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One Flesh: What does it Mean?
<page 72>I will now rewind my story and return to the time I mentioned in Chapter 9, when I wondered if church discipline would happen to me. In the fall of 1979, I began my "extra semester" at Indiana University. I had completed my fourth year in the spring of 1979, after which I would normally have graduated. I needed an extra semester because I had dropped out of several classes over the years. (Indiana University had a policy that if a student dropped out of a class early enough in the semester, the class didn't count on their record.)
What had caused me to drop out of so many classes? It was largely the strain of resisting sexual temptation. It was so distracting for me that I sometimes didn't get my school work done. I would sit in front of my books, unable to read, fighting images in my imagination. After a while, I would give up on studying and switch to activities like worship or Bible reading, which were more interesting. They helped me to avoid the temptations, but I fell behind in my classes. When I got far enough behind, I would save myself from bad grades by dropping a class. I had done this often enough that I was forced to take an extra semester to earn my four-year degree.
College had been a perplexing journey. I truly had surrendered to Jesus. I was consistent in my devotional times, had memorized more than a few chapters of the Bible, attended church regularly, and shared about Jesus whenever I could. I didn't party, and almost my entire social life was spent with other committed Christians. In most areas, I walked the walk with Jesus …yet in one area, my sexuality, I had never changed (or to be more accurate, I had grown worse).
This problem had come to a head earlier in 1979, during the last semester of my fourth year. I tried an experiment to see if a new approach would help me overcome sexual temptations. After so many years of struggling with my studies, I decided that when a temptation showed up, I would immediately stop studying and start seeking God. I hoped that if I spent focused time with Him, He would set me free from temptation in time to return to my studies before the end of the semester.
In spite of some wonderful times with the Lord, I made little if any progress with my sexuality, and as the end of the semester moved closer, I realized I was in trouble. It was too late to drop any classes, and I was so far behind that I had little hope of catching up. My grades were going to suffer, and I had to perform at a level I had never before achieved if I wanted to escape that fate.
I decided to do something I had always wanted to try but had avoided because I wanted to honor God. I moved the boundaries of my sexual behavior to accept sins that I did by myself. Doing this allowed me to quickly release the pressure of my sex drive, and I could then study during the time of relief between temptations. I avoided actions that were especially dangerous like sex with another person or going on a total binge. My goal was to be responsible with my schoolwork, not to party my life away. So when temptations got in the way, rather than fighting them, I gave in quickly in limited ways in order to put them behind me and refocus on my assignments.
<page 73>Much to my amazement, I became the kind of student my parents had always hoped I would be. I not only passed everything – I got good grades.
It didn't make sense. How could wrong actions in my sexual life have turned me from being a good student to being a great one? And what was I going to do when I graduated from college and had to work a job? I could no longer drop classes. I needed to perform at a high level all the time. Would I need to give in to sin in order to survive in the real world?
When I left school for the summer break, I once again tried to avoid sexual sin, but as the summer ended and I went back for my extra semester, I knew I was at a crossroads. I had tried everything I could think of to obey God, yet somehow it had failed me.
I decided to admit defeat, for the moment, and to once again give in to limited sexual sin. At the same time, I decided to fully practice what I had learned years earlier from 2 Corinthians 3. I became unveiled, not only before God but also before the Christians who were closest to me. I opened up to my friends and a leader in the church I attended about what was happening. I hoped that God would do what He had promised in His word, that he would change me from glory to glory.
…to godliness brotherly kindness… (emphasis added)
During that fall semester, I moved from the Indiana University dorms into a house off campus with a couple of Christian friends, Gregg and Malcolm. We talked several times about my sexual issues, and I described my eight-year struggle to find freedom. This was no small feat. I gave them the details of a problem that was some distance from what people would consider normal. From that moment on, every time they saw me doing anything related to it, they knew that it was a sexual turn on for me. I wasn't sure if they would reject me for that, and I wasn't sure how many people they would tell. I was potentially opening up to the entire church. What would happen if more people found out? Would I be excommunicated?
