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Spirit-Led Identity Change
<page 69>Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
When I was a teenager, I was incredibly excited about serving Jesus. The Holy Spirit was moving in our church, and it felt awesome to worship and sense His presence. The God of miracles I read about in the Bible was showing up in my life – how could I not be excited!
I knew that the Scriptures taught Christians to embrace suffering for Christ’s sake, but having never really suffered, I could barely imagine what that would feel like. In faith, I decided to obey Jesus and accept whatever pain came my way, and I thought the Holy Spirit would turn the whole experience into something that felt so wonderful I would push straight through without much trouble.
It didn’t occur to me that some of my emotions would refuse to play along. They would grab for control out of fear and anger. They would stir so much trouble within me that I had to use a good deal of self-control to avoid rebelling.
What is surprising about this is that it didn’t look like I was suffering all that much, at least not in the way we normally think of suffering. Any persecution that came my way was mild, and my earthly successes were probably greater as a result of being a Christian than they would have been if I wasn’t. Outwardly, my life was going pretty well.
Inwardly, however, I was trying to follow a path that was beyond me. Christian character pushed me past what I could handle. I knew in theory that following Jesus was impossible apart from His work, but I didn’t expect it to feel quite so … impossible. I expected that with the Holy Spirit in me, I would quickly adapt and move forward.
Following Jesus turned out to be a strange mixture of amazement and distress. When I first stepped out in faith, the amazement generally kicked in. I was excited by the vision birthed in my heart through the words of the Bible. My zeal was fueled by the Holy Spirit, and I anticipated that God would lead the way. I marched into the unknown with anticipation.
But somewhere between the excitement of each new beginning and the satisfaction of each grand finale, there were often times of emotional pain that twisted me in ways I never imagined I could be twisted. They came and went in waves, pushing me past what my heart knew how to handle.
The problem was that my faith was turning me from sins and addictions that were so much a part of me that they seemed to be what made my life work. Leaving them created a series of crises that left me with nowhere to turn but faith and endurance – and faith and endurance didn’t feel nearly as spiritual as I expected.
Nevertheless, I pressed into Jesus and found His grace, and trusting Him worked pretty well over the years. In terms of my actions, I learned to discipline myself and experienced relative victory. I sowed according to God’s word, and I reaped blessings.
Yet after each victory, a new surprise showed up. I found that another layer of emotional baggage had been added to my heart. After I had humbled myself, sacrificed, and discovered ways to keep moving forward, I lost a little more joy.
<page 70>This slowly produced a growing resentment. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was turning into an obedience automaton, only able to survive by willing myself into good decisions and stuffing down the resulting firestorm. My heart was fragmenting into warring factions.
I was embarrassed by all of this. Why couldn’t I feel like a Christian was supposed to? Where was the peace and joy? I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong.
Then, eventually, through a series of circumstances that pushed me to the point where I seemed to have no other good choice, I stumbled onto an insight that turned the tide. I discovered that the missing piece was that I was failing to mourn, and this was keeping me from God’s comfort.
I had interpreted negative emotions like fear, anger, and sorrow (emotions associated with mourning) as sinful reactions, so I had tried to squash them. I was afraid of what they would do to my relationship with the Lord and my family. They seemed unchristian – like complaints rather than gratitude, like rebellion rather than appreciation – so I avoided them, buried them, or did whatever I could to keep them from affecting my life.
Yet they demanded attention. My fear was morphing into suppressed panic, my anger into simmering rage, and my sorrow into sarcasm. And to make matters worse, these emotions fed into temptations to medicate myself with sexual sin and other addictions. All of this was an incredible contradiction against what I believed should be happening.
It didn’t make sense! I was making good decisions, and God was moving in my life. Why did I have to fight so hard to keep my emotions from destroying that?
I was afraid to face what was happening. What if I didn’t find answers? What if my emotions convinced me that I had made a tragic mistake by following Jesus? What if I concluded that it really is impossible to give up a deeply entrenched sinful sexual orientation? I had seen others come to these sorts of conclusions, and I didn’t want to end up like them (Philippians 3:18-19).
Year by year, little by little, my fears increased, until I had little good choice but to be honest about them. …I had to face my predicament, admit I wasn’t sure how to handle it, and decide to do my best to walk through my inner confusion.
Then to my great relief, Jesus stepped right into the middle of this threatening battle and helped me to see the way forward. He took all that He had taught me during the many years I had followed Him, and He used it to speak comfort to my heart.
