Some original commentary on today’s breaking news about Newsboys/DC Talk singer Michael Tait being busted for multiple homosexual sexual assaults on young men in their 20’s while they got drunk with him. (I’ll leave the shocker “Rock Star abused drugs” revelation for others.)
1] The allegations against Tait, who allegedly felt the genitals of inibriated/passed out young men who partied with him, date back to 2004 or 2005. I’m encouraged by the fact that there WERE allegations, because that means the young men this happened to a] know that what happened to them was wrong b] that means they have the psychological framework to get help c] I’m grateful that we live in a time when psychological and religious help is openly available for male victims of sexual assault.
2] Tait is admitting that the assault is ‘largely true’ per Fox News today. After a generation around sex offenders, a general truth is that disclosure (admitting what someone did) tends to be a process. So, good first step, but I won’t be surprised or shocked if more details come out in the future. That’s what the process looks like, and that won’t tell me that God is not working on Tait to bring him to repentance and help him bear fruit keeping with the same.
3] I’m guardedly hopeful that Tait’s fame will not allow him to sweep this under the bus and avoid the consequences of his actions. For starters, most (but by no means all) treatment and education options for those who have/can commit sexual assault is only available on the far side of a coutroom. That’s a shitty realty for abuse prevention, but the stats for re-offending among those who receive treatment following their sentencing are encouraging. In my state of Minnesota, re-conviction rates drop by roughly half for perps who complete sex abuse treatment programs.
I want to be very clear: It would be A Bad Thing for our society and public Christianity if Tait faced no legal consequences for at least two sexual assaults. Society needs justice. God will handle the grace.
Speaking of which:
4] “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” St. Paul in 1 Timothy 1:15
I’m not shocked or rocked that one of the Newsboys had a homosexual sexual assault issue, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” In my faith, it is not a question of whether or not anyone I meet is a sinner. (We all are.) The question is more like, “I wonder what shape their sinful nature takes?” We all have one, and we all stand equal at the foot of the cross in need of God’s mercy.
The sins of some people are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later. So also good works are conspicuous, and even those that are not cannot remain hidden. – 1 Timothy 5:24-25 ESV
The God of all Truth has revelealed to us that homosexual activity is a sin, even without sexually assaulting vulnerable young men who trusted you. Michael Tait’s alleged crimes are all the more grievous for the betrayal of that trust. God is equally forthright that Jesus Christ has died for the sins of all humanity, and that includes Tait’s admitted homosexual activites and these alleged crimes. God has also established authorities to punish evildoers, and that is the just and right goal of government.
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. – 1 Corinthians 10:13
No, I won’t be deleting my Newsboys music or DC Talk concert memories because there were a bunch of sinners up on stage and now I know what one of their sins was. The reason? I know that both King Solomon’s sexual idolatry led him to legalize polytheism, and King David’s rape and murder are famous even among non-Christians, but God in his wisdom has kept their writings in His Holy Word.
That said, I’m pretty sure that Tait’s Christian Music career is and should be over for a significant time. I heard Rev. Mark Peske once say, and I have quoted him ever since: “Forgiveness is free. Trust has to be re-earned.”
God can and sometimes does restore fallen people to the lives they had before. Other times, he leads the blind out by paths that they do not know. If Tait does not reject Christ’s mercy, there will be an interesting path ahead for him. That may or may not involve public performance.
5] Hebrews 12 (the whole chapter) teaches us that God loves us too much – because of what Jesus Christ accomplished on our behalf on the cross – for God to skip disciplining us like a loving father disciplines his beloved children. It is my fervent hope that God will use the upcoming difficult times to discipline, correct, and lead Tait to a penitent and more righteous life relying on the grace of Christ.
This is all just Day One of this story, and I doubt I’ll be asked about it in a public forum after this. But that covers the bases.
Finally
6] In Romans 2, God warns that we Christians who rely on God’s grace to cover our ongoing sins while we point fingers at the sins of others are storing up wrath for ourselves, as well as giving the unbelievers reason to despise and blaspheme God’s Holy Name.
Tait seemed to ‘get away with it’ for 21 years till the walls came crashing down. If you are living with secret sins, or you’re afraid to repent, or even worse, if you think that you love to sin and God loves to forgive, let Tait’s example remind you that God is patient, but he is not fooled. It is better to repent and bear the consequences while you are young, because God is more faithful than you are wicked, and even if the consequences of your repentance last your whole life here on earth, what Christ’s love and forgiveness, won for you at the foot of the cross, has in store AFTER is totally worth it.
He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver; 14 I have become the laughingstock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all day long. 15 He has filled me with bitterness; he has sated me with wormwood.
16 He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; 17 my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness[a] is; 18 so I say, “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.”
19 Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! 20 My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. 21 But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; 23 they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 24 “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”
25 The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. 26 It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. 27 It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.
28 Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him; 29 let him put his mouth in the dust— there may yet be hope; 30 let him give his cheek to the one who strikes, and let him be filled with insults.
31 For the Lord will not cast off forever, 32 but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; 33 for he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men.
– Lamentations 3 ESV
But if you think that you have gotten away with your quiet sins so far, or that you have been able to remind you of the fate of Pharoah Amenhotep II, who faced Moses. Many times, Moses called for Amenhotep to repent and set Israel free from slavery. Many times, Amenhotep hardened his heart. But Amenhotep’s ultimate doom was sealed long before he died, because one day, the Lord stopped calling Pharoah to repentance, and started to set him up for destruction.
16 Then Pharaoh hastily called Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the Lord your God, and against you. 17 Now therefore, forgive my sin, please, only this once, and plead with the Lord your God only to remove this death from me.” 18 So he went out from Pharaoh and pleaded with the Lord. 19 And the Lord turned the wind into a very strong west wind, which lifted the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea. Not a single locust was left in all the country of Egypt. 20 But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the people of Israel go. –Exodus 10, ESV
Once YHWH himself decided to harden Amenhotep II’s heart, it was all over for the King of Egypt. Romans 8 teaches us that our sinful natures are incapable of understanding or desiring God, and without God’s help, we would all be self-condemned for all eternity. So be warned that God is not mocked.
Instead, God calls us to repent, and that life of repentance is a daily baptism of putting to death our sinful selves and trusting in Jesus Christ for forgiveness, life, and salvation won for us at the foot of the cross.
