| << | Contents | >> |
One Flesh: What does it Mean?
The Apostle Paul made a startling claim about sexual sin. He told us it isn't like other sins:
Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.
Phrases like "outside the body" and "sins against his own body" might be a little difficult for us to understand (I will do my best to explain them later in this book), but the logic of this verse is simple. It says that sexual sin (immorality) is different than other sins. It hurts the person who commits it in a way that nothing else can (he …sins against his own body). Therefore we should steer our lives far from it (flee sexual immorality).
In spite of the simplicity of this message, many Christians are having a tough time living it. Dr. Ted Roberts, the host of the Conquer Series, reported in 2014 about a five-year survey that showed that 68% of Christian men and 50% of pastors look at pornography.[1] Among those who identify themselves as born-again Christians, a ProvenMen survey reported similar results:
95% admit that they have viewed pornography;
54% look at pornography at least once a month;
44% viewed pornography at work in the last 90 days;
31% had a sexual affair while married;
25% erase Internet browsing history to conceal pornography use; and
18% admit being addicted to pornography (and another 9% think they may be)."[2]
One remarkable quote about what is happening among us comes from Josh McDowell. He has always held a special place in my heart, in part because he was one of the first Christians I heard speak about sex. Over forty years ago, when I was a freshman at Indiana University, Josh came and gave a talk called Maximum Sex. He spoke in an easy to listen to style as he encouraged students to follow God's plan for their erotic desires.
Josh McDowell's ministry in the 1970's, however, was not primarily focused on helping people overcome sexual sin. He was an apologist who defended the faith. Recently, however, he has switched his ministry to focus much more on sexual sin. He had this to say about the change:
"This (pornography) is probably the greatest threat to the cause of Christ in two thousand years of church history…"[3]
When I saw that quote, it caught my attention. Josh is not a wild-eyed preacher given to rash statements. He is an intellectual. If he thinks pornography is probably the greatest threat we have faced, we can be sure that his conclusion is well researched.
When I personally come to the subject of speaking about sexual sin, I am faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, I have a great deal to say about the subject. Sexual sin has been a huge struggle in my life, and I have spent decades finding God's answers to it. It took me the first eight years of my Christian life just to get my actions under control, and then I spent the next thirty-three years figuring out how to deal with the internal struggle left in its wake (and I am still learning). I have written five books (The Exchanged Glory Series) to describe what God did in this area of my life, and this book is my sixth. Obviously, I have put a great deal of prayer and thought into this subject.
My dilemma, however, is that it is not easy to speak about this sin to Christians. I first noticed this on August 17, 1986. That was the first time I publicly shared about my struggle and victory over sexual sins. I don't usually remember the year in which I taught on a specific subject, let alone the day, so you can imagine that this was a memorable teaching for me.
I had traveled to a church in a nearby state to spend some time with a man who ministered there. As I prayed during my visit, I felt the Holy Spirit stir a teaching in my heart in which I would give an honest account of my struggle and how God had helped me to overcome. Then I had the opportunity to give my message in the Sunday morning service; I was naively eager to do so.
When I spoke, I felt it was best to play it safe and be vague about the specifics of my problems. I also spent most of the teaching looking at Scriptures that weren't directly about sex. At several points, however, I gave brief descriptions of my problems and used a couple of words that I have since learned make people feel quite uncomfortable. I noticed that some of the women in the church looked especially shocked. In fact, they reminded me of people sitting in a wind tunnel.
I was a bit thrown off by that. For me, it wasn't an option for sex to be a taboo subject; it was the battlefield on which I had been forced to face my greatest weaknesses. Without God's answers, my entire life would have been shipwrecked – so I thought it was important to be open and honest about what I had learned. …And somehow, I expected others to be excited about that, yet the faces in front of me told a different story.
I didn't really understand why that was, but no one asked me to sit down, so I pulled myself together and kept speaking. After the teaching, people were politely positive. One of the "wind tunnel women" even came up and thanked me for sharing. She said, "We need to hear a message like that every once in a while." Then a young man came up, confessed a number of sexual sins, and told me that he couldn't believe how anointed my teaching was. We spent some time together, prayed, and then went our ways. Because of his response, I left for home feeling pretty good about the weekend.
Among my friends at home, however, the reaction also wasn't what I expected. I am not sure if someone from the other church had described my teaching over the phone or if my friends had only learned about it from my words, but they were concerned for me. I found out about a conversation in which one of them had said, "I guess he'll never be asked back." Another friend warned me about what a teaching like that could do to my family.
I understood, but I was a bit baffled. When I had shared, I had simply pulled the veil back a little bit on a struggle that had threatened to destroy my life. And I wasn't sharing about it from the point of view of having no answers. I had met Jesus in the middle of this war, and He had saved me! Why wasn't that an amazing story that God's people would want to hear? I thought to myself: "What are we doing? This is a really tough struggle for anyone caught in it, and it seems like we are ignoring these people? Shouldn't we be talking about the answers?"