I decided it didn't matter. I was tired of hiding. I was going to bring my problems into the light and let God decide what happened next. Using a sports analogy, I was throwing a Hail Mary pass. In football, a Hail Mary pass is done when a team is only seconds away from losing a game but can still win if they score a touchdown before the clock runs out. The quarterback throws the ball as far as necessary to reach the end-zone (the Hail Mary pass), and he hopes that one of his receivers will pull it down to win the game. For me, college had been the football game. It was a chance to find answers to my sexual problems before they affected my future marriage and career. I was now at the end of the game, and it was clear that I wasn't going to win by playing it safe. I heaved the ball toward the end zone by opening up to the body of Christ, hoping that God would do something to bring victory out of defeat.
Gregg, Malcolm, and I shared our lives, our hearts, and our knowledge of God. 2 Peter 1:7 says we should add brotherly kindness to the mix of our experiences in the Lord, and during that last semester of college I got the biggest dose of brotherly kindness I had experienced up to that point in my life.
<page 74>Brotherly kindness can be distinguished from other kinds of love in that it is based on the enjoyment of human relationships. It can be contrasted with agape love (which appears after brotherly kindness in 2 Peter 1:7). Agape love is more of a decision based love. It holds true even when human relationships are not enjoyable; it is the glue that keeps brotherly kindness brotherly even when it costs us at a human level. Brotherly kindness is more emotional, and it is an eighth line of defense. Human beings need to touch each other through friendship and sharing their lives together, and that is what I experienced during that last semester in college.
As I opened up about my sexual struggles, Gregg and Malcom shared with me about their past experiences and present temptations. I can't begin to tell you how much it meant for me to talk to other Christians about sexual sin as if it was something we could study and understand rather than as if it was only a plague we needed to avoid. The "avoid the plague" mentality was valid for someone who wasn't already trapped by sexual addiction, but it was totally inadequate for me. I already had the plague and needed to find a cure.
When I write about the unveiled life, the sort of relationships I had during this time are what I am referring to. It is where we recognize that we are dealing with profound brokenness and difficulty, and we are honest about it, searching together for God's answers. It doesn't need to contain deep and amazing insights. My friends and I were three guys in our twenties who had never been married. Our experiences were limited, our theology was newly formed, and what sex-related psychology we had heard told us that the Bible was wrong on the subject. Yet for me, the little bit we shared was like the five loaves and two fish that Jesus used to feed the multitude (Matthew 14:17-21). God took our simple words and expanded them in my heart until I wrote six books with the overflow.
Along with Gregg and Malcolm, I spent many hours with a church leader, Denny Strickland. At one point, I even moved into his attic for several weeks so I could spend as much time with him as possible before leaving college (in the winter – there was an electric heater, but it was cold). I am an introvert by nature, so it is difficult for me to keep long conversations going, but with Denny that was no problem. I have never been able to talk to anyone in the way I was able to talk with him. He had an amazing gift for drawing people out, and I eventually started calling him, "Dad."
Once again, it felt incredible to enjoy deep friendship with someone without needing to hide my sexual problems from him. Denny honestly admitted that he wasn't sure what I needed, but he shared what he had, prayed, and loved me with his unique gift that touched me in ways I had never before been touched.
I didn't realize it at the time, but many of my problems were caused by a difficulty I have with emotional instability. I have never been diagnosed with any sort of disorder, but through studying I have concluded that I have what psychologists would call a tendency toward emotional dysregulation. In short, my emotional reactions tend to be quicker, stronger, and more lasting than what most people experience. Psychologists compare this to having skin that is extremely sensitive. If you touch such a person, they may feel pain and react in ways that others wouldn't. My emotions have often responded to life like that.
Perhaps the main reason I have concluded this about myself is that I was physically punishing myself when I was ten years old. I would punch trees to inflict pain on my hands, jump in the air <page 75>and land on my knees to hurt them, and cut myself with razor blades. With as strange as these sorts of actions sound, self-harm is a common symptom for someone who has difficulty with emotional regulation.[18] When they become overwhelmed by their feelings, hurting themselves helps them to regain some control.