21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.
8 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.[d]2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. 8 Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. – Romans 7:21 – 8:8 ESV
Hebrews 12 calls the Christian life a ‘struggle against sin.’ St. Paul talks about his ongoing struggles with sin, and his ongoing dependence on Christ. Praise God that, no matter what our sinful nature takes, or what crimes we have to face here on earth, Jesus Christ’s victory at the cross and the empty tomb is complete, and his plan of us is glorious.
So let us pray for Andrew Tait, for our justice system, and for Tait’s alleged victims. Let us all the more pray for God’s mercy and grace to repent of our sins, trust in our own lives that the living God has done everything necessary for our salvation, and embrace his call to repent and believe, knowing that in the end it will be well worth the struggle.
18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. – Romans 8 ESV
Life with sexual brokenness seems to always be defined by shame. I am not talking about guilt: the feeling that we have done something wrong. No. Sexual sins and questions of identity are hammered by all sides of this broken world as shame: we are something wrong. Shame is a terrible burden, and it is not God’s desire for us, no matter what our sins or temptations.
Let us take a quick look at God’s holy and true Word, and let us believe what it tells us that we are. Then we can decide whether or not we should accept shame when Satan, the accuser of the saints, comes a-knocking.
I found this list on Twitter, and it seemed excellent and worth sharing:
1] You are hand-made by God for good works (Eph 2:8-10). 2] Even if you spent your life bedridden from a stroke, you could still serve God with your prayers (1 Pet 3:12, 1 Pet 4:7). 3] God uses our hardships to equip us to serve others (2 Cor 1:3-11). 4] God teaches us to trust Him when he sees us through hardships (2 Cor 1:3-11, Romans 5:1-4). 5] Like Joseph, you do not know what good God can bring from your evil times (Gen 50:20, Rom 8:28). 6] You DO know for certain that these present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in you (Rom 8:18). 7] In times when your suffering seems pointless, you have the blessed reminder of what God brings about when you are enduring difficulty (Romans 5:1-4). 8] We can always remember that the God who brought us both good and bad times (Job 1:21) is faithful: He was, is, and will be there for us. Therefore we can have peace and hope, and God has given us the whole Body of Christ and the blessed vocation to encourage them all (Heb 10:19-25). 9] In view of these great promises, we can rejoice and join the Psalmist in remembering just how great, faithful, and effective our Loving Lord is to us, so we may go about engaging in these magnificent purposes he uses to fill our lives and not forget his great benefits (Psalm 103:1-5).
In previous posts, I have spoken about the acronym HHALTS, which is a way of self-monitoring that can be very helpful for those facing sexual temptations or other addiction issues. In order to make these tools available to more people, I have taken these lessons and made them available as cheaply as possible in print and e-book format from Amazon.com.
God’s word says “The wisdom of the prudent is to discern his way, but the folly of fools is deceiving.” – Proverbs 14:8. HHALTS is a method of self-monitoring risk factors that can leave us vulnerable to sins against God, ourselves, or others. They stand for Horny, Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, and Scared. In the book I take a look at the Biblical examples of how these factors show up in multiple examples of God’s people sinning, or even falling away entirely. Then I take a good long look at the great hopes and advice that God has to help us. First and most importantly, the Lord loved us so much in our helplessness that he sent us Jesus Christ to live the perfect life that we could not, and then Jesus died to pay for our sins and rose again that we might have eternal life. That alone would be worth many books, but looking at these risk factors, and the good advice God provides in the Bible, I take a look at how we can address these risk factors as responsible stewards of the life God’s given us. It is not a magic formula, and there is nothing to be gained adding a half-dozen extra laws when we need God’s forgiveness for our own in ability to follow the first 10 Commandments. This is a book of practical, proven advice to express our gratitude to God and our love for our neighbor in response for all that Christ has done for us.
The good news it that God, knowing our every weakness, graciously gives us his Holy Spirit, the message of the Bible, and the mercy of Christ to sustain us and provide for us in our struggles.
HHALTS and Life with Sexual Temptations is available in e-book or paperback. I’m unable to make it available for free, but I’m charging as little as possible so that the resource can be available for all.
Hurt, anger, and fear about past hurts are so common among ssa/ma/tx overcomers that I would go so far as to say that they are the rule, and not the exception, for their lives. We live with issues of neglect, abandonment, betrayal, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the false promises that ssa/ma/tx lifestyles offer is that they will be a cure for our hurt, and either a comfort for our anger (it isn’t) or a channel for our rage (for those of us who want to vent our anger and not overcome it).
Speaking of echoes of past hurts, I heard a prison counselor (I was not myself in prison) speak once about the fact that anger is almost never an original response. It is generally among people the second thing we feel after hurt or fear.
We are hurt, and we want to lash out. We fear for ourselves or our future, and we tend to want to take control.
James 1:20 For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.
My sinful nature wants to rub the noses of those whose oaths and words I trusted with my very life, whose words were lies, hollow reeds, untrustworthy, transient, disposable. I have to live with the consequences of trusting against prudence, and forgetting the Word of the Lord.
Proverbs 29:25 The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts the Lord is safe.
The bigger the pain, the greater the anger. But I’m of Celtic ancestry, and my nation’s past is riddled with tragedies of our people’s capacity for vengeance, though it is the very stuff of legends. (Rent Next of Kin for an amusing taste of the mafia learning what Celtic/hillbilly revenge looks like.) In the farming country the KKK left my family alone because they knew our reputation, and no one wanted to be the person to bring my uncles down around their ears, though my best friend in grade school was a black Muslim.
But we’re not called to revenge ourselves when we hurt. And follow along, it is not enough simply to NOT revenge. Christ’s example calls us to a radical position of blessing and love for those our sinful human nature would vent itself upon.
Psalm 4:4 Be angry and do not sin, ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent. Romans 12:19- Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
So it is not enough for me to simply abstain from rage and vengeance when they might be justly claimed by heart and hand. That is only half the Gospel, and the lesser half by far. This is where any honest inspection of the New Testament paints such a portrait of forgiveness that it is impossible to separate forgiveness from fellowship, love, and reconciliation. For without reconciliation and love, the following passages become nonsense at best or passages that condemn us to hell at worst.
Matthew 6:11-15 Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
And in the same sermon: Matthew 7:1-2 Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.
