It’s been a while since I posted, but I’ve been thinking about much of what you’ve said, though, and a lot of things have come to mind to ask and/or discuss. Part of the reason I have waited this long is because of my acute awareness of my tendency to overstep in things God has brought to my attention. Yes, I believe you crossed my path for a reason. I think you found Thinklings for a reason. I also was thrown a bit by your response to my words, and I wanted to take some time to sort out the things running through my brain regarding our conversations. In essence, to avoid a situation like I just described on today’s main post.
There are times when I am really good in the moment because the Spirit is leading, (pardon the “religious talk”–that’s what I believe it to be, whether you do or not) and there are times when I overthink to the point of interference. Enough people have taken your situation into their own hands and hurt you deeply. I do NOT want to be one of them. If I am going to screw this up, I hope you never read my blog again. Really. Discussion? Good. Asking pertinent questions to help you find your way? Good. Preaching to a former choir member? Pointless. Not good.
I know that in “my absence,” God is working in your life, though. And so will you be tempted alongside His provisions. Though I don’t know you or where you are in your life at the moment, I wouldn’t at all be suprised if at almost the same time you were presented with two things: a brother or sister in Christ coming alongside you in a tangible way (i.e. present in your life physically, not just via the internet) to walk with you through this crisis of faith (what I believe it to be, since you are even struggling), and a man inviting you to pursue a relationship with him. Why? Because just when we begin to seek God in any way when we have turned away, temptation is there to pull us back, and because sin will always take you further than you want to go. And if you feel guilty enough to walk away from God for ____, then surely you will never be forgivable if you take it further and ____, right?
So about that passage in Romans. The immediate words that popped out at me that you seem to have missed are “choose” and “no condemnation.” Paul doesn’t say that we are perfect, only that we are not condemned in our sin. Yes, we are a new creation, the old is gone, yada yada yada. But because of that, we do not have to “choose” sin. The law is good in that it made us aware of our sins, and useful because now we can “choose” to not sin because we are no longer ignorant. But though we are no longer slaves to sin, we find ourselves submitting to it. “I know I don’t have to pick the cotton, and I hate picking cotton, but I know how to pick cotton. I don’t know how to plant anything other than cotton. I know it depletes the soil and will eventually wear out the land, but I do cotton because it’s what I’ve always done.” This is where grace enters the picture. The former slave is not condemned for his cotton crop, yet he must be taught to cultivate more beneficial crops, ones that feed people, that nourish and rejuvenate the soil when they die, and that are less toilsome.
The thing is, long after you have changed crops, old seeds can sprout if the right conditions exist. When you till in the spring, you dredge up buried seed, and even though you’re planting okra, you can get a full grown cotton plant if you just let “nature” take its course. God is a cultivator, not just a creator. You have to yank the weed before it goes to seed, and over time, there will be fewer and fewer weeds that pop up each year.
I think, from what you have told me, that perhaps every time a weed popped up in your life, you panicked. “This is a wheat field, God, not a cotton field! Honest! Take these seeds out of the ground!” I think, though, that your sincere desire to live a godly life, your repentence, and your eventual honesty were all ways of yanking the weed before it grew to maturity and went to seed. I think, though, that the secrecy and pornography were just buried, yet alive and active roots that had to be dug out. You can keep chopping at wild honeysuckle and killing the foliage, but if you don’t get the root out of the ground it will keep coming back. . .and coming back. . .and coming back. And left unattended, it will choke the sun out of your flowers and veggies and bend your ornamental trees to the ground, leaving them permanently deformed if left that way for a number of years.
I don’t mean to say that you need to find the root of the problem, as in the source. You tried that. Pointless. What I am saying is that perhaps you were using inadequate means of suppressing growth. Instead of openly uprooting yourself in front of your wife, you just kept snipping off those telltale shoots so she wouldn’t know anything was growing there. And the porn root that was always shrouded just got bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, you were working at growing a beautiful garden in the rest of your life. But eventually there were too many shoots to keep up with, to much new growth to kill off in time, and you couldn’t keep on top of it.
That doesn’t mean that you have to let it take over your whole yard. And it doesn’t mean that your whole garden was a failure. I may be too presumptuous here in assuming that you were serving God in truly admirable ways throughout your spiritual struggle all those years, because you certainly could have been a “pew sitter.” But I think that you wouldn’t feel so unworthy of God’s continued outpouring of grace if you had been less than passionate in your pursuit of Him. I would like to know a little more of the good things in your life during those twenty five years. Surely you didn’t squander your whole life on self-gratifying to porn, or you wouldn’t feel like such a hypocrite.
Your failures do not nullify your victories. Your failures do not nullify your heart’s desire to do good. That’s what I believe Paul’s point was, in essence.
