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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 187>How much could Jesus reverse the effects of the sexual damage that grabbed me at such a young age and affected me for so many years?
In Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, I began this series of books by discussing Jesus’ promise that those who abide in His word will become free indeed (John 8:31-36).[85] I have often wondered what that freedom would look like when it reached its fullness in me. How much could Jesus reverse the effects of the sexual damage that grabbed me at such a young age and affected me for so many years?
I can’t tell you for sure (I continue to find more freedom all the time), but in the hope of helping others, I will devote the rest of this book to describing my current progress.
God has enabled me to control my actions for over thirty years, which has been wonderful, but if it was all I wanted I could have stopped my journey long ago. I yearned for something more, something that would penetrate my deepest emotions, and by God’s grace, I have found that. My emotions are still influenced by the smoking fetish, but that influence has become less and less over time. Though there are times when this trend seems to be reversing, those times often precede breakthroughs. My worst feelings tend to become classrooms in which I learn some of my most important lessons.
I have come up with an approach to sexual temptations in which I group them according to four categories: those based on Physical Desires, those based on Intimacy Desires, those based on Triggers, and those based on my Love Protector (a part of my personality that I will describe in Chapter Thirty-Six, “Love Protector.”) Each category of temptation requires a somewhat different approach.
With Physical Desires, our bodies have chemicals and fluids which build up to motivate us toward sex. They are part of a natural process designed by God to lead us into erotic expression. Whether we are looking for temptation or not, we carry it within our physical makeup. Paul put it this way:
It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband. Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband …Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again so that Satan does not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
<page 189>(1 Corinthians 7:1-3; 5)
We were designed by God for sex, so most of us should seek to fulfill our erotic desires through marriage. Some people are given a gift for lifelong self-control to remain single, but they are the exception rather than the rule. For the majority of us, a spouse is God’s gift to keep our Physical Desires from creating lifelong strong temptations toward sexual immorality.
Marriage, however, doesn’t remove all physical temptations. Sometimes circumstances make it inconvenient or impossible for a husband and wife to be together regularly, and this leads to enticements that have nothing to do with improper lust. We simply want to release the pressure of our inner chemistry.
Lest anyone underestimate how difficult this can be, allow me to share an experience that has happened to me many times. While I am sleeping at night, I become subconsciously aware of my wife next to me, and my body starts to respond. This may go on for hours until I am primed for sex. To make matters worse, I occasionally have a dream about my wife that brings me to the edge of sexual climax. Then I wake up to find her either asleep beside me or ready to get out of bed to go to work. I desperately want her, but there is little I can do without placing inappropriate pressure on her to perform for my sake.
When sexual love cannot be expressed, it can feel overwhelming, even cruel:
…for love is as strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave; its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it …
It can create feelings that in some ways mimic physical illness:
Sustain me with cakes of raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am lovesick. (emphasis added)
At times like this when my chemistry has kicked into action, a desire for my wife can quickly turn to temptation for some other kind of release. God, Who requires sex to be an act of unity, seems to be out of touch with human nature. I fear that if I don’t follow my drives, I am exercising a ridiculous amount of self-control that will damage me psychologically and perhaps physically.
Yet even though it seems unreasonable to derail my feelings after they have been legitimately stirred, I have to wait for the right time. If I release my desires sinfully, I will hurt everyone. The one-flesh chemistry of my body will kick in and bind me to someone or something rather than to my wife (1 Corinthians 6:15-18).[86] The wiring of my brain, which is designed to express the Holy Spirit and glorify God (1 Corinthians 6:19-20), will be rewired to suppress God’s glory through misguided expressions. So I deny my Physical Desires for the sake of my relationships with God, my wife, and everyone else.
<page 190> Doing so often results in frustration and sadness on my part. When I was younger, I tended to handle this by blaming myself for being overly interested in sex. I was afraid there was something wrong with me, so I tried to force myself to be less excitable. This book has shared the consequences of that approach. My emotional life was damaged.
I found answers when I instead learned to wisely parent my sexual Fun Emotions and Desires. The Holy Spirit helped me to see that they were designed so I could celebrate my marriage. I didn’t need to stuff them into a cage or chase them away; I needed to learn to delay them while continuing to embrace them as part of my relationship with my wife.
The Anger and Sorrow I feel while waiting are understandable reactions to their power. They are designed to be strong so that I will feel incredible when I can fulfill them. In order to handle that strength when I can’t, I sometimes need to take my feelings down the Pain Drain. Doing so allows me to both mourn the difficulty of denying my sexuality and celebrate the hope of expressing it. I learn to nurture my emotions, which enables me to exercise Self-Control without throwing my inner life into confusion.