There was nothing in my family, friends, or culture that encouraged these actions. No one was abusive or overly angry toward me. I also had never heard of anyone harming themselves in this way. My actions sprang from me not being able to handle what was happening inside of me. In a sense, cutting myself with razor blades seemed to help me to not do something crazier. It gave me an outlet for what I was feeling, and that helped me calm down.
Another sign that I have difficulty with my emotions is that I fell into sexual addiction when I was twelve years old. Addictions[19] and sexual issues[20] are other common symptoms of emotional dysregulation. They showed up even though I had not been exposed to pornography and there was no sexual abuse in my life. They were simply a far more pleasant way to control my emotions than cutting myself.
Finally, there have been, and still are, many times in my life when I am forced to deal with levels of emotion that are out of proportion to my circumstances. For example, extreme anger, urges to self-harm, and even reactions to life that make me suddenly so upset I feel as if I should kill myself – all of these show up at times in my heart. People with a tendency toward emotional dysregulation can find that unavoidable everyday experiences can trigger emotional pain to the point where having emotions can become traumatic.[21] This has happened to me several times over the years.
I have had little choice but to learn how to handle this by God's grace. For someone like me, it appears that a tendency toward emotional dysregulation is a permanent genetic condition. I can't change it, but that doesn't mean that I can't handle it well. God has done much to help me over the years, and I can now usually work through my worst emotional states in a matter of minutes. I have even been able to harness the strength of my emotions in ways that have helped me greatly on my job and in my walk with the Lord. Most people who know me have little idea that I have struggled. It is only when I talk about my emotions that they realize what my inner life has been like.
One of the key issues for me to understand is what psychologists call validation. Validation means that I need someone (God, myself, or others) to assure me that my difficulty with my emotions is understandable, given my emotional makeup and experience. It also means that I need the assurance that with the right help, I can find answers to my struggles. Finally, I need to be put in touch with the right help. Without validation, an emotionally dysregulated person tends to fall into a downward spiral that looks something like this:
They overreact to situations.
The people around them let them know that they are acting weird.
They try to shut down their emotions in hopes of being normal.
Their emotions go underground and fester beneath the surface.
<page 76>Eventually, the emotions resurface, sending the person back to step 1. The cycle repeats itself, sometimes with greater intensity.[22]
Though most addicts do not have a genetic predisposition toward emotional dysregulation, they are still dealing with emotions that are dysregulating in one way or another. Sex is as strong as death, as cruel as the grave, burns like a fire, feels unquenchable, and pulls addicts to be willing to give up everything they have in order to satisfy desires that are ruining their lives. That sort of emotion is dysregulated by definition.
Along with this, addictive sexual sins can reshape our entire personality, so they pull in all sorts of emotions that are not directly related to sex. The sex addict may feel seemingly uncontrollable anxiety and fear. He may carry heavy loads of shame and guilt. He may feel he has no choice but to deceive as he hides his habits from his family and friends. A host of out-of-control feelings conspire together to run (and ruin) his life.
It is exactly in this state – where it feels as if the entire world ought to give up on him – that validation is the most necessary. The sex addict needs to be assured that it makes sense that he is having such a struggle. He also needs to know that with God's help, he can overcome. And though the addict needs to trust that God will provide all the help he needs with or without others, God often chooses to work through His people. So if the body of Christ can be a support, that can go a long way toward healing.
I found this sort of validation during my last semester in college, and I am eternally grateful for it. My experience could have turned out differently. My friends could have told me that if I was serious about God, I wouldn't be doing what I was doing. They could have said that if I would just ignore my feelings and show a little self-control, everything would fall into place. Or they might have outright condemned me. This has happened to others, and if it had happened to me, it might have thrown me off track for years, or perhaps permanently.
Instead my friends helped me to accept that my problems were extremely difficult for me. They were honest about the fact that they didn't know what the answers were, but they were also confident that God would show them to me. Then they supported me as we together looked to see what He would do.