So, not only can I not avenge myself when hurting and angry, but I cannot simply shun and abandon those who have hurt me. What good is a forgiveness that says, “I forgive you, and I never want to see you again.” if I then hear the same words from Christ? Such a forgiveness still leaves me bound for hell from the very measure that I have just used! “Depart from me” are the very words of condemnation Jesus uses to condemn the damned to hell in Matthew 7:23, so how dare I use those words, “depart from me, you worker of lawlessness” and call them forgiveness when in Jesus’ mouth they are the very syllables of damnation? Am I so cock-sure in God’s grace that I think I need have no fear of Jesus’ own standards? Am I so absent-minded that I could then live without fear as every time that I utter the Lord’s Prayer I am praying for the Lord to send me straight to hell by the standard that I am using?
Again, in Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness in Matthew 18:15-35!
15 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.18 Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed[f] in heaven.19 Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask,it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant
21 Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.
23 “Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants.[g]24 When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents.[h]25 And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife andchildren and all that he had, and payment to be made. 26 So the servant[i]fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ 27 And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. 28 But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundreddenarii,[j] and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ 29 So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ 30 He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. 31 When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. 32 Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33 And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ 34 And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers,[k] until he should pay all his debt. 35 So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
Jesus gives a purpose and goal of forgiveness in Matthew 18:15: It is to GAIN the brother back again. How can I claim to be God’s if, in my hurt and anger, my heart wants the very opposite of God’s goal in his commandments. Jesus commands me to confront my brother to gain him back again. American Christianity claims that forgiveness is something internal, and can be done while severing the brother from our lives, the exact opposite of the Godly goal.
Peter’s question in Matthew 18:21 is pure nonsense if we can forgive and cast out in Christian love! If we can forgive and cast the sinner away from our hearts and lives, then the answer is not seventy-seven times, but once! I can forgive my brother who harms me and throw him out where he can never harm me again! Then I have “forgiven” and gotten rid of the problem at the same time!
But Jesus follows up with a parable immediately after, that says if we do not forgive our brother from our heart, we are in a very, very bad place. There is a trilogy of Greek phrases here in Matthew 18:35 that do not translate well into English. It loses an important emphasis. My Bruce-the-Monk clumsy translation will drop the ESV’s your part of your brother for the actual phrase hekastos autou, Hekastos (each, every, or as an adverb, at all times, always) is completely dropped from the English translations from the King James on, though it is clear in the Greek and adds an emphasis on an already emphatic and terrifying sentence:
So also will my Heavenly Father do to you, if you do not divorce/release everything always from your brother from your heart.
This is a clumsier translation by far, but it is interesting not only because of hekastos, but because the world for “forgive” is actually divorce/drop/let go of used in the Lord’s Prayer.
So, if my brother sins against me, I have my brother and his sin and my hurt. If I cut out all of my brother’s sin, then I just have my brother and my hurt. BUT here is the Christian Gospel brought home. Life here on Earth is hurtful. The response to the pain is not to lash out, but to take up my cross, my pain, my suffering, and follow Christ.
Where do we follow Christ? Christ left his comfort, his right, his throne and went chasing off in loving desire (the word frequently used for Christ’s desire for his disciples’ fellowship is the same word translated elsewhere as passion/strong desire/lust) for his enemies who were actively hurting them. Ephesians 1 says that the joy of our redemption was such that Christ looked forward to it, cross and all, before the start of time in creation.
I can’t claim to have that heart, a Christ-like heart or Christ-like forgiveness if I do not have a Christ-like love, a love that passionately desires my enemies by my side, a forgiveness that defines them as beloved and desired instead of hated or revenged.
Days like today, that feels like dying, but I heard somewhere that the person who wants to save his life will lose it, and the one who loses his life for His sake will gain it. (Matthew 10:29, 16:25, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:24).
So, rejected, I must accept. Hurt, I must embrace. Scorned, I must long for those who scorn me. Hated, I must love. Forgotten (yeah, right) I must remember, hope, and pray, because that is what true love does (1 Corinthians 13) instead of the false forgiveness, which having been shown as counter to Christ, is ultimately a blasphemy and hatred of the other because it does not seek what Christ seeks, does not seek the kingdom on earth as in heaven, does not seek Christ’s will to be done, and therefore rejects God.
Here my sinful nature wants to fail the way America’s church fails. We have such a long list of people we must never forgive, never love. Adultery? Divorce! Let Hosea never be spoken of again! Crime! Punishment, and let 1 Corinthians 6 be cherry-picked to the bones.
We do not live God’s Way, and wonder why our nation does not remember God or honor Him? How can they say, “See how they love one another!?” when we reject the inconvenient, shun the wrongdoer, divorce the unfaithful, discard the unpleasant, lie to one another, deceive, abuse, exclude, and betray God’s grace in every way?
But in this case, it is hard, because it means offering love and open doors to the Vandals at the gates. It means sacrificially accepting hurt for a passion to have those who hurt me brought back into my presence, for the passion for their fellowship outstripping my own self-protection.
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
1 Timothy 1:15
A dangerous hatred has crept into the narrative of American conservatism that betrays the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Far from the progressive deceptions that turn us away from God’s word to embrace our unrepentant sins, this fresh uprising of genuine hatred must be overcome by returning to the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ and the full counsel of his holy word.
Monument Ministries exists to share the full counsel of God with those who experience same-sex-attractions (SSA), minor attractions (MA), and transsexual issues (TX). That means that I, a sinner, tell other sinners the same thing that Jesus has been saying since the very beginning of his ministry on Earth:
From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Matthew 4:7 ESV
This message is lacking among the poltical conservatives in my increasingly-divided country. As of the time of this writing, during the past calendar month I have heard politicians, political commentators, comedians, and even people speaking to an elder of my own church openly call for or joke about the idea of murdering minor-attracted people. They cheer, celebrate, and laugh at the idea of MA people being killed, or dying. The more political or the more painful the death, the more they cheer.
God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit absolutely and unequivocally condemn this behavior and this attitude. It will send its practitioners to hell apart from Christ, and through God’s holy word, he makes it clear that those who embrace this opinion have no part in him (1 John 4:19-21, but we’ll absolutely get there).
This is the fourth or fifth time that I have made this argument, and rather than retype it yet again when this Satanic line of reasoning rears its murderous head, I am publishing it to save time tomorrow, or the day after, when I must make these points all over again.