The second category of temptations is those that come from what I call Intimacy Desires. The Bible shows the connection between sex and intimacy by referring to intercourse as ‘knowing’ our spouse.
And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son…
As you might expect, these desires include a yearning to be close (or intimate) with a partner, but I believe they go beyond that. Intimacy Desires also include an aspect of fascination that causes us to rearrange our lives in order to share ourselves with the one we love. Allow me to illustrate with a few examples:
When a young man is “in love” with a woman, he is drawn to her. If she will be at a certain place during the day, he may rearrange his schedule so he can meet her there. If she is interested in some activity, though he may have little interest in it himself, he will join her just to be near her, and she will do the same with him. Both of them will search for shared activities they can enjoy together as their personalities are subtly reshaped to fit with each other. Intimacy motivates them to reach outside of themselves and change.
In another example, my desire to be intimate with God (which, of course, is non-sexual) has affected me in a similar way. I am fascinated with Him. When I read about His love I ask, “What does it feel like? How can I experience it? Are their people who can help me to know what it is about?” When I read about the gifts of His Spirit and His church body on earth (1 Corinthians 12-14), I want to see that body in action. I also want His work to be a part of my life, so I study His mercy, His anger, His lordship …, because I want to find out what it means to know Him. All of this changes me. My shared life with Him motivates and enables me to become the person He has created me to be.
In the same way, my life has been restructured through my desire to be with my wife. Perhaps the easiest area in which to see this is with my career. I am not by nature a businessman; I am a temperamental artist who values self-expression more than money. My heart becomes easily <page 191>captivated by creative projects with little regard for their economic value, and I am not fond of procedures or schedules. When I am faced with a choice between the freedom to “be myself” versus financial security, my instinct is to choose freedom. I don’t like to be tied down.
Yet I have pursued (sometimes dragged myself through) a business career for the past thirty-plus years. Why? The only explanation I can find is my desire to share my life with my wife. I became fascinated with a woman who didn’t want to live the life of a starving artist.[87] She wanted to buy a home, raise a family, and follow her family’s traditions – and I wanted to make her happy. So I modified my desires for her sake and accepted the task of providing for her and our children.
The world is a better place because of this. I look at my family on the one hand and the contributions I have been able to make at my job on the other, and I know they exist for one reason: God used sexual intimacy to motivate me to serve others. I am still pretty much a “starving artist” on the inside, but my life with my wife has reshaped that into something productive for the people around us.
There is also a dark side to intimacy, however. The same emotions that can bind us to God or a spouse can also bind us to evil. My smoking fetish is an example. When it controlled me, I was fascinated with every aspect of the habit. Its hold on me drove ever deeper into my personality and rearranged my life to make room for it. Even the threat of potential sickness and death couldn’t free me from the systematic restructuring it worked within me.
A key insight for recovery from addictive sexual sins is to realize that once our Intimacy Desires have become locked into those sins, giving them up can feel like giving up on intimacy. It is as if we are losing the childlike joy of life and the delight of pursuing new expressions of our heart. Our emotions have been reshaped to see closeness and honest self-expression through distorted eyes, and we seem unable to experience them in any other way. When we decide to obey God, it can feel as if we are choosing a passionless life of loneliness and despair.
To make matters worse, the same misled internal Parent that failed to keep us away from false intimacy in the first place is unable to manage the recovery process to true intimacy. We don’t understand what has gone wrong, how to fix it, or what it will look like if it is made right. Change seems impossible.
Giving up my fetish often felt like that for me. Fortunately, God was willing to become intimate with me even while the fetish continued in my life. His relationship with me became the emotional foundation that paved the way to freedom. He made it so that repentance didn’t feel as if I was totally cutting myself off from everything that mattered to me. Instead, I had faith that He was offering me something better.
I still had to deal with my misled internal Parent’s inability to manage the recovery process. I grew as the Holy Spirit taught me to nurture and guide my Intimacy Desires with His wisdom and power. I slowly learned to affirm them while at the same time refusing to allow them to express <page 192>themselves in harmful ways. I found the ability to trust His promise that He would meet my needs for closeness and self-expression in His time and His way.
My Intimacy Desires have been largely transformed to now find their satisfaction in my relationships with God, my wife, and others. The fascination previously associated with smoking has found its home in relationships. My Heavenly Father has helped me recover the longings of my heart, which has changed how I experience life. Where previously my inner life tended to show up in “smoking fetish form,” it now tends to show up in “Jesus form.”
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