For over a decade after that teaching in 1986, I wondered what was going on with Christians on this subject. I simply wasn't able to make sense of the way we approached it, so I stayed largely quiet, waiting for more insight. I wasn't too concerned about my silence, because I didn't know of many people who struggled with sexual sin. I figured that maybe I was just weird, or maybe this wasn't an area that God wanted me to worry about.
It wasn't easy for me to not speak, because I like to be open with others, yet God was moving in my life. So I decided to keep my head down, enjoy His work, and play it safe. Eventually, however, unresolved sexual issues within me attempted to force their way back to the surface. I held on to purity in my actions, but I developed a growing emotional turmoil that was slowly sabotaging my life. I felt like I was holding down a festering infection of anger, disappointment, and sinful sexual desires that refused to be silenced.
Finally, I decided that God was leading me to once again begin to cultivate an attitude of openness about my struggles, first with Him, then anonymously with people on the internet, and finally with friends in my church. That was when I, once again, began to find relief from the storm within me.
I also found that Christianity had come a long way from my "wind tunnel" experience of the 1980s. There was now a wealth of information available on sexual sin. I could read books and articles, hear from people on the internet, and privately share my own struggles and victories. I also discovered the statistics about sexual sin in churches, and that caused the questions I had considered earlier about why Christians don't talk about this subject to come back to the surface. It was one thing for me to be quiet about something that was only a problem for me and a few others. It was quite another when thousands of Christians were falling to a plague that was threatening the entire church. It seemed obvious that we needed to change. The world had become a sexual cesspool, pouring pollution on millions; why did we hold to a strategy that didn't seem to be working?
In 2003, I started putting my experience into writing in the five books of The Exchanged Glory Series. I thought to myself, "This is my chance to share a detailed description of my problems and the answers God gave me. The church is facing a "sexual apocalypse," and I have over twenty years of experience in successfully dealing with that sort of thing. Surely people will be excited about what I have to say."
I was once again surprised by the way many responded. A couple of times I shared privately what I was writing in the books, and my friends said, "That's great, but you aren't going to say that in church, are you?" Some readers, and even one sex addict, said, "These books contain some great insights into God's word. If you would just take out the parts about sex, you could reach many people." As I got near to finishing the books, a good friend said to me that now that I had worked through my issues I could focus on sharing things that would be more edifying for God's people.
I wasn't sure what to do with those responses. I knew my friends loved me. They had cared for me for a long time, and they continued to. Their input had been so valuable that I believe I never would have found victory over sexual sins without them. Yet it was obvious that they viewed the world in a way that was far different than I did. To my mind, the church was being clobbered by the enemy in this area, and if we didn't make changes, there would be untold damage.
A key moment in the discussion came when a friend told me he didn't think I should use the m-word when I shared about sexual sin in church. He felt it was too crass; I should instead say something like "sex with ourselves." I thought to myself, "If healthy Christians feel this way, how can we minister to sex addicts? The m-word is tame compared to what they are facing. Making a word like that taboo sends the message that they need to hide their problems rather than bring them into the light."
I felt a small temptation to run to an opinion I had noticed in some recovering sex addicts: that Christians are self-righteous hypocrites who want to either push sexual sinners into the closet or judge them. Yet I couldn't honestly conclude that. Even when I was falling to my sexual struggles, the Christians I knew had cared for me and laid down their lives for me. They played a big part in God saving me. Others had plumbed the depths of God's grace side by side with me for decades.
I am sure that some who struggle with sexual sins have experienced Christians as judgmental, but I personally cannot think of a single time when anyone has blatantly condemned me. No one has attacked or belittled me. It is true that many have upset me by indicating that my struggles should be cleaned up quickly and quietly (which I felt unable to do) – but even that was generally said with love. They were warning me about the problems I could create for my family and the possible discomfort and confusion I might cause in those who would hear me.
I considered my friends' statements for years, trying to make sense of them. Why did I find their words so upsetting while they considered them totally normal, even godly? Finally, it hit me. What I was seeing was a reaction similar to what any of us would feel if we were exposed to a dangerous disease. If we found out that we were in the same room as someone who had Ebola, we would create distance between that person and others. Doing this is wise caution, not judgment. One friend actually used medical terms to describe what it felt like for him to hear me describe my struggles. He told me it made him feel ill.
Paul told Christians to flee sexual immorality (1 Corinthians 6:18), and it makes sense that they would do that not just in their actions but also in their emotions. If sexual sin were to infect them, it would do so in the unique way Paul described (they would "sin against their body"), so they feel cautious when the subject even comes up. They don't want unhealthy images to enter their mind or anyone else's.