Let us start with today’s example from my church elder’s Facebook feed and move on from there.
What about what God thinks? He died for their sins the same that he died for yours.
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
2 Peter 3:8-9 NI V
And you might want to fear what else Jesus thinks.
For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Matthew 7:2
I would not wish to see you account for desiring the death of others when God applies it to you.
Stephen Crowder, a comedian and political commentator who regularly calls for painful deaths for MA people, is deadly wrong in this regard:
We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.
1 John 4:19-21
Furthermore, while God spares you for your sexual immorality even though you call for the death of others for their sexual immorality (Romans 2:1-5), the Stephen Crowder culture is further wrong in drawing a distinction between the sinful temptations of those you cannot sympathise with and the temptations of those for whom Christ whom you call your lord sympathizes. You should not ignore these two critical verses which I must quote routinely in my ministry work:
No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.
1 Corinthians 10:13
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Hebrews 4:14-16
So I cannot separate one particular sin and wish for the death of those whom Christ died to save because, unless Jesus the Word of God lies in his scripture, their tempation is not uncommon to man and, unless Jesus the Word of God lies in his scripture, the fact that Jesus can be approached by all for he has been tempted in the same way without sin means that Jesus himself experienced temptations to same-sex-attractions, minor-attractions, and transsexual ideas during his human life.
Think about that for a moment. Really think about that. If you are the sort of person who calls for those with minor-attracted feelings to be raped/burned/mutilated/whatever-vents-your-spleen, Hebrews 4:14-16 states that you have called for that wrath to fall upon Christ. How do you think that is going to work out for you?
God doesn’t have your gag reflex, or more precisely, his gag reflex at sin doesn’t skip you to land on those you wish you had permission to hate. It applies to all equally, and equally God has died for all.
This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Romans 3:23-24
Moreover, I would not desire to let my personal hatreds be the reason some sinner, witnessing the words of my mouth or what I type on Facebook, believe the lie of Satan that they could not approach the visible body of Christ to hear about the salvation and deliverance available to all sinners, them included, through Jesus Christ.
I know of one MA individual whose LCMS pastor, speaking from the pulpit in his sermon at a Minnesota church announced, “At one church we had a child molester who expected forgiveness. I still want to punch him right in the face.” That pastor had no way of knowing that he had a minor-attracted person in his congregation. Upon learning that the church would hate him for seeking help or mercy, the at-risk individual kept his silence. Within a year, that individual had gone on to commit a crime against a high school student and been incarcerated.
If the church is ever going to get serious about fighting childhood sexual abuse, it is going to need a plan to deal with both the perpetrators and victims of that abuse. The best plan is one that provides a path for at-risk minor-attracted persons to seek help before they can act out criminal and harmful behaviors. The second-best plan is one that addresses those who have committed crimes and present them with the tools of the Gospel and the message of salvation.
But, when confronted with human sinfulness and evil, and minor attraction is definitely a symptom of human sinfulness, how does God tell us to confront evil?
Fear and hurt are very common responses when we encounter those with minor attractions. Anger is never the first emotion. It is always the product of fear or pain. With an estimated one in three females and one in four males experiencing some form of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) before adulthood, anger springs from hurt for many people. Either we have been hurt by CSA or we know and love someone who has been. Even if we have not, empathy for children and awareness of the immense impact of CSA, along with fear for the young people in our own lives, serves just as well to fuel outrage at the very thought.
The pain and suffering society experiences from childhood sexual abuse is great, and the anger about it is (justly) very great.
But rage does not work.
Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls… If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.
James 1:19-21, 26
But not everyone with MA issues has or will commit a crime. I have heard many victims of CSA speak about how they have unwanted thoughts and associations forced upon them by their abuse, and they have lived their life in fear that these issues may turn them into their abusers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that the vast majority of CSA victims do not go on to act out those effects of what was done to them.
It is also true that, hearing the openly murderous hatred of society at large, those with MA issues frequently believe that they cannot find help, much less compassion, in the world. Sociologist Dr. Niel Whitehead, in his book My Genes Made Me Do It, points out that his survey of the ex-gay movement showed him that about 60% of the men who came for SOCE (sexual orientation change efforts) were themselves victims of childhood sexual abuse. Many of those victims whose CSA has resulted in issues involving minor attractions only reach out once they hit rock bottom, having entered the criminal justice system.
I would love to see a world where people with MA (and about half of CSA in the USA is committed by other minors, not merely adults) are not hounded into silence, but can find pathways to help and freedom from MA issues before they act out to hurt others, or hurt themselves in despair because they world has never told them that there is any hope for them, much less where to find that hope. How can I say that? That scenario is the world in which there are the least possible number of victims.
Am I advocating a world in which perpetrators of crimes against children go unpunished? By no means! God established governments here on Earth for the express purpose of punishing evildoers (Romans 13:1-7), and those who act out on MA desires gratify themselves at horrific cost to those without the physical or mental power to resist them. Jesus himself warned in the Sermon on the Mount that those who cannot reconcile with those they have wronged (and it is incredibly rare, though not impossible) for this to happen with MA and CSA cases, those offenders will face the full punishment of the law. As a matter of fact, Jesus mentions this truth of God’s justice in the very passage where he warns his followers against anger and wrath:
“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.
Matthew 5:21-26
All the anger in the world, and as a victim of childhood sexual assault myself, I am well-acquianted with anger on the topic, has no power to bring about the righteousness that God desires. My justifiable fury does not make me righteous. Typically, my rage at someone who has wronged me makes me a murderer at heart. It is a barrier to my own forgiveness, when I pray for God to forgive me as I forgive those who sin against me.
The truth is that rage defined my inner life from my first victimization at age eleven until my late twenties. It never offered me any peace or healing. That only came when I began to bring my rage to Christ, and then bring Christ’s mercy to my offenders through forgiveness and grace.
I understand that, for many, this seems like an impossible step. I think that if I tried to accomplish all of that in one step I would burst into a thousand pieces. But what I could no do at once, or lightly, Christ has taught me to do in his word.
