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Spirit-Led Identity Change
I mentioned earlier that I struggled with sexual problems when I was young. During my high school and college years, I couldn’t seem to get them under control. I could keep myself from sinful actions with others, but lust in my heart overcame me regularly.
Like the difficulties I was facing with “condemning voices,” my sexual problems forced me to learn a good deal about being led by the Holy Spirit.
One day during my sophomore year in college (in 1976 or 1977), I was reading in Psalm 91 when verse 7 seemed to jump out at me.
A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it shall not come near you.
I said to myself, “This is the promise of God for me concerning my sexual sins. Not only is it in the written word of God (the standard by which I judge everything else), but I feel the Holy Spirit has spoken it to my heart to confirm that He wants to do this in me. God is telling me that He will protect me from falling into sexual sin.”
In order to make sure that the promise would be fulfilled, I did everything I knew of to cooperate with the Lord. I believed the word with my heart and confessed it to others, even telling my Christian friends about my embarrassing problems. I diligently walked in obedience in everything I could, fully expecting Him to hold me up with His power.
After a few days the weight of ongoing temptation overcame me, and I fell.
I was devastated! I had done absolutely everything I knew of to trust God, and it very much seemed like He had failed me. I had believed a promise from the written word of God, and I had sensed Him prophetically confirm that promise to my heart, yet He hadn’t fulfilled it.
It wasn’t just that He hadn’t answered my prayer; it was that He hadn’t answered my prayer to keep me from sin. If I couldn’t trust Him to do that, what could I trust Him for? I hadn’t asked for money, fame, or some vain thing, or even for something like ministry which would appeal to my spiritual pride. I had trusted Him to keep me from lust. It was one-hundred percent within His will, yet every bit of evidence seemed to tell me that He had let me down.
I wondered if there were other promises He would fail to uphold. What about forgiveness? Or maybe everything I had believed for the past five years was a lie. Maybe there was no God.
Obviously, I stayed with Jesus. Within a few days I decided that even though the “evidence” seemed to say He had failed me, I would trust Him anyway. His word was more reliable than my experience. What had happened was somehow my fault.
It wasn’t until decades later that I concluded I had indeed heard from Him on that day. About three years after I sensed the message from Psalm 91, I found victory over the worst of my problems. Then for more than forty years I have watched as not just ten thousand, but probably millions around me have fallen into sexual sin – yet it did not come near to me. The promise I had sensed was real – I just misunderstood how and when He would fulfill it.
I have shared this story so I can compare the approach I took during my sophomore year in college to the approach I learned later. I will illustrate this approach by looking at how I handled another prophetic experience about 30 years after this.
As I was entering into the final stretch of writing The Exchanged Glory Series (the full story of how God saved me from sexual issues), I woke up one night in May of 2009 with a dream that seemed to be a picture of both what God had done in my past and what He was going to do in my future. This is the dream (simplified to only include the parts important to the message of this chapter):
I was in my car, and I was trying to get it to stop moving. My attempts were not working. Even when I put the car into park, it still moved. At one point, it drifted out onto the road and someone on the road got upset with me.
Finally, I got the car off the road and turned it off. I then got out and walked up a big hill.
When I got to the top of the hill, I looked down and saw that my car at the bottom of the hill had started to move again. So I headed toward it. I ran a little and then jumped down the hill twenty feet or so. When I landed, I slid as dirt flew all around me. Then I ran and jumped again, and the sliding in the dirt happened all over again. I repeated this many times.
When I got to the bottom of the hill, my car was sitting in a dirty stream. I walked around and found a hallway with stairs going down under the ground that led to my car. I walked down the stairs to my car and tried to pull it out, but I couldn’t.
I have interpreted many dreams, and most of them only have small messages for my life.[4] I concluded, however, that this dream was different. If I had the right interpretation, it was a picture of what God had done in my past and was going to do in my future:
My car that wouldn’t stop moving was symbolic for my compulsive sexual problems (and for compulsivity in general). When I was young this problem had been like that unstoppable car. I couldn’t seem to keep it under control.
Getting the car to stop was symbolic for the victory I had found over sexual sin in 1980. By God’s grace, I found answers to the worst of my compulsivity.
Going up a hill is an activity that requires work, and it was symbolic for a time from 1986 till 2000 when I had studied wisdom. I learned many skills that helped me to maintain and increase my victory over being compulsive.
Reaching the top of the hill and seeing my car start to move again was symbolic for a realization that had come to me in the late 1990s. I saw that wisdom and discipline alone weren’t giving me the full answers I needed. They helped, but they hadn’t fixed the brokenness in my emotions (symbolized by the fact that my car had started to move again). I needed something more.
This led me to make changes that were symbolized by running down the hill. I learned to face my emotional problems and slowly work through them. Doing so required me to take leaps of faith (the jumping) and to deal with messy problems (the sliding with dirt flying). This was a time when I allowed one area of my emotions after another to surface with its threatening compulsivity, trusting the Holy Spirit to lead me through each one (several jumps with sliding and dirt).
When I dreamed the above dream, I had been in the “running down the hill” phase for close to nine years. The Exchanged Glory Series was largely written during this time, and writing it had been part of how I worked through my emotional problems.