I grew up in Woodstock, NY in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Woodstock was a center of the 1960's counterculture revolution, and I loved its message of peace, joy, and freedom of expression. My parents were part of the generation that grew up during the Great Depression, so their lives were built around acquiring the wealth they had lacked in their childhood. I found their money-centered world stifling. I longed to live from my heart without bowing to the idols of material possessions and respectability.
When I became a Christian at the age of fourteen, I found that, in some ways, Jesus seemed to agree with my view. He warned about the dangers of greed and storing up treasure on earth (Matthew 6:19-34). He had little regard for the show and pretense of trying to look good before others (Matthew 6:1-18). He didn't speak about living from your heart in the same way I did, <page 77>but He certainly spoke about what came out of our hearts (Matthew 15:18-20). When I viewed His message through the lens of my artistic tendencies, I envisioned the Christian life as the ultimate form of self-expression. God would make it so His ways would come gushing out of me like a spontaneous song. In Chapter 7, I referred to my approach as a stronghold of existentialism, with a related stronghold of the false god of permissive-love.
I probably could have succeeded fairly well with my strongholds if it weren't for my sexual problems. They made it so that after good acts came gushing out of my heart, sexual sin followed. Emotions that were as strong as death were far too powerful to hold back while I was embracing the sorts of deceptions I believed, and in a strange irony, my sexual problems helped me to see this. My failures slowly wore down my confidence in my view of life. The fact that I was being given over to uncleanness (Romans 1:24) drew attention to the fact that I had exchanged the truth of God for a lie (Romans 1:25).
As I became unveiled before God and others during my last semester in college, I began to be honest about the ways in which the Bible contradicted my Woodstock upbringing. I admitted that parts of God's word were hard to accept, and at the top of that list were the scriptures that said God sends many people to hell. I could handle Him judging a few really bad people with eternal torment, but the Bible basically taught that most of the people I knew were headed there – and that just seemed crazy. And although God provided a way for us to be saved through Jesus, that didn't seem like enough. Too many people were being lost. Why didn't He just save people because He liked them? With so many headed for a fate worse than death, it seemed unloving for God to not provide a more popular option for eternal life.
One day during my final semester in college, I was reading Romans 1 and 2, and I had an experience with the Holy Spirit that I didn't expect. He opened my eyes to see how He felt about sin, and more specifically, how He felt about my sin! I suddenly realized that judgment wasn't a matter of God being overly critical or grouchy; it was a matter of me deserving to be punished for committing crimes against Him and His creation. It was as if every time I sinned I was dumping toxic waste into the world that created a poisonous environment for others. I was suppressing the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18), and this was making it more difficult for people to see His goodness. I deserved to be punished for that, and hell was the penalty that God had determined was just.
That insight, by itself, might have destroyed me. (It was hardly validating.) Fortunately, it was immediately followed by a revelation of what the blood of Jesus had done for me. He had paid the price so I could be forgiven in spite of the sin which continued within me.
When I saw the blood of Jesus in the context of God's righteous wrath, it was as if I was seeing His sacrifice for the first time. I had believed it as a doctrine for years, but without a knowledge of the seriousness of my guilt, it felt like little more than a sentimental overture. Now, in the light of the true nature of my life, I realized that someone needed to pay. That person should have been me, but Jesus had taken my place.
By the time my encounter with the Holy Spirit was over, it seemed as if I lived in a whole new world. It was no longer ruled by a god who agreed with my views of wrath and love. Instead, the true God had his own views. He was both much more wrathful than I had imagined (because <page 78>hell is a just punishment), and also much more loving (because He made a way to escape when He didn't need to).
My view of myself apart from Jesus had also changed. I was no longer a basically nice guy with a sexual problem. Instead, I was a habitual sinner who fought against the truth of God. I deserved to go to hell, and I had only escaped because He cared enough to send His Son to die for me. I had never before appreciated how gracious He was toward me.