First, before I consider my right to rage at any other person, no matter what their tempations or behavior, I must have a correct understanding of my own standing before the Lord. There is no better passage than my opening quote:
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
1 Timothy 1:15
The cross upon which my savior died belongs to me. That is where I earned death and hell. That is where my own sins merit nothing but God forsaking me and the world hating me. Before I can deal with anyone else who absolutely and clearly deserves death and hell, I must be kneeling at the foot of the cross where my own execution was scheduled by a just and righteous God. Only at the foot of my cross that Jesus took for me, and fully owning the reality that Jesus TOOK it for me, can I have any footing to deal with another person’s sins.
Then I can have the peace to deal with the rage born of my pain at what has been done to me as a CSA survivor and the anger of my fear for other children, and fear for my society. Those emotions are strong, and they are real, but as James has shown us, they are not the solution.
Does that mean that going to the cross means that I give up without any solution? By no means!
Having gone to the cross, I have some work to do on myself:
Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent. Selah Offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord.
Psalm 4:4-5
What does it look like to correctly ponder a source of hurt and anger like MA and CSA issues? Consider these two excellent instructions for trouble hearts in the New Testament. Though the world never offers a promise of peace in wrath, both of these directions promise God’s faithfulness when we feel distressed.
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.
1 Peter 5:6-7
…do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:6-7
God has very, very broad shoulders. He loves us so much that, even though he knows our every thought before we do, he still commands and invites us to bring our cares to him. In his love through Jesus Christ, he promises us his compassion and his peace. He also promises that all of our sufferings are temporary and at the right time he will make even the worst of tribulations seem like dust in the wind (Romans 8:18). The hardships of MA and CSA issues are not bigger than God’s power or more lasting than his faithful promises for our future.
That reality brings us enough peace to start thinking about God’s plan for the topic. Remember that Psalm 4 commanded us to ponder the source of our anger on our beds instead of lashing out in our feelings.
God brings us a steadfast assurance, and even more peace, with his faithful promise that he has not just dropped the issue. He simply hasn’t given the task of vengeance to us. That belongs to government (Romans 13:1-5). We have a different mission in his kingdom.
If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”
Romans 12:18-20
When I first started to apply this teaching to MA and CSA issues in my life, I found myself starting to get angry all over again. It felt terrible to think that God was telling me to live at peace with those with MA issues. Didn’t he know what I had gone through? What about the others in my life who survived CSA? People who did such things, or were likely to do such things ought to be viewed as the enemy!
Well, that’s fair. After all, Jesus Christ gave us specific instructions on how to deal with our enemies! He even went so far as to set the standard with his own life!
Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Romans 5:9-11
And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
Luke 6:34-36
The idea that God commanded me to let it go, let him take care of the vengeance and justice, and to love... Now he really was asking me to take up my cross and follow him. The very idea of doing nothing about some of society’s greatest sins and crimes, and then loving the people who were tempted to cause those tragedies or who had caused them already… That was beyond the pale.
Of course, God is both wiser than I am and more faithful than I have ever been. In his goodness he pointed out to me that he wasn’t asking me to do nothing. He was making me more like him, and showing me how to imitate him in the face of actual evil. Is it evil to act on MA desires? Absolutely. CSA is devastating. But God is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. So he calls us to be the same.
Then he started teaching me that this kindness and patience was the exact opposite of doing nothing. The early church in Rome experienced the same problem. Rome was a huge city full of every imaginable vice and evil. Without going into gory details, from the poet Virgil to the laws of the Empire, sexual exploitation of children and adolescents was commonplace among all of Rome’s other sins. Romans 1 contains a broad list of those sins, but then St. Paul’s epistle pivots from the grand tour of human depravity to a condemnation of the church for hating the wicked around them.
That’s correct. In a society of ever-more-visible wickedness and temptations to sin in ever-wilder ways, the American church is falling into the same trap as the Roman church. Paul’s rebuke to the Roman church at the start of Romans 2 also contains even more encouraging insight into God’s master plan for dealing with sinners.
Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.
Romans 2:1-5
The master plan of God’s great mercy in Christ is revealed in Paul’s warning to the Roman church. Minor-attracted adults (and youth) are the source of great fear, hurt, and anger because of the great damage done should they act on those temptations. But when God tells us to show the patience and mercy that God showed to us, and leave the vengeance and justice to the left hand kingdom of this fallen world’s governments, he is not telling us to ignore or poo-poo these severe sins away. He has faithfully given us the precise formula that God himself has used to effect our own salvation.
God is rich in kindness, forbearance, and patience towards us. God’s kindness, which found its ultimate expression in Christ dying for his enemies and then rising from the dead to conquer death, is precisely the mechanism by which we are saved. THIS is the means by which we have been changed from who we used to be through our baptism into Christ and the the ongoing support of word and sacrament. In Christ, our sinful old man has caught a terminal case of Holy Spirit cancer, and that wicked old sinner is surely doomed.
In the same way God calls us out of the rage that hurt and fear produce in our hearts, and equips us with his commands and the loving example of Christ himself with the very tools needed to create real change for those struggling with same-sex-attractions, minor-attractions, and transsexual issues. Every MA person we can lead to Christ and then help in dealing with their temptations is at least one, if not many more than one, less victim in our society.
Additionally, we must not ignore the clear warning for the ever-more-vocal wrath and judgment coming from the American political right in response to the ever-more-open evil on the American political left. If we continue to indulge in our hatred and judgment instead of pursuing peace, mercy, and love as God has shown us, we are storing up wrath for ourselves (Romans 2:5), proving ourselves to be outside of salvation (1 John 4:19-21), and failing to be part of the very pattern that God commanded to actualy address evil in our world.
It is not an impossible task. When we abandon our sinful and counter-productive wrath, find our humility at the foot of the cross of Christ, and cast our cares upon our ever-faithful Lord, we will receive the peace and help to respond to God’s mercy by loving our enemies and showing them kindness, since this is the very mechanism that lets us share the Gospel which is the power to save and transform the most wicked of hearts.
Then, God willing, we will be able to stand together and confess law and Gospel like the church in Corinth, yet another city besieged with open sexual temptation and sin.
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality,nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
Today I want to talk to you a little bit about how life is harder when you’re hungry.
For a long time, this was one of the hardest things for me to accept. I think part of it is that I held on to the idea that I was always in control of myself. You could say I was trusting in my own will power and never paying attention to the things that would make that will power fluctuate.
