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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
When my Love Protector hooked into the fetish, I choose to nurture and guide it toward a different direction. Rather than trying to chase my emotions away from their task of standing on a soapbox preaching about true love, I sought to move them to a better soapbox.
The last category of sexual temptations comes from what I call our Love Protector. It is a set of emotions that tends to feel as if erotic love drops on us out of heaven, is shot into us by Cupid’s arrow, or is dropped into us by “the fates.” It makes love seem so important that it is above rules. Our passion transcends logic, loyalty, and social boundaries.
It is hard for our Love Protector to truly believe that a loving God would oppose the “touch of heaven” it feels. We may be committing adultery; we may be attracted to an activity that hurts others; we may even risk spreading some virus to our partner, but if it feels like an expression of “true love,” our Love Protector tells us that any other path would be hypocrisy and a violation of human dignity.
What I have just written is a little overstated, but it is an attempt to describe the mystery and power of our feelings about romance and sexual love. I have found my Love Protector to be one of the most difficult parts of my personality to reclaim through God’s grace. It told me that my smoking fetish based desires felt too right to be wrong. It was offended that I would dare to question the way “destiny” (God?) had made me. How could I let the weak logic of theology violate this beauty in my heart? My love, no matter how bizarre it might seem, was too mysterious and wonderful for it to be anything but the only path for me.
After I learned to control my Physical Desires, after I was enjoying intimacy with my wife, after I had laid down my previous triggers and was developing new triggers – even then my Love Protector was standing on its soapbox claiming I was headed in the wrong direction. I was turning from a sincere expression of my emotions to beliefs that made sense but lacked the freedom of total spontaneity.
It is difficult to even describe Love Protectors in the way I have, because doing so goes against their nature. They are not easily convinced that they are capable of being wrong. They lead us to find all sorts of reasons to justify ourselves: “I can’t choose who I love. …The heart wants what the heart wants. …If I deny these sorts of feelings, I am living a lie….” Can you see how a misguided Love Protector can be a huge trap in today’s relativistic culture?
When we overrule our Love Protector and close off every door of excuse, it is amazing to watch it struggle. We may find ourselves in such confusion that we seem unable to think straight. Since our strong feelings now contradict our morals, we may conclude that our desires spring from some dark imposter that has invaded us, perhaps “lust” or some demon. We can’t believe that a loving God would require us to deny longings this strong if they are a normal part of our humanity.
Our Love Protector may also turn from blindly defending us to blindly condemning us. Once it has become convinced that our passions are under the influence of sin, it may castigate us for our continuing struggles with them. It feels that we should be able to quickly forsake our past and adopt a new form of “true love.” It views romance and sex as so “sacred” that it finds it tough to accept an emotional state in which our thoughts are partly pure and partly depraved. It overreacts, condemning us for our mixed feelings, making the gradual change process of recovery extremely difficult to manage.
We see this judgmental expression of Love Protectors in the way many straight people in the United States previously treated homosexuals. Same sex attraction was so far from their accepted view of “true love” that they recoiled against it as something strange and frightening. Rather than seeing this sin through the eyes of God’s hope and love, they wanted to persecute those who struggled with it.
After years of societal reprogramming and exposure, however, we have found a way around this. We say that homosexuality is inborn or comes to a person in some other unchangeable way. This allows us to see it as the same sort of “heavenly attraction” that straight people experience, just pointed in a different direction. We sidestep the difficulty our Love Protector has with sin influenced attractions (Romans 1:26-27) by deceiving our hearts into accepting them.
The following scripture describes the strength of Love Protectors:
…If a man would give for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly despised.
Love Protectors produce a devotion that makes us willing to make great sacrifices, even to risk all the wealth of our houses. They cause our entire being to rally behind the object of our affection. They are incredibly powerful.