Then I watched as this comfort transformed the very emotions that were threatening me. Fear turned into caution and deep abiding wisdom. Anger became motivation to persevere. Sorrow became understanding. The feelings that had seemed so dangerous turned into helpers.
Though I still had some bad moments, my emotions no longer left me saying, “Here we go again; I can feel myself falling apart, and I have no good answer for that!” Now, they led me to embrace challenges so I could see God work.
It took a while before I realized that what I was doing was called ‘mourning.’ At first, I thought of it as facing insanity. It didn’t occur to me that the insanity was basically unresolved fear, anger, and sorrow grabbing for control. I didn’t know that mourning was the process of coming to grips with these sorts of emotions, and comfort was God helping me through the struggle.
<page 71>When we experience Spirit empowered mourning and comfort, they change our experience of pain. God uses them to turn trouble into deep character; He teaches us how to regroup and press into a better future. The events that could dismantle us become stepping stones into some of our greatest blessings.
When we mourn, we embrace our emotions and learn to see them from God’s perspective. If we are angry, we admit how we feel and discern how anger can motivate us to rise above what pulls us down. If we are fearful or depressed, we face the shock that life isn’t what we feel we need it to be, and we let go of our mistaken ideas so we can embrace reality. We learn to live within the limitations of God’s plan for us – as our mind, will, and emotions, both spirit and soul – grow to see His strength perfected in our weaknesses.
This often takes far more time than we would like. We slowly accept the frightening reality that when we decided to obey Jesus, we gave up our make-believe right to the habits, addictions, escapism, and foolishness that previously gave us quick and easy ways to hide from pain. We see our unhealthy coping mechanisms, and though we might be terrified to let go of them, we do let go of them, because Jesus has a better life for us.
We don’t do this through determination alone; our strength is in Him and His comfort. The Holy Spirit (the Comforter and Helper – John 14:26) shows up in our lives, and He leads us through the difficulty. We grow to know His love and wisdom, and He causes a new future to emerge. His presence and teaching allow us to move toward a place of contentment where we believe He is working everything together for good (Romans 8:28).
This book has described several times when I mourned. When I embraced my emotions and faced my sexuality as a young man (chapter 4), I was mourning. I was saying, “God, I expected that overcoming sexual sin would be way easier than this. I can no longer pretend that what I am doing is working. I need to mourn the loss of the feeling that I have the ability to set the course for my life apart from You doing something I have not yet experienced. Please come into the middle of my mess and give me a life I could never find without you.”
As I mourned, God comforted and helped me, and I walked into a new future.
When I faced my anger at my job (chapter 13), I was mourning. I was telling God how frustrated I was with the business world. I was working a job because He had told me to care for my family rather than run from my responsibilities, but how could I handle the emotional strain of watching my responsibilities crush my dreams? It all seemed like too much for me.
Once again, God comforted me and enabled me to work through the realities of my life. It took years, but I came out the other side with a far deeper wisdom.
In another example, many years after my business struggles, my difficulty with my emotions once again asserted itself, and I fell into the struggle I described in chapters 6 and 10. I felt as if I was headed for an emotional breakdown as fear, anger, sorrow, and sexual temptations once again grabbed for control. It seemed that after all of the difficult choices I had made to obey God, He had failed me. I felt abandoned to languish with a soul and spirit which were being torn apart by conflicting beliefs and longings.
That was the time in which I learned to make mourning an ongoing part of my life. I embraced the idea that following Jesus was always going to produce emotional conflicts and losses, and I needed to learn how to mourn those conflicts and losses well. In the past, I had waited for my pain to reach a breaking point before I mourned. I now decided to make it a regular practice.
<page 72>Steps 5 and 6 from chapter 4 became deliberate choices rather than last-resort desperate-measures. I embraced the fact that I needed to find answers for my ongoing inner angst, and I trusted that as I allowed conflicts, God would provide the wisdom and comfort I needed to make my way to a healthy resolution.
At first, it didn’t make sense that I needed to mourn. I could point to all sorts of good fruit that had come into my life through obedience. How stupid was it that I was upset and depressed about that? It made more sense to become angry at myself for being ungrateful.
Yet reacting against my negative emotions was sabotaging me. I needed to become honest about what obedience had cost me. I had sacrificed who I felt I was, and that had upended my life in ways I hadn’t understood. I needed to take the time to work through the resulting confusion in the light of God’s word.