The hallway and the stream at the bottom of the hill were a picture of my future. They symbolized that I was going to take humbling steps (walking down the stairs), and these would help me to see what was underneath my emotional issues (symbolized by seeing the car in the dirty stream in an underground hallway). These issues would be impossible for me to fix on my own (I couldn’t pull the car out of the dirty stream). That might mean that God would fix them for me, or it might mean that they would be like a “thorn in my flesh” – a weakness in which He would display His strength without removing the difficulty (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). Either way, He was going to help me to find answers to the low-level issues that were affecting me.
I was a bit shocked by this interpretation. I had just spent six years writing a set of books that described the car, the walk up the hill, and the run down. I thought I had already reached the bottom of my problems. The dream, however, seemed to be a prophetic message that God was going to bring another major step in this process.
Unlike when I received the prophetic message from Psalm 91, I didn’t seek for a quick and easy fulfillment of this message. I had already seen that the climb up the hill represented over a decade of hard work and study, and the trip down had already taken nine years of a different kind of hard work and study. So I figured the issues related to the dirty stream might be similar.
Or …maybe the dream wasn’t from God at all …or maybe I had misunderstood it. I didn’t know – and I didn’t worry about whether I knew. Though I look to benefit from dreams, my faith is not based on them; it is based on the written word of God. So I just kept seeking God for His path for my life, figuring that if the dirty stream was important, He would show me what it was about.
Shortly before I had dreamed the dream in 2009, a friend had read my story and asked me, “Have you ever been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder?” I answered that I hadn’t, but I would look into it.
When I eventually did look into it several years later, I concluded I had at last found the dirty stream from my dream. I read three books and two workbooks about Borderline Personality Disorder and its treatments, and I read some of those multiple times. As best I could discern, God was helping me to see deep weaknesses at the core of my personality, and I wanted to do what I could to understand them. I believed the dream told me I would need to humble myself (going down steps), and I did that by embracing whatever humbling insights showed up as I faced the truth about problems that were not flattering.
I learned that at the heart of Borderline Personality Disorder is something called emotional dysregulation, which refers to a great difficulty some people have controlling their emotions. It is as if the person has race car engine emotions with go-cart breaks.[5] When they move in a direction, it is tough to slow them down (thus creating the problem symbolized in the dream by me not being able to stop my car).
Another way to think about this is that it makes the person’s emotions like an out-of-balance bicycle wheel. Each spoke on the wheel is an emotion like fear, anger, love…. In most people, these emotions find a middle ground, represented by the hub of the wheel, where the emotions work together well. When the person gets fearful or angry, for example, their general love and trust of others can give them perspective. The hub of the wheel stays close to the middle.
For a person with emotional dysregulation, one emotion or another will tend to grab control for a time and exclude the others. It is as if the hub of the wheel gets pulled out to the rim, and the wheel spins painfully. The person can be giddy at one moment and filled with rage shortly afterward. They may be blissfully secure for a time, only to quickly fall to irrational fear.
These insights helped explain my sexual problems. Shortly before these problems had shown up at puberty, I had been in so much emotional turmoil that I was cutting myself with razor blades. (Cutting is a classic symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder.[6])
When my sexuality arrived, it became my way to control my inner thrashing. By medicating myself with pleasure, I was able to comfort my emotions into a more stable state. In a sense, sex seemed to have “saved” me from some of the worst effects of emotional dysregulation. I latched onto it as “who I was,” because doing so stabilized my personality. (Sexual problems are another symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder,[7] as are addictions,[8] and mild psychosis – like hearing the voices I mentioned in the first two chapters.[9])
As the dream showed, God had already been working for decades to save me from the destruction this could have caused in my life (the trip up and down the hill). He had taught me that using sex as a sort of psychiatric drug was a disastrous coping mechanism. He had also taught me a Christianized form of the treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder (called Dialectical Behavior Therapy[10]). I realized I had slowly learned this therapy over the years, and the books I was reading helped me to see everything more clearly. I discovered more tools for managing my life (my car) by His grace.
All of this also confirmed something I had learned from experience. My ongoing struggles with my sexuality hadn’t primarily been caused by a lack of commitment to the Lord, a failure to flee temptation, or a lack of repentance. They had been caused by not knowing how to ride the out-of-balance bicycle wheel of my emotions. To the extent I lacked that ability, my heart felt compelled to turn to various addictions as a way to redirect the strength of my emotions into something more pleasant.
This addictive approach felt like “who I was” for decades – even after I refused to engage in addictive activities. It was a reflexive reaction to emotional difficulty that called to me from the depths of my being. Addictions offered a quick way to stabilize my emotions. They would have been a disaster in the long term, but in the short term, they temporarily helped rebalance the out-of-balance bicycle wheel of my emotions. They restored my peace and helped me to be more productive, at least for a time.
Fortunately, God helped me to stop practicing them before I found out the destruction they would have caused long term. By His kindness, I learned through experience that He is greater than my weaknesses and my ignorance. Through a relationship with Him, I was able to find workable answers that gradually revealed both the problems and the solutions. His strength was made perfect in my weakness.
Getting back to my purpose in sharing the stories in this chapter, notice the difference between my approach in college and the approach God eventually taught me. In college, I expected the Holy Spirit to touch me and quickly transform me. As an older man, I expected I would need to search, read books, experiment, suffer, learn from experience, and expose myself to limited danger in order to discover the process by which God was transforming me. Prophetic insight and power were a part of that, but I needed more. I needed the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him:
…that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him
In the next chapter, I will describe how my early struggles with sexual addiction gave me a life-changing example of receiving the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.
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