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Spirit-Led Identity Change
<page 18>I didn’t find answers to my sexual problems quickly. By the time my final semester at college came, in the fall of 1979, they were threatening to derail my life. They had grown gradually worse during my first eight years of faith, and I had now reached a breaking point.
All of this had happened in spite of the fact that I was radically committed to Jesus. I read the Bible; I was involved in church; I obeyed in most areas of my life; I had confessed my embarrassing sins to God and others; I had spoken with a counsellor. Yet my problems continued to grow worse!
Sin was calling for me to give up. It told me that this was just “who I was.” It was futile to put myself through the turmoil of trying to be anything different. I might as well accept myself and get on with life.
I have seen many face similar temptations, and I know that they can be incredibly persuasive. At the time when I was struggling with my own issues, one of my closest Christian friends from college chose to live as a homosexual. He had fought against doing so for years, and he finally decided to follow what he thought was his own true identity.
I am grateful that I didn’t make a similar choice. In the middle of my growing temptations, I discovered (or rather, I believe the Holy Spirit led me into) the final pieces of a pattern that has now become a standard part of my life. It goes like this:
I stand in the truth that I am accepted and loved by God through the sacrifice of Jesus. I hold onto this no matter how sinful my emotions or actions might be.[11]
I recognize that in spite of being accepted and loved, I need to change.
I also stand on the truth of who I am in Jesus, even when my experience tells me a different message. His word teaches that my real identity is that I am a new creation in Him. I can love Him and walk in His ways, even if I have not yet learned how to do that.
I press into whatever I can that will help me to change. I seek God, study His word, listen to others, read, try to obey, look for practical wisdom, and learn from experience. I do this even if obedience throws my emotions into pain and confusion for periods of time. I do what I can to walk in faith, wisdom, and truth – trusting that He will lead me into how to handle any difficulties that show up along the way.
Step 4 generally leads to a war where some parts of my heart lock into what God is doing and others become increasingly furious over “not being true to myself.” My personality fragments (another symptom of a tendency toward Borderline Personality Disorder[12]), and the out-of-balance bicycle wheel of my emotions spins painfully. I may develop desperate feelings that my heart could self-destruct if I don’t find some way to resolve my internal contradictions.
I see this feeling that I am not being true to myself, in part, as a lie. I actually am being true to some parts of my heart. In fact there is a significant part of me that is happy about what Jesus is doing. Yet there are other parts that are attempting to mount a coup. I have denied them and done whatever I can to hold them back, but they refuse to yield.
<page 19>In time, it becomes obvious that though there are advantages to delaying my internal war, I can’t do it forever. I have gained some wisdom by playing it safe, but the strain of the growing internal divide is destabilizing me. I need to find some way to bring together the warring factions.
Eventually, I sense God leading me to let my conflicted emotions “fight it out.” So I let the battle happen – still trying to control my words and actions as best I can to protect everyone. I know which side God has chosen to win, but the other side has shown that it will not fade quietly into the night, so I let it have its say.
The fight involves embracing the different parts of me and slowly – often painfully – riding the out-of-balance wheel of my emotions as the Holy Spirit teaches me what to do about it. I learn to mourn the losses each part feels, and I find productive ways to work through offended reactions. I embrace the fact that my life will be messier than I hoped, and I become OK with that. I don’t compromise with sin, but I learn to work with the parts of me that will sometimes want to sin.
Gradually, the different pieces of my personality find common ground in the comfort and wisdom of God, and this allows them to join forces and form a new identity. This is where step 4 proves extremely helpful. The fact that I have already worked with the Holy Spirit to learn all sorts of spiritual and practical insights before the fight starts saves me a great deal of trial and error in the fight. I have been prepared with many partial answers before the worst of the trial, and they become building blocks that are rearranged as the new version of me takes shape.
My sexual struggles, for the first time, had led me to step 5 in this pattern. I had been practicing steps 1 through 4 for eight years, so 1) I stood on the truth that I was loved and accepted, 2) I knew I needed to change, 3) I believed I was a new creation in Jesus, and 4) I spent a good deal of time learning how to follow Him.
But this had led me to an emotional war that was unlike anything I believed a Christian should face. I had tried to deny “who I felt I was,” but this had not worked nearly as well as I had hoped. Yet God was about to use the preparation of the past eight years to transform me.