One of my pet peeves when I was in my teens was that I would be greatly upset about something, but when I tried to tell my parents about it their first reaction was to ask how long it had been since I had eaten. That used to make me so mad that I could spit. Why weren’t they listening to me? Why did they think that my problems weren’t big problems? Didn’t they understand that I was talking about important things!?
Now, I am not a particularly smart person, so it only took me another fifteen years to look back on my life and notice a pattern. My folks would outrage me by suggesting the first thing I needed to do to solve some incredible problem that threatened to overwhelm my world was get a bite to eat and something to drink and then come back to it. Now, as an adult, I can see the times when I was very upset, and times when the same problems didn’t seem like such a big deal. Sure enough, if you guessed that I could handle the same stress factors a lot better.
Mom and Dad, if you are reading this, you were right.
When I look back on my life, I think I had bought into a popular idea in modern culture. I was a big Star Wars nerd, along with every other kind of nerd, as a kid. There is a great quote by the Muppet Jedi Master Yoda in the original trilogy. In effect, Yoda said that Luke and the other people were luminous beings and not crude matter.
That is a new way of saying a very old idea, that we are spirits stuck in bodies. Some Greek philosophers and the early church heresy called Gnosticism thought this as well.
The truth from God’s word says that we have bodies, minds, and spirits. You can tell because both Jesus and the Old Testament say that we need to love the Lord with them all. This is pretty freeing. If I am my body and spirit together, instead of some super-being trapped inside a body, then it makes sense that how my body is doing will affect the rest of me. Maybe it would be better to say that I would not be lowering myself from some super-spiritual plane to take care of my body, too.
The simple fact is that our brains burn calories just like our muscles. Without fuel, we don’t think as well. Once again, I want to point out that our sinful nature isn’t going to go away in fear of a healthy breakfast, but why take up the daily battle against sin and pick another fight with your belly, too?
You would never try to run a marathon or try to win a competitive sports game with no fuel for your muscles. It is not helpful to try to make good decisions without brain fuel.
So far, we have mostly been looking at human wisdom. Let us take a look at some times in God’s word when people had a hard time while they were hungry.
In Genesis 25 we get the story of Esau and Isaac. Esau was coming back from hunting and he hadn’t caught anything. He was really hungry and Isaac had food. When Isaac offered him food in exchange for the blessing of that Birthright, Esau handed it over. He would spend the rest of his life paying for that decision he made when he was hungry.
Being ruled by your belly instead of your fear of God is such a big deal that Esau is held up in the New Testament as a specific example of godlessness.
Hebrews 12:15-17 See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.
When the people of Israel were wandering in the desert after their slavery in Egypt, their bellies got them into trouble twice. First, instead of trusting God to provide for them, their hunger drove them to complain that it would have been better to stay slaves in Egypt then for God to bring them out to die in the desert of hunger. You’ll remember that because God arranged to give them manna from heaven, which he did for forty years (Exodus 16).
The second time, even though they were eating literally miraculous food every day, the people of Israel complained that they weren’t getting enough meat. So, once again they were focused on their stomachs instead of trusting God and God punished them by giving them exactly what they asked for. He stuffed them full of quail until they couldn’t stand anymore (Numbers 11).
My third example of life being harder, and temptations being stronger when you are hungry comes from the New Testament. In the Gospel of Matthew, we know that after his baptism, the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness for he fasted for forty days. I don’t know about you, but I have never fasted for longer than seven days, and I was starving.
It is at the end of this forty-day fast that we have Satan’s three best attacks on Jesus. What is the very first thing that Matthew records Satan tempting Jesus about? He offers him food.
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Matthew 4:1-4
Jesus is absolutely right that God’s word is far more important than earthly bread. This is also a great example of knowing God’s word to defend yourself from Satan. Go figure, Jesus is a great example, period. As hungry as it is possible to be, he didn’t fall into sin the way that Esau and the children of Israel did.
God also knows that food is important and necessary for us, and in his love, he provides for us. He teaches us to ask for our daily bread in the Lord’s prayer. He fed the crowds with fish and bread rather than let them go hungry for one evening.
God makes it a point that he will faithfully give us food to eat, but he doesn’t leave us there. He also teaches us that God’s word is a much more valuable food for our souls than food and drink will ever be for our bodies. So, little brother, let us learn from the failures of the past and the success of Jesus. Unless we are fasting for some reason, we shouldn’t neglect to feed ourselves or our neighbors. Then we should know that God’s word is the food we truly need, which God faithfully gives us and will never perish.
Happy Holy Week and Easter from Monument Ministries!
I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the fact that we have a great and glorious Savior, and of all the amazing things that he has done for us. These are the very things that we take time to remember on this blessed Easter season!
My brothers in Christ, consider the amazing things that God has done for us!
From the prophet Isaiah, who wrote over 600 before Jesus was born, God the Holy Spirit inspired the prophet to share the good news of our great and glorious king!
Isaiah 53
Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2 For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?
9 And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.
WHY, we can ask in our dark times, when the bars seem permanent, hope seems dim, and Satan keeps throwing our sins in our faces along with the highlight reel of how we enjoyed the worst things we did… WHY would God do this to his only son for folks like US?!
For the joy, of course. Ephesians 1 spells out this Gospel truth beyond our wildest dreams. Jesus, knowing all of the price that he would pay, considered it a joy to pay it in order to redeem us so that we might be adopted as God’s sons and Jesus’s brothers!
And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom.For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
1 Corinthians 2:1-2
And
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Galatians 2:20
Now, this Easter, we can face the trials of life with the sure and certain knowledge that God is for us, that he loved us, chose us, and paid the full price for our sins. Now Jesus calls us friends.
No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.
John 15:15
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
Romans 8:18
So let us thank and praise God this Easter because of his surpassing greatness of loving us, adopting us, and sealing us with the promise of great glory, peace, and immortal life.
May God’s richest blessings be with you this Easter season.
Many years ago, when I was first starting to deal with people who dealt with addictions, I heard a quaint little acronym that addiction counselors use to help folks with issues stay clean. The idea was, if they kept track of these things in their lives, they could tell whether or not they were at risk to do something stupid, like break their parole when they used something (or someone, not all addictions are to drugs) again.