That power can be used for good or for evil. Just as it can lead a man to lay down his life for his wife, deception in it can lead him to justify an affair. It can beautifully bond him with his family and, at the same time, lead him to utterly despise those he judges to be deviant. With all the good that comes from Love Protectors, the hard truth is that they can become deceived, and I suspect that nothing short of the power of God can restore a wayward Love Protector to freedom.
What possible value could there be in having a part of us that can lead to such difficulties? Love Protectors seem too powerful for our good, yet they are extremely valuable when they are guided by the Holy Spirit. I believe Paul refers to them in the following verses:
For it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret. But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light.
The same stubborn dedication that can lock us into sinful sexual behavior can provide some of the best subconscious resistance available to sexual sin in all its forms. It leads us to instinctively turn away from extramarital affairs, unhealthy attractions, and pornography. We consider them shameful, so we won’t even speak of those things in a positive way. At the same time, we avoid rejecting those who may fall into them, because we see misguided sexuality as it is made manifest by God’s light, which is full of love and grace.
The answer to the sometimes-misled power of Love Protectors is the power of the Holy Spirit. He can enable them to do their job of guarding true love without overreacting. He can strengthen them to feel as if it is almost inconceivable for us to violate the sanctity of married sex while, at the same time, inspiring us to reach out with mercy to those who do – including ourselves. (Of course, emotions can be unpredictable, so we might feel this on one day and feel entirely differently during a moment of weakness. That doesn’t negate the value of Love Protectors, however. By God’s grace, they can make a loving reaction against sexual sin the normal condition of our heart.)
Early on, I tended to fall into either of two unworkable approaches to my Love Protector. The first was to essentially agree with its “you can’t change” assessment and say, “There is nothing I can do but to follow my smoking fetish based desires. If God wants me to act differently, He will first need to change the way I feel.” That approach led to sin and would have eventually destroyed me.
The second approach was to do my best to turn my Love Protector against my own heart. I said, “Either I am a jerk or this is a demon. Either way, the only hope for me is to be ashamed of what I feel, force these desires into the closet, and make myself behave. Hopefully if I do that for long enough this problem will go away.” That approach produced better actions, but as I described earlier in this book, it led to growing resentment.
Inner freedom came when I recognized the value of my Love Protector emotions and sought to have them work for me rather than against me. With the Holy Spirit’s help, I affirmed them and looked for His path to transformation. I considered them a delightful asset for my marriage, and I trusted Him to teach me how to properly express them.
When my Love Protector hooked into the fetish, I chose to nurture and guide it in a different direction. Rather than trying to chase my emotions away from their task of standing on a soapbox preaching about true love, I sought to move them to a better soapbox. I rehearsed where the fetish came from and why I would never want to follow it. I had a wife in whom I delighted; why would I want to hurt her for a ridiculous deception. My sexuality was a gift to be given to her, not a heavenly decree whose momentary whims I had to follow. I sought to have my Love Protector support God’s view of sex in marriage.
When my Love Protector overreacted and turned against me, I once again sought the Holy Spirit’s help in directing it. I affirmed its desire to see me express true love but reminded myself that God was doing a gradual transformation. My emotions weren’t “all or nothing” signs of some unchangeable state of my soul. They were fallible expressions of a heart that God was leading into His character.
I did all of this in faith that He would change this part of me at the deepest level. Then I watched the Holy Spirit work. He brought a level of Brokenness in which I was able to see the mistakes I had made in my quest for heartfelt purity. The hidden fears and insecurities that drove the fetish were exposed and healed. I was able to relearn romantic fascination without the baggage of the past. Sometimes it felt almost as if I was returning to adolescence and discovering erotic love for the first time. I was able to re-experience the emotions and guide them with God’s love and wisdom.
My Love Protector told me that this sort of change was impossible, but:
No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him, but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.
(1 Corinthians 2:9-10, NIV).
I wrote my rough draft of the previous few chapters (the different categories of sexual temptations) in January of 2009. The insights I shared had come together in my heart a short time before that.