It would have been good if I had faced my emotions without falling into sinful sexual actions, but I was months away from that sort of wisdom. So I fell, but I protected everyone by avoiding especially dangerous sins (those that involved other people).
Nevertheless, because my goal was to find God’s answers rather than to indulge myself, I continued to seek Him, read the Bible, and go to church. In addition, I confessed what was happening in my life to my closest Christian friends and to a leader in our church. I decided that if I was going to crash and burn, I was going to do it semi-publicly. I didn’t justify my actions. I simply said, “I have tried to find answers to this for eight years, and nothing has worked. If you have answers, please let me know.”
No one had any great insights other than that God loved me and would give me wisdom about the situation. They prayed that this would happen and supported me.
<page 20>Fairly quickly, I had an encounter with the Holy Spirit while reading Romans 1 and 2. I not only sensed the Holy Spirit speaking to me prophetically …it was almost as if I had a conversation with him.[13]
I came out of the experience with an entirely different view of sin, judgment, and the sacrifice of Jesus. Previously, I had thought of myself as a basically good person with a sexual problem. I now saw myself as a man who was addicted to sinful evil that fought against the truth of God. I would be destined for a well-earned eternity in hell if not for what Jesus had done for me on the cross. Though I had believed this as a doctrine for years, I had never before felt it in my emotions. The Holy Spirit opened my heart to sense God’s anger at my sin, and this helped me to see why Jesus had to die for me. He was my only hope.
My view of what it would take for me to repent had also changed. I had thought of my sexual sin as being like a wart on the otherwise smooth skin of my soul. I expected it to be removed by a simple operation – a zap of the Holy Spirit together with some repentance and discipline. I now saw it as a cancerous tumor woven throughout my being. It was a wickedness that had become so much a part of me that I could never remove it by myself. To heal would require the Holy Spirit to work in ways I had never before experienced.
When the encounter ended, nothing in my actions immediately changed. I still didn’t know how to stop sinning …but my entire world had changed. It was no longer ruled by a god who fit my definitions of justice or love. Instead, the true God had His own definitions. He was both much more wrathful than I had imagined, and also much more loving.
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 new 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. I was able to more fully apply the truths of the first three steps I listed above. 1) I was loved and accepted by Jesus because of His amazing mercy. 2) I knew I needed to change, because I had seen the evil in my heart in the light of God’s judgment. 3) I was also able to see myself as a new creation in whom the Holy Spirit was working in ways I had never before known.
In that environment, I was able to walk through the practical issues of pulling together the warring pieces of my personality (step 6 listed above). I found the ability to study the out-of-balance bicycle wheel of my emotions as I sat in the security of God’s love – and as I did, my emotions became more manageable. The inner workings of my heart were laid bare in the light <page 21>of His wrath, mercy, and power, and I began to feel like He was giving me some control over them.
Just as I had earlier learned to actively work with my mind and will (chapters 1 and 2), I was now learning to actively work with my emotions. An analogy will help to illustrate this.
If we picture my emotions as a river that ran through my heart, we can say that the river had previously been out of control. It carried me to harmful places, and all of my attempts to dam it up or redirect it had yielded limited success. I now spent several months studying the river in the light of God’s word and Spirit.
He graciously gave me one extremely prophetic experience which became the foundation for a major reorientation of my view of the river, but this, by itself, didn’t produce the full change. That came through many far less obviously prophetic experiences where I grew to understand my heart and gained the wisdom to work with it. Few of these other experiences were dramatic, but this didn’t make them any less Spirit-led. God was working in me to give me the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him (Ephesians 1:17), and this helped me to control the river and steer it in a healthy direction.
Describing this from a Borderline Personality Disorder perspective, my sexual sins had previously been my answer for the turmoil in my heart. I felt that a life lived without their medication was beyond me. Now, God was giving me better answers for my turmoil. He was comforting me and nurturing my emotions with His love and wisdom.
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 when I left college, I fairly quickly gave up my sinful actions and haven’t returned to them for over forty years.
A significant piece of my heart had taken on a new identity, and sexual sin no longer fit into “who I was.” Many problems still remained, and they would lead to significant emotional struggles in the future, but I now had a concrete example I could look back on of beholding the glory of the Lord and being transformed into the same image from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:17-18). I didn’t understand all of what that meant, but a major piece of a Spirit-led identity change was now in place.
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