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Spirit-Led Identity Change
In this chapter I will use an example from my life to illustrate the approach I take toward living by God’s strength rather than our own.
At one point in my walk with the Lord, almost twenty years after the transformation that occurred in 1979-1980, which I described in chapter 4, my resolve to obey Him in the late 1990s devolved into angrily saying to myself, “What is wrong with you that staying away from sexual sin feels like it is destroying you?! You have done well in your actions for almost twenty years – and you have been blessed. Why can’t you just accept the benefits and move on? Instead, you cling to your past longings as if your life depends on them. Why do I have to live every minute of my life with someone who is as messed up as you?! …But you are not going to use your feelings as an excuse to sin. If the only way you can continue to do what is right is to angrily wrench yourself away from this insanity in your heart, then do it and don’t be stupid.”
Obviously, this approach was far from perfect. It certainly felt like I was living by my own strength. At times, I even crossed the boundary into being sinfully harsh on myself. (But remember …I was facing temptations toward sexual sins …to fall to them really would have been stupid.)
God seemed to have abandoned me in this area of my life. I had given up sins that seemed to be so much a part of who I was that leaving them was impossible, and I had trusted Him to enable me to do so, but now I felt as if I was headed for an emotional breakdown. It became so painful that my heart was falling into rage (a common symptom of a tendency toward Borderline Personality Disorder[15]). …But I wouldn’t allow myself to express that rage toward God or others, so I turned it against the only “sort-of-permissible” target I could find – myself.
I looked for help from other Christians, but no one seemed to have answers. I was doing everything I had heard I should to deal with sexual temptations, but the struggle felt like it was seriously damaging me. The easiest way to escape from that seemed to be to return to my former sins, but doing that would have caused a great deal of harm to others and myself.
It was as if I was stuck between who I felt I was and who I needed to be – with no good way forward or back. I wondered how that could have happened to a sincere Christian. Did it mean I was deceived about the sincerity of my faith? Did it mean that I had believed a lie and there was no God who would save me?
Trapped in that dilemma, I sided with the silent majority of Christians who voted in favor of trying to not think about sexual issues. Though that required me to harshly shut down my emotions, it seemed like the only way I could stay anywhere close to pure in my thoughts. …Yet it left me fighting to avoid smoldering rage.
Looking back from where I am as I write this book, I can explain a good deal of what was happening by the fact that I was in a situation where I had to learn without another human being to teach me. My tendency toward Borderline Personality Disorder had created a situation that mystified just about everyone. The only realistic hope was to grow in my relationship with the Lord to the point where He could directly teach me.
…And He did teach me. In the process, I concluded that it was a mistake to see myself in terms of walking by my own strength versus walking by His. Even my anger, which felt very much like my own strength, had come a long way from my youth. I was nowhere near to cutting myself with razor blades. I realize that this is a pretty low bar to measure myself against, but it was the bar where I started. And though my current anger bordered on being out of control, it had also been a great help. It had motivated me to make a string of wise decisions that had prepared the foundation for the way forward.
What I was missing about my anger, however, was that it could only accomplish so much. It helped me to control my actions, but it couldn’t nurture my heart. Its firm hand steered me away from trouble (which I desperately needed), but until I developed God’s compassion and sympathy toward myself, I wasn’t going to be able to find the full answers I needed.
But I was afraid to feel compassion and sympathy toward myself. Compassion and sympathy were part of the reason I had fallen to sexual temptations as a teenager. They told me that God would never require me to face the sort of emotional struggle I needed to face in order to give up sexual sins. To do so was so difficult that I felt like I was living by my own strength, so I had chosen to fall to sin rather than strive in what felt like my own strength. In a bizarre twist of theological confusion, I thought that to stop sinning would require me to be unspiritual.
To describe my dilemma in more detail, it is helpful to refer to that out-of-balance bicycle wheel I mentioned in chapter 3. Anger and compassion were like separate spokes on the wheel, and one or the other tended to grab control and exclude the other. As a result, the wheel of my inner being spun painfully. When compassion was in control, there was some nurture, but it tended to spill over into excuses to sin. When anger was in control, I acted well but was afraid to allow my heart to receive the nurture it needed.
So …given a choice between compassion with sin and anger with a lack of nurture, I had chosen to let anger pull the wheel out-of-balance. It produced better results.
But as I grew older, anger was causing my heart to rise up to protest the lack of care. And to quell what seemed to be a compassion-led revolt against wisdom, anger fought back to squash the danger …but this only made the damaged parts of my heart more determined to fight against what felt like anger’s abuse.
Fortunately, my life was based in my relationship with Jesus, and after a good deal of encouragement and discipline from Him, I became convinced I needed to accept the risk and once again give compassion a try. Hopefully something had changed since I was young. I had for years practiced step step 4 from chapter 4 of this book (do whatever I can to walk in God’s ways). This had helped me to survive until I now found myself in step 5 (a growing internal war). Now I became convinced I had to move to step 6 (let the war happen). It was time to let anger and compassion fight it out and see what would happen.
In the year 2000, I let the fight occur. As it did, I saw that anger and compassion could be friends. I was able to keep each from grabbing control over the other, and I discerned how they could work together to create a safe environment for healing. I used the firm resolve of anger to avoid sinful actions, and I practiced compassion by giving myself permission to feel my complicated brokenness with mercy and sympathy. This gave birth to a long process of emotional growth.
As it became clear that healing was occurring, I concluded that though it had looked as if my anger was an expression of my own strength, it was actually just an imperfect expression of God’s strength. It was a stage of changing from glory to glory. I had discovered the value of the heated determination, and this had led to a series of good decisions that had prepared me for a better future. Now it was time to enter that future by adding greater compassion to my emotional experience.
Ironically, if I had refused to embrace the difficult steps along the way, if I had avoided angry determination because it felt like I was living by my own strength – I would have actually been living by my own strength. I would have been passively letting go of the grace God was giving to gradually rise out of the deceitfulness of sin – all because the whole experience seemed too unspiritual.
With that as an example, I am now ready to give my definition of living by our own strength: I don’t believe it has anything to do with how hard we are working. I also don’t believe it is related to how much we are using our soul to make progress. If we are submitted to God in faith, if we are trusting Him to empower us, if we are seeking Him for direction, ready to change at His command – then we are living by His strength, even if we are frustrated and partially failing. To live by God’s strength is to humbly do what we can to obey, all while relying on Him to empower and guide us.
To be honest, however, I am not a fan of thinking in terms of living by God’s strength versus our own. It can lead to an overly simplistic view of life. For me, it paints a picture as if there are two electric outlets on a wall, one for God’s strength and one for our own. We feel that all we need to do is to be plugged into the right one.
I believe it is more scriptural to say that we need to be plugged into God, and He takes us through a process of transformation from glory to glory. We discover His strength gradually as we grow to experience it in different areas of our life, even while we don’t fully understand what is happening.
We have times when we aren’t sure what is working and what isn’t. We experiment and imperfectly uncover areas in which He is leading us. It may not feel all that spiritual, but we humbly do our best to obey, making mistakes and learning from experience.
Changing from glory to glory implies that we have to learn to live well with being in stages of incomplete glory. My struggle with anger was such a stage. I was finding some of God’s grace in a difficult situation, making my way to a better one.
If we panic when our life turns out to not be the pristine spiritual experience we expect, we may let go of what God is giving us. We misjudge our effort, anger, and pain to be relying on our own strength, when in reality it is us growing to rely on His.
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