I don’t have it all together…seriously. There are days when it feels like, from the core of my being, everything I am is falling apart. This past week has certainly been that for me. For those of you who don’t know, for about a decade, I struggled with severe addiction to pornography. It took a sovereign act of the Lord to deliver me from addiction and the convicting power of the Holy Spirit to change my mind about pornography and give me a new Spirit. Growing up in a Christian environment, I grew up with a lot of knowledge about God and the bible. I knew all the bible stories and I had all the right answers in church. I learned how to imitate what I thought a christian should be. I could tell you why Jesus died for me and what it means to be a christian. I even knew that being a Christian was about having a relationship with God. However, with all of this being said, I did not have a relationship with God myself. I prayed a prayer when I was 6 years old to ask God for forgiveness for my sins, but I didn’t know Him.
“No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in Him; and he cannot keep on sinning because He has been born of God.”
1 John 3:9
“If anyone is in Christ, He is a new creation; the old has passed away and behold the new has come.”
2 Corinthians 5:17
“Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven. On that day many will say to me Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and do many mighty works in your name? And then I will declare to them, I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”
Matthew 7:21-23
On a trip that I took to the Dominican Republic in 2016, the Lord encountered me in a very real way. Up unto that point, I was imitating Christianity. I knew this because when I examined the thoughts and motives of my heart, I was more concerned with knowledge and the appearance of godliness, than I was with actually knowing God. I knew that my sexual sin and addiction was wrong in God’s eyes, but I never repented and I made a practice of sinning against God. I did not carry conviction. I only carried shame and didn’t want anyone to find out my secret sin. I cared that others thought that I was a good person, but the word of God never made it past my brain. I arrogantly approached God thinking that I had figured him out and I knew everything there was to know about Him, when I didn’t even know Him at all. You can’t know God and your life remain unchanged. That week in the Dominican Republic, God showed me that it is Him who breathes His life into me and unless He gives me a new heart with new desires, I cannot follow Him. If my desire for sin was never superseded and challenged by a greater desire, then I would still be slave to it and my sin would rule me. I would think that I walk in freedom, but truly walk in darkness. The years leading up to May of 2016 were some of the darkest in my life. I pursued sexual sin to some really deep perversions and in doing so, I isolated myself in my personal relationships and suffered through long seasons of loneliness, depression, shame, isolation and insecurity. But God called my name in May of 2016 and I ran out of that grave, out of darkness. Since then, I could truly say that my struggle with pornography truly became a battle. I began to find ways to actively fight it. I found people that I could talk to about it and began holding myself accountable. I found my resistance to temptation increasing.
Then, the Lord granted me a long season where I did not even think about looking at pornography. He gave me strong conviction and He started to give me a healthy perspective of women and view them as beloved and highly valued daughters of a Holy righteous Father meant to reflect His Beauty and glory. Every woman stuck in the bondage of sexual exploitation whether consensual or not is someone for whom Christ died and whom Christ views as supremely valuable, and here I was exploiting God’s daughters for my own selfish pleasure with no regard for the souls of the women I lusted after. A Holy fear of God came over me and I stopped… for a while.
It is with great grief that I am writing this blog. But, also with great hope that somehow what I share will help one person overcome slavery to sexual sin. This week, I watched pornography. I engaged in the sexual exploitation of women who were created in God’s image. I satisfied my own selfish desires and I treated what God created with supreme value and worth as an object for my own pleasure. I felt like I was having a crisis of identity. The enemy’s voice was quick to come in and say that I was never truly free from sexual sin, that the Spirit of God is not at work in me. He was quick to tell me that the calling God has placed on my life will never come true. He was quick to say that I am going to slip right back into the patterns I walked in for so long. Though I know God has called me to be His ambassador and representative to the nations here on earth and He has called me to teach people His word, I couldn’t help but feel like I threw it all away for a few moments of fleeting pleasure. All the beauty God had spoken over my life and future, and my identity felt like they had just fallen apart all under the bitterness of failure.
The enemy loves to remind us of our failures. He likes to remind us that we are inadequate, insecure, weak and unworthy of God’s love. He likes to remind us that we are falling apart and we are not holding well together.
But, the Lord reminded me that though I am not one who has it all together, I worship a God who does.
“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Colossians 1:17
It was God who began the transformative work in my heart May of 2016 and it is God who will be faithful to complete it.
I am weak.
But in my weakness, His power is made perfect.
I am inadequate.
But by his Spirit, he makes me more than enough.
I am unworthy and undeserving.
But he declared me worthy and deserving of it all when he said “It is finished” on that cross.
No matter where you find yourself in your sin struggle. Whether you have never felt convicted and never repented of your sins against God, or this is the 100,000th time you are coming before God in repentance, what God speaks over those who belong to Him, His children is always true. You really can come to him as you are and ask him to restore you. He really will answer and there is coming a day when all of us who belong to Him, will worship Him in Spirit and Truth completely free from the influence of our flesh and the work of Christ in our lives will be complete. There are no “Super Christians”- only super broken sinners in need of a Super God to rescue them from their sin.
“Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”
James 5:16
“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead, expose them. For it is shameful to speak of the things they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light it becomes visible.”
Ephesians 5:11-13
If there is anyone reading this that is struggling with secret sin, confess it, bring it to the light, repent and let God heal it. God is faithful, even in our weakness. He is loving, even when we are unlovable. He is so patient with us and He is calling us to repent and follow him with all of our being. He is so worth it. The fleeting pleasures of this world do not compare to the glory of God revealed through Jesus.
