wait for consequences to convince me of what I already knew? I wanted to repent and walk in new life, not wait until I lost even more to this plague.
With as good as that simple logic was, I didn’t know how to make it work. Abstaining from the fetish strained the limits of my being. It left me with a hollow, empty feeling, as if I had lost my passion for life and was being forced to robotically follow rules. The cacophony of demonic voices pressed me with accusations, and the Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow that the fetish had been masking ate away at my resolve.
A few activities brought relief, and this gave me hope. Worship, Bible study, and church activities tended to send the spirits away for a while, and playing basketball helped me to forget them for short periods of time. I fought to rise above my problems by God’s grace, but I wondered if I was being a hypocrite. I did not think Christians were supposed to feel like I did!
In this key area of my life, what obedience I could muster didn’t seem to come from an internal reality. It felt more like living by law and hanging on for dear life. I couldn’t imagine how God’s promise of “abundant life” could have anything to do with my passion-drained, faltering attempts to silence the demons and control my sexuality. It seemed far from the Christianity I read about in the Bible, the one in which I was supposed to be more than a conqueror.
Where was that Christianity? I was trying everything I knew of to live it, but I couldn’t find it.
I didn’t understand that the problem was with my internal Parent. I had little idea how to work with God as He nurtured my emotions to health, so I felt that my only choices were to either bully them with rules or medicate them with a fetish.
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