It brings me back to David. He failed God continually on so many levels! Yet God not only continued to forgive him, He blessed him and kept His promises to him. There were consequences, such as the loss of his first son with Bathsheba, the one conceived amidst adultery and murder, but there were also rewards for his repentence and love for God, such as Solomon, the child conceived with Bathsheba, now his wife, shortly after their first son’s death. And we know about Solomon, don’t we? Another example of consequences is the fact that David was not allowed to build God’s temple because he had shed too much blood. But his son, Solomon did. David failed in the father department with many of his children (look how many sons tried to steal his throne out from under him, not to mention Amnon raping his sister Tamar, and on and on), but that didn’t erase his success with Solomon. It didn’t undermine his words to Solomon before he died, to love God with all his heart and follow his commands all of his days.
If you look intently at David, he shouldn’t be called a man after God’s own heart by looking only at his actions. You must look at his heart. You must see the honesty in his prose and the acknowledgement in his poetry. You must see his deep and abiding love for God, not just his devotion to keeping His laws. You must see that God despised David’s sin and punished him for it, yet loved him through it and beyond it and kept his promises to him despite it. Over and over and over again.
I dare say He has done the same for you over the years, except that after David’s first son died, he stopped fasting and praying, accepted that “it is what it is” and moved forward. He comforted Bathsheba and they ended up with Solomon from the very wife he had aquired through sin. From the little you have related to me, I am not sure that you were willing to accept the good things God gave you. Or maybe it’s that you didn’t acknowledge that they were from Him in the first place. Or maybe you just didn’t see them, like David didn’t see the sacrifices his troops had made on his behalf when he heard of Absalom’s death. All he could do was cry over Absalom, and his top guys are going, “Hello!! What are the rest of us, chopped liver? The guy was out to kill you anyway! Put your praise where it belongs!”
One thing I remember mentioning in my original post to you on thinklings was the possibility that your “very hetero” friend was a gift of God to show you the difference between His love and sexual desire. You said that this was really your first “real guy thing” kind of friendship. And I can easily see how you were reluctant to give up that gift. But you also acknowledged that you became attracted to him and that led to your wife’s jealousy and eventual ultimatum. What I’m not sure you see clearly is that it got screwed up because you were unwilling to accept the boundaries of the friendship and moved it into fantasy territory voluntarily.
Now, you may argue that you didn’t want to be attracted to him, you simply were. I would then argue that the fact that you even owned gay porn, much less gratified yourself with it, betrays the truth that you, at times, relished your sin. If you were truly striving to fix your mind on things that are pure, lovely, etc., then you would’ve not wasted all that time and energy. And if you could spend time with a magazine or movie, you certainly could spend time fantasizing about your friend–by choice.
This is where that word “choose” is so important. You don’t choose to have the desire, but you choose what to do with it. You choose to immediately expunge it, ask God to help you change focus and choose to pursue activities or thoughts that are more beneficial to you, or you dig out your magazine and get down to business. You said that you asked God to take the desire away, yet admit that you continued to choose to immerse yourself in pornography at the same time.
Here’s the difference between the image of yourself you have thusfar portrayed to me, and David. When David chose to sin, he recognized at his point of repentence that God could not acknowledge his prayers in the midst of his sin. “If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, you would not have heard. . .” Even though you were repentant, you still hid your sin. That could be the difference between the two. It’s putting conditions on God’s cooperation. “I’ll be good if you will. . .” But you know He doesn’t work like that. The minute you try to put Him in a box, He tears the box apart and insists on making the hidden things plain, shining light on the things we prefer to do in the dark. That doesn’t mean He doesn’t love you. It means He wants ALL of you, not just what you are willing to let Him have.
Matthew, I can’t say if anything I’ve assumed is true for you or not. I just feel deep in my gut that you are selling yourself short in the grace department, and perhaps your self-hatred outweighs your love for God right now. Or maybe your devotion to God outweighed your love for him. You can be physically devoted to your wife and love another man. But the first and greatest command is not to be devoted to God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. It is to LOVE Him.
Perhaps you did. I suspect you still do deep down, and that’s why it all hurts so badly. You don’t have to hate yourself because you fail. We all have a giant in our lives. Mine is anxiety and anger. It takes over my best intentions and ruins so many things in my life at times. And were I not so keenly aware of the danger and did I not have Christ’s example to pull from, I would probably be an alcoholic and/or drug addict, too. I am an all or nothing kind of person. But that is also my strength, my gift, when I am walking upright with the Lord. I’m not endorsing New Age theology when I say that it’s okay to love yourself. I am only saying that it is okay to see yourself through the Father’s eyes. And you know deep down that He loves you past your self-loathing. And so do I, brother. So do I.
You are in my continual prayers, and I hope to find you in a different place soon, even if it be more difficult. The darker the road, the easier it is to spot a silver lining.