When I heard this saying, I wondered why we waited to teach this idea to keep until after they had blown up their lives. Sure, in the eyes of the world people with addictions need special help with coaching put their lives back together. Even so, I would much rather teach the same set of skills to people before they needed to put their lives back together. We don’t wait until someone gets in a car crash before we give them helpful hints about driving.
When I read the New Testament, particularly the writings of Paul, I am amazed at how much our daily struggle with sin sounds so much like someone dealing with an addiction. Since God’s word says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are freely Justified through Jesus Christ,
In Romans 7, St. Paul talks about his ongoing struggle with sin. He says that he keeps doing the very things he does not want to do. He fails to do the things that he wants to do. That sounds very much like the life of someone struggling with an addiction. So, I don’t think I’m putting words in the Bible’s mouth when I say that we are addicted to our sin and we cannot help ourselves. More than that, we are not people born good who fell into the mud of sin and need a good bath. David says in the Psalm 51:5 that he was sinful even in his mother’s womb.
If that seems pretty harsh to you, I invite you to consider the warning 1 John 1:
1 John 1:8-9 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Now, when you consider that this letter was written to people who are already believing, baptized children of God, maybe that will help take the ego out of the question. If we (Christians) say that we are without sin, we are kidding ourselves.
I want to be very clear that the list I’m about to give you is not a cure for sin. Only faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, and even that is not of our own doing, because of what Jesus has done for us on the cross to pay the full price for our sins, only this can save us. In truth, Hebrews 12 calls the Christian life a battle against sin. In that battle Christ is our only help. Instead, think of this list as a bunch of secondary bad guys. Our battle against sin is hard enough. We struggle against our sinful nature. We struggle against Satan and his minions who want to destroy us. We struggle against this sinful world. Why add an extra pile of bad things to fight? What we already have is hard enough.
So, let us take a look add a list of dangerous situations I find all too clearly in scripture, so that we can avoid them and keep our eyes on the main fight.
The acronym is HHALTS. It stands for:
Hungry
Horny
Angry
Lonely
Tired
Scared
That is catchy and sounds wise, but it is always a good idea to bring human ideas to compare with God’s wisdom. I found a lot of examples in God’s Word.
In the next couple of letters, I want to go through each one. We will look at some examples of these weak times in the Bible, and have a couple of frank discussions about how to be self-disciplined and take care of ourselves to cut down on the times they leave us vulnerable to sinning.
Don’t get me wrong. The Bible is not, first and foremost, about making our lives better or giving us a to-do list. It is about what God has already done for us in Jesus Christ. To that end, I’m going to talk a little bit about God’s faithfulness with every person that we look at. That being said, God’s word says that we are given a spirit of power, love and self-control (2 Timothy 1:7). In the Epistles we are told to teach young men how to control themselves (Titus 2:6). So, we are going to look at times when people lost self-control, and failed themselves or hurt others. Often, both.
We’ve got this list, and I’m going to prove to you that I can find it in the Bible. But what are we going to do with it? I think of my HHALTS list like a bunch of warning lights on my car’s dashboard. Okay, let’s be honest, I think about it like a computer panel in Star Trek, but it’s possible that not everyone is blessed to be the level of nerdiness that I am. So, if you want to think car, you can think car.
On a good day all of those indicator lights are in the green. I have eaten, I’m rested, I’m running my emotions instead of the other way around, I’m not starved for attention, and I’m not afraid. On days like that, I feel like I’ve got my feet on pretty good ground. Let’s be honest, it’s really hard to have all of your body and your feelings in a good place if you and God aren’t walking together, but if I have taken care of myself and rested, I do a lot better with the sins and temptations let the devil, this broken world, and my sinful self routinely throw my way.
It is hard to admit to myself just how much I am a flesh-and-blood human being, how little things like sleep and food have such a big impact on my emotional reserves and my self-control. I was kind of dumb when I was younger and I didn’t think I had to take care of those things. When I look back on times when I made seriously stupid decisions, I see some of those HHALTS lights flashing red in the computer monitor in my brain.
So, since Proverbs 14:8 says that a wise man gives thoughts to all of his ways, and many places say we are to be self-disciplined, I don’t think I’m going outside of God’s word to look at what makes me more likely to stumble and fall and what I can do about it.
These days that means I am frequently deliberate about keeping those indicator lights in the green. I mean, it is kind of hypocritical to ask God in The Lord’s Prayer to deliver me from temptation and then do a ton of things that throw me right into temptation’s lap tied up like a lamb for the slaughter. And of course, figuring out how to take care of these things frequently means going to God’s word, which is always the absolute best tool in our ongoing struggle against sin.
Follow along the next series of posts as we deal with each of the HHALTS in turn and look at what the Bible has to say about it.
Dan*, a young man with transsexual struggles, looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders when he spoke to me. It didn’t seem to matter how well he had reconciled his feelings with the truth of God’s Word, someone or something was always coming back into his life with a fresh attempt to cover him in shame.
I have frequently heard, and love, the following distinction between guilt and shame; Guilt is about what you have done. Shame is about who you are. Dan is a young man who is happily married, faithful to his vocation as a husband, a loving husband, and enjoys the respect of his church and Christian community. Of course, Dan is not perfect. None of us are.
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,
Romans 3:23-24 ESV
Jesus Christ has paid the full price, not just for my sin or your sin, those things we have done that do not love God with all our being or our neighbor as ourselves, but for the sins of all people in all places and all times. There is no act of comission (what we do) or omission (what we fail to do) for which he has not paid the full punishment. He freely offers us forgiveness and mercy because of his great love for us, available to all who believe. No Christian has any reason to give in to feelings of guilt over what we have done. It has been handled, taken care of, wiped fully off of the record by Jesus Christ.
Shame, though, is an attack by Satan on who we are. Shame does not say, “You have done wrong!” but “You ARE something wrong!” It is a vicious and foul attack, and for the Christian it is a lie straight from hell!
That seems to be an amazing statement from a ministry that deals with people struggling with same-sex attractions, minor-attracted adults, and transsexuals. We preach to free men and convicts facing life behind bars for their crimes. There are many voices, some tragically located inside the church, who shout that such temptations and feelings are signs of God’s rejection, marks of condemnation that puts the struggler outside of God’s love and acceptance.
God’s word provides the truth that destroys this lie! It does not matter what someone’s temptation might be. God’s word has the same Good News of comfort in Jesus Christ.