As I wrote about Love Protectors, I realized that mine was still not where I wanted it to be. Though I had made a good deal of progress, it contained a stronger resistance to change than I expected. During the process of writing, this resistance became worse – almost as if it was speaking to me:
“You don’t really believe what you have written. How dare you treat this part of yourself as just a set of emotions – something that God can rearrange. What you have called a Love Protector shouldn’t be touched by theology or logic. It guards the most precious feelings you can experience, and you have defiled them by acting as if they can be guided.
You need to accept the truth that the fetish is too wonderful and powerful to yield to stuffy religion. It is too deeply a part of you to be reshaped by ideas or actions. No matter how many other areas of your personality are transformed, this one will never be.
And who are you to write about this subject anyway? You are an insignificant man whose books no one will read. You are nothing before the sex-charged society that surrounds you and holds people in what you consider to be bondage. Even if you did manage to find some way to be changed yourself, look at what it took – all of the faith, patience, and suffering in the face of evidence to the contrary. No one will be willing to trust God for that kind of miracle; your writings are a waste of time.”
There was obviously some sort of demonic influence in what I was feeling, which was a little frightening, but also strangely encouraging. I suspected God had flushed a demon into the open, like a bird out of the bushes, because He was planning to shoot it down.
So I practiced what I have preached in this book. I held on in faith, affirmed my emotions, set straight paths for my feet, and looked for God’s Appointment. I wanted the emotions affected by the demon to support God’s plan rather than the demon’s.
As I was lying in bed that night trying to fall asleep, I sensed the Holy Spirit speak to me from Psalm 24:
The earth is the LORD's, and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein. For He has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the waters.
I was impressed with the fact that it is God Who owns the earth, not the devil. No matter how much influence evil powers may have over our sex-charged society, the LORD is greater. I sensed God affirming to me that He was able to take what He had done in my heart, even if few people noticed it, and use it to break through the strongholds and demonic forces that hold so many. A demon had challenged me that my lack of influence in the world meant that little of worth could come from my life. God was letting me know that it was His strength that counted, not whether anyone noticed.
Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD? Or who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to an idol, nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive blessing from the LORD, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is Jacob, the generation of those who seek Him, who seek Your face.
These verses brought a sense of God’s approval toward me. He seemed to be saying to me, “This is what you have done. You have turned away from sexual sin and climbed My hill. You have sought my face and found my grace for clean hands and a pure heart. It is through people like you that My power is released in the earth to tear down the enemy’s work. It doesn’t matter if others notice. I have noticed, I am moved, and I will move because of what You have allowed me to do.”
Lift up your heads, O you gates! And be lifted up, you everlasting doors! And the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O you gates! Lift up, you everlasting doors! And the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, He is the King of glory.
As we humbly embrace God’s plan for our lives (verses 3-6), He comes as the King of glory, strong and mighty in battle. In ancient days, cities had walls and gates. The only way to receive a king into your city was to lift up the gates to let him in. I realized that my desire to serve Jesus through the years had opened my gates to Him, and He had come in to be a Warrior Who would conquer through me. It didn’t matter what my Love Protector, the world, or any demon said; the LORD strong and mighty was doing His work, and I was playing a part in that.
I awoke the next morning at about 6:00AM and sensed a shift in my Love Protector. I looked at my willingness to do all that I have described in these books in response to God and my wife and suddenly realized, “This is true love. It’s a little weird how it all happened, but this kind of sacrifice and devotion is the stuff of real-life fairytales and happily-ever-afters.” As that thought hit me, my emotions for my wife rose with great strength. She was the only woman in the world for me.
I knew that God had done a work in this deep and seemingly immovable part of my being. The demon that had been exposed the day before had lost his foothold. From this point on, there would be a change in my Love Protector emotions that would enable them to do a better job of protecting me rather than tempting me. This wouldn’t be the end of God’s work in that area, but it was a significant step in the journey.
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