2 Peter 1:6 says to add godliness to the mix of qualities that are a part of knowing Jesus. To be godly is to see, accept, and worship God as He truly is. It is to let go of our own ideas and to allow His word to birth within us His view of the world. That is what happened to me as I encountered Him in Romans 1 and 2. The stronghold of the false god of permissive-love was torn down in a single day, and the stronghold of existentialism was dealt a serious blow.
All of this helped me to find the proper balance between fear and love. I feared because I knew sin deserved judgment, but it wasn't the panic-stricken fear found in emotional dysregulation. It didn't lead me to return to cutting myself or to grasp at desperate attempts to prove myself. The sacrifice of Jesus showed I was loved, accepted, and validated in my struggles. My obedience was going to be based in the growing conviction the Holy Spirit was building within me, not in my anxious efforts. God's love regulated my emotions while He gradually worked in me.
It's hard to describe what happened over the next few months. As the Holy Spirit touched me, my confusion began to clear and strength of character grew within me. With my new insight into the wrath and mercy of God, an inner fear and trembling were added to my worship. It's not surprising that I was able to better see God work for His good pleasure in my life.
…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.
I had a renewed relationship with Jesus. I was able to continually go to the One who sympathized with my weaknesses without excusing them, and who didn't condemn me for my failures while He strongly disapproved of them. It changed me.
Finally, one day I looked at myself and said, "You can give up this sin if you want to." Though I didn't feel like stopping, I knew how God felt about it, so over the period of a few months I gave up different parts of my sinful actions until none were left. I haven't gone back to them for over thirty-nine years.
How do I explain that change? On the one hand, I have to acknowledge the grace and plan of God, who chose to save me from myself. He arranged for me to experience an inner transformation; it was a gift I didn't earn. On the other hand, a few important principles were in play that tie in with the themes of this book:
I had spent the past eight years filling my heart with God's word, experiencing His love, and trying to obey. I had added to my faith virtue, knowledge, self-control, perseverance …. Though <page 79>I had failed for many years with my sexuality, the word of God had still been working powerfully. It birthed in me the vision that I was accepted by Him. I could unveil myself before Him, myself, and others, trusting His Spirit to change me from glory to glory.
Part of the unveiled approach was that I was being honest about my experience with sexual sins. I stopped treating them as a small issue that could be handled with a little discipline. Though I didn't yet describe them using Song of Solomon 8:6-7, I said in effect, "What is the real answer for something that is as strong as death, cruel as the grave, burns like a fire, is difficult to quench, and pulls you to risk everything you have to satisfy it?" As I refused to accept quick and easy "fixes" that didn't work, I was open to answers from the word of God that were previously off my grid of possibilities. I was ready to receive the Holy Spirit as He wrote His laws on my heart and mind.
God graciously sent people to help me. My friends validated me as I learned what it meant to be humbly honest before Him. They helped me to come to grips with the difficulty of the challenges I faced. As I did, I beheld the glory of the Lord and was transformed into the same image from glory to glory.
In the previous chapter I said that strong emotions rarely change through logic and willpower alone. They do, however, change when we experience them in the presence of the God who created them and knows how to make them into what they were meant to be. That is what happened to me during my last semester of college. He took my emotionally dysregulated fear and guilt and regulated them into stepping stones to abundant life.
I cannot tell you how many times I have been brought to tears while considering this. My future career and marriage were about to crash to the ground before either of them had started. Who knows what this would have done to the rest of my life and my faith. How many other sexual sinners have walked through similar trials without experiencing this sort of watershed moment that sent me to an entirely different future?[23]
I threw a Hail Mary pass into the air, hoping that God would somehow help me to win a game that I was about to lose. He sent a team around me to keep the ball in the air while He spoke to me and healed me. Within six months, I was able to make and stick with the sorts of difficult decisions that were necessary to make sex a healthy part of my life. I found myself lying on the ground in the end-zone with the ball in my arms. The Hail Mary pass had worked. I am still amazed by His grace!
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