Doing so involved a fairly major change in my view of the idea of having an “old man” and a “new man” (Ephesians 4:22-24). I previously had made decisions as if there was an “old me” that I could quickly shake off and replace with a “new me.” I viewed this almost as if I was changing into a new set of clothes, putting off the old me and putting on the new.
Hard experience, however, had taught me that there was only one “me,” and I couldn’t just take “me” off or put “me” on. I needed to develop a relationship with Jesus in which He gradually transformed “me” from my old ways of thinking, acting, and feeling to new ways.
I would sometimes need to repent of one thought, action, or feeling at a time …and fixing any given problem might cause new ones that might take me years to work through. The progress was sometimes so incremental and difficult that it might look like I was not making progress at all. All I could do was to obey day by day in faith, mourning the difficulty and looking to Jesus for the comfort and wisdom that would make it all work.
“Wait,” you might ask, “how does that approach fit in with Paul’s command to put off the old man and put on the new man?”
…that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness. (emphasis added)
I believe it is a mistake to view putting off the old man and putting on the new man to be like changing clothes. It is not as if one person (the old man) was in charge of our life and he is replaced by another person (the new man). Instead, the old man and the new man are different expressions of the same individual – you or me. The old man is you or me when we walked in our own ways rather than God’s, and the new man is you or me as we surrender to the work of the Holy Spirit. The old man is the old version of our authentic self, and the new man is the new version.
The process of putting off the old and putting on the new involves following the Holy Spirit as he gradually leads us. We are renewed, not replaced. We learn how to think, act, and feel as we discern how to express the mind of Christ. If we want to compare this to changing clothes, we could say it is sometimes like changing our spiritual outfit one thread (one thought, action, or feeling) at a time.
<page 73>The path is unique to each of us, as God Himself helps us to see what we specifically need at each step along the way. It is more like a parent helping a child to grow to maturity than like finding a new outfit to put on.
When I treated the old man and the new man almost as if they were two separate people, it seemed acceptable to run roughshod over my emotions in an attempt to quickly discard them. After all, if the old man was becoming a thing of my past, what did I care if its emotions got hurt while they were being replaced? They had no say in my future.
But if the old man is “me” stuck in my former conduct and an unrenewed spirit of my mind, and the new man is the same “me” with better conduct and a renewed spirit of my mind, then running roughshod over my emotions was a problem that required my attention. Since those same emotions were going to be transferred from the old man to the new man, they carried the damage I inflicted on them into my new life. They ended up feeling abused, and they rebelled against the perceived mistreatment. It wasn’t surprising that they clung to resentment rather than feeling gratitude.
I wasn’t going to get a new set of emotions, so I had to learn how to take care of the only ones I had. I couldn’t ignore them and expect them to snap into joy after putting them through pain. They needed to be nurtured to health, which took much more time and skill than I expected.
Based on what I just wrote, you might think that I believe we must be careful to not make decisions that hurt our emotions …but that is not my point at all! My point is that our emotions will get hurt in following Jesus, and we need an ongoing way to handle that pain.
Our emotions can’t avoid being hurt. They have been shaped by sinful tendencies, a sinful past, and the influence of all sorts of sinful people around us – so they are often set against the truth. When we override them in order to do what is right, they can become angry and offended.
We sometimes have no other good choice than to make decisions that hurt them in the near term. I have often found myself in situations where I needed to contradict my emotions or I would end up injuring my family …or I might financially hinder people on my job …or I might walk in addictions that could cause problems that would last for generations. So I had no other good choice but to buckle down and do what was required, no matter how offended or damaged they might become in the process.
And this is where mourning and comfort became vital: How should we handle a world in which we have to make decisions that emotionally hurt us? How can we act responsibly without risking our long-term psychological health? The answer is to mourn and find God’s comfort. As we bring our pain before Jesus, He transforms the damage into growth. We recognize His involvement in our lives, and His presence and power turn our sufferings into stepping stones to a better future.
We find that it is better to experience our emotions, even our painful emotions, in an obedient relationship with Him than to try to “play it safe” in sin. Mourning and comfort are like medicines that restore our emotional strength as we endure the difficulty of putting off our old authentic self to grow into a new authentic self. They help us to sacrifice for God and others without feeling as if we are being abandoned for the sake of the greater good.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted (Matthew 5:4).
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