Here is the first truth, the core verse that destroys the lie that your temptations and feelings alone are a source of guilt or shame, as opposed to what we do about our temptations.
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
1 Corinthians 10:13
Paul, speaking by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, tells us that there is no one, not a transsexual, a same-sex-attracted person, or a minor-attracted person who is not feeling a temptation that isn’t common to man. There are hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in each generation who share these temptations and feelings.
If that wasn’t enough, the person of Christ Himself disproves Satan’s attack that feelings or temptations makes anyone less of a person, or less of a Christian.
Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Hebrews 4:14-16 ESV
The divinely inspired writer of Hebrews tells us that Jesus Christ, while he was here on earth, suffered every temptation in every respect. There is no temptation a Christian might feel, from binge-eating to sexual immorality, that Jesus did not feel in his own person.
Most of us know about the idea of Alcoholics Anonymous and other support groups, where people who share a common struggle listen to one another. They can offer compassion, understanding, support, and advice to one another in the face of their common experience.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, Jesus Christ, our perfect high priest, is waiting and available as our support group! He has felt every temptation common to man (and the Bible makes clear that there are no temptations that are not common to man). Not only has he faced our every feeling, but he faced them without failure.
In every place that Satan, the broken world, and our sinful natures tell us that we should feel shame, we have an understanding and loving adoptive Lord and brother. God’s word tells us that Jesus himself is able to have compassion on us in any circumstance. We have his divine invitation to come to him with any of our trials and temptations, and the promise of his loving grace and mercy!
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.
1 Peter 5:6-11 ESV
What a great and loving God we have! He eagerly waits to hear our prayers about our struggles! He offers us mercy and compassion that he has completely paid for! More than that, he gives us the comfort and mercy to know that these temptations and trials are just passing things. They are a cloud moving in front of the sun. The clouds will part and the sunshine of God’s relentless love will continue to shine on us in this world and in the next!
These great verses are a blessing and a refuge when the world, the Devil, or our own memories comes to bury our hearts with shame. That grave has been opened. The penalty paid. All that remains is Christ’s love and Freedom for all people in any trial and feeling any temptation. We are all equal at the foot of the cross!
The following is a letter written from a male survivor of sexual abuse to another survivor. It discusses the ongoing ramifications of childhood sexual abuse in adulthood. While it is not the intention of Monument Ministries to be graphic or offensive, this letter may be triggering to some.
It is not uncommon for men and women dealing with ssa/ma/tx issues to also deal with the consequences of childhood sexual abuse. For those dealing with minor-attracted issues, it may be valuable to see the long-term consequences of childhood sexual abuse. The author of the original letter wishes to remain anonymous, but cited 2 Corinthians 1:3-11 as his motivation for sharing, in the hopes that the truth that has comforted him in his recovery may be of some comfort to others.
Please be sure that you are in a safe place, physically and mentally, before reading.
Used with permission. Some details have been changed to protect the identities of the innocent.
Hey [Redacted]
[I read what you wrote, about what you went through with your family. You are very brave to be able to share about some pretty tough stuff. I am so sorry to hear about what you went through. No one should have to deal with that. None of us should have to deal with the unwanted memories or thoughts, either.]
[When I read about those flashbacks, it was almost like you were talking out of my own diary, if I kept one. When I read how much you hated them, and how you felt guilty and dirty afterwards, I had to say something. I hope you will hear me out.]
TRIGGERS
I gotta chime in because I can’t count how many times I nearly killed myself over this. It is my biggest, most recurrent wound.
I was date-raped for 2 hours and in terms of my body’s reaction it was the most intense sexual experience I’d ever had in my life.
My perp was similar aged, but he set up circumstances to make me vulnerable while he stayed straight-headed, and as soon as I wasn’t all there he went right for the sex stuff.
And I’ve never felt anything so intense. It destroyed our relationship because I couldn’t look at him without remembering how good it felt, and how much I hated myself for feeling that. HATED myself. It would creep into my fantasies. I had sex dreams about it, and I would wake up, go to my bathroom, and want to kill myself. Because only the dirtiest person in the world would have that done to them and miss it, or want it.
That was the way I stabbed myself in the heart over and over for something I didn’t do. Didn’t ask for.
Man, if he had just freaking ASKED me I’d have probably done every thing he wanted. I loved that guy. But he wasn’t loving towards me.
That was 16. I was 30 or so when my shrink finally convinced me to deal with this.
Man, I wish I could throw myself between your heart and that knife of guilt you keep hitting yourself with. Because I have that same thought tied up in a corner of my mind. If I let it out… man… it can really kill me.
The other guys have really hit it, the truths that have set me free even if I still feel the wounds from time to time.
1] I am MADE to want sex. I’m made to want someone to want me. It’s supposed to feel good that someone wants me, when someone holds me, when someone looks at me like I’m made of solid gold. That equipment is made to be touched. Held. Prompted. It’s made to react. It’s supposed to feel good.
2] So when my perp gave me those things, it was HUMAN of me to feel good. And when my perp used those God-given, normal things about me to get what he wanted, he was using my humanity, not my flaw, to turn me into his toy.
3] My brain is set up to remember sex, to seek it out again. It is not built to sort out the bad from the good, it just knows “off” and “on”. So when it remembers stuff that I don’t want it to… it’s being human, too.
4] And I knew it was wrong, so there’s all that adrenaline, all that “hand-in-the-cookie-jar” feeling piled onto all the sex stuff… and it was too much for my teenage brain to deal with. It wasn’t meant to handle all that. So, it broke a little, scarred a little. Left an imprint like a boot-mark on my sex drive. He stomped on my private life, and I live with the boot mark.
But it’s his boot mark. It’s not mine. It is there because I’m human, not superman. And that’s ok. I was only ever meant to be human.
And he set me up, just like your family set you up. It sounds like they made sure that you knew about sex, that you were wrapped into their circle. And just like my perp, if they had used it for good, that would have been awesome. Just like my perp, the fact they took what they wanted, shame on them.
You’re just human. You’re just my hero.
Because you survived, like me.
You have the guts to talk about it. Like me.
And you’re willing to get help.
Which makes you way smarter than me.
Today you’re my hero.
So let’s be human together.
K?
Just human, hero.
We are not defined by our faults, or our wounds, but by the truth of Jesus Christ within us, which nothing can take away.
Monument Ministries 