And that explains why I tend to make people nervous. I believe it is important to describe sexual problems so we can search for answers to them. I want to openly challenge the deceptions that hold so many Christians in sexual bondage and brokenness. If we can't do that, how can someone escape from the pit in which they have been trapped? I say this because I am reasoning from my experience; my attempts to find emotional healing from sexual issues worked far better when I was able to talk to others about them.
Most Christians, however, don't see themselves as spiritual doctors who can help others in this area; instead, they see themselves as potential patients who should stay away from diseases. In order for them to feel somewhat comfortable around sexual issues, they would need to have some assurance that it is necessary and safe to bring those issues into the light. Our current approach to sexual sin makes sense to them. When a person struggling with sexual sin speaks about his problem, an image comes into everyone's minds, and the Christian senses the danger of allowing that image to remain. So their heart jumps into action to remove it in whatever way possible. They feel that making it go away is a matter of moral integrity, and if they can't send it away quickly enough, they may feel ill.
What I have just written brings me to one of the main themes in this book: It is that there is a disconnect between what two groups in the body of Christ should rightfully desire. Healthy Christians should desire to not be exposed to sexual sickness, yet sexual sinners should desire an environment where they can be open about their problems. Both are understandable and legitimate needs, but the two don't fit together well. How can we protect those who have wisely fled sexual immorality without leaving those who have not fled feeling as if the church has no real answers? How can we create an environment in which the sick are able to heal without placing the healthy at risk?
I won't offer any grand solutions, but I hope to provide insights that will help us find solutions. In the past, we have generally decided in favor of the healthy; discussions of sexual sickness were frowned upon. With the incredible amount of issues that have now infected the church, however, I hope this book will help us to reconsider that approach.
In my own life, I believe I recovered, in part, because of my tendency to ignore social norms. I have a phrase that I use to describe how I feel about culture: "Who made this stupid rule, and why should I listen to it?" I recognize that this tendency is dangerous, so I rein it in by submitting to others and working hard to study why "stupid rules" are not as "stupid" as I might think. Nevertheless, there are times when I come to the conclusion that cultural norms, even Christian cultural norms, get in the way of progress.
One of those rules has been the rule that Christians shouldn't be open and honest about sexual struggles. I saw that I needed to bare my soul and talk about the reality of my difficulties. I needed comfort as I sought to overcome the fear that I was fatally flawed and could never find freedom. I also longed to celebrate the victories God was giving me. I sometimes even needed just to have a friend with whom I could share some of the craziness stirring inside of me. Getting the insanity out into the open was a way of finding what I was missing. With as scary as that might have been for those who heard, being open played a huge part in me finding answers.
Allow me to introduce you to a term that might be new to you: 'dialectical tension.' It is where two values are both important, but it is tough to see how they work well together. They are in tension with each other. The two values I have been discussing are the good of avoiding thoughts about sexual sin and the good of reaching out to those caught in it. The simplest path to each tends to rule out the other.
In a dialectical tension, in order to benefit from both values, you need to endure holding to both for long enough to discover answers that aren't obvious at first. You have to live with the tension, usually for longer than you would like, so you can find a path through it. You will go back and forth between the two options, trying to make sense of them, and you will struggle as problems slowly come into focus and God gives answers. It takes hard work, patience, and reflection. There will always be the temptation to take the easy way out and reject one side in favor of the other.
In this book, I will do my best to not take the easy way out; I will write about both sides. I come from the background of having a sexual sickness, so I will obviously say much more from that perspective, but I will also do my best to honor the perspectives of those who come from a healthier background. I will try to avoid words and images that I have learned are upsetting to them. My goal is to help all of us work well together. We are Christ's body, and our relationships with one another are vital.
…from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.
As you read, I ask you to keep one more thought in mind. Many Christians, including those with sexual problems, believe they already understand sexual issues and God's solutions. They think the whole subject is simple; people just need to obey. I believe this is naïve. When a Christian cries out for years to find victory yet continues in defeat, we should look more closely to see what is actually happening. Most of the sermons I have heard about sexual sin have basically said, "This is bad. Don't do it?" People haven't been challenged to rethink their approaches to the subject. In this book, I will dig deeper. I will ask all of us, both the victorious and the defeated, to take a closer look at what we are doing.
I pray that by God's grace, this book will equip us to live our faith in such a time as this (Esther 4:14). I pray that as you read you will understand what is happening in our culture and our churches. May you find hope as God opens your eyes to His abundance of grace that is greater than any sin or weakness. May the words of the Bible come alive in you, and may they spark a fire that will spread to produce purity in many. I ask in Jesus name.
Bill Cadden, 2019
Search Comments
This page has been visited 0033 times.
| << | Contents | >> |
10 per page