Desperate Joy

  From the time I was very young I knew that God loves me.  I could quote John 3:16 and sing "Jesus Loves Me" with the best of them.  As a child, I believed in God's love and felt it at many different points.  But then something happened as I journeyed into my teens and twenties, I became addicted to internet pornography.  As the acid addiction spread through my being, that sense that God loved me slowly dissolved.  The more involved I was with porn the colder my heart became.  Whatever love I had felt for God when I was younger gradually grew distant and dark.  I could still feel his love, but it was a shadow of what it once was. In spite of the deadness of my feelings, I still believed in God's love.   My faith was built on the unchanging Word of God, and when it told me that God loves me, I believed it.   But my passion for the Lord was cooling, doused by the black water of pornography.   My religion was driven by duty and self...

  Pornography addiction is an insidious and powerful enemy. It had a strangle hold on me for most of my life. When the addiction was running the show, one of the trademark problems it caused was isolation. Every time I acted out with porn I would be filled with toxic guilt and shame, this led me to hide from God and from others. "How're you doing?"   people would ask. I became the master of the inauthentic smile and the "I'm fine."   Even when I was particularly distressed and depressed and those close to me could see I was not okay, “What's going on?"   "I'm just tired, I didn't sleep well last night."   Which was usually at least partly true, but the reason I wasn't sleeping well was because I was up half the night on the internet clicking away my sanity. I was filled with pride. Pride in my image, I could not let anyone see how weak I was. I was the good Christian guy; I was a leader in the church. I had a reputation t...

  The other day I tuned in to the pop radio station and I heard Katy Perry crooning about the dangers of falling in love, one of the lines said, "Make me your Aphrodite, make me your one and only, But don't make me your enemy, your enemy."  Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of love and beauty and was one of the many false gods people long ago worshiped in place of the one true God. I am amazed at the diversity of gods and goddesses people once worshiped.   There were gods for the sun and moon, gods for lightning and rain, gods of fortune and fertility, and gods for death.   Whatever you might want or need, there was a god for you. We moderns are more sophisticated in many ways than those ancient Greeks, we do not worship gods and goddesses after all.   But idolatry is still alive and well.   While Ms. Perry may not be looking for anyone to make a statue of her and worship her, the message in the song is that we often take romantic love, the people we love...

  The winter Olympics in Beijing recently came to a close. I am always amazed and inspired by the feats of athleticism that these champions accomplish every four years. One of the things that most impresses me about these athletes is their tremendous level of dedication and self-mastery. They spend hours each day training for years upon years, pushing their minds and bodies to the limits of human endurance. They eat only according to carefully structured diets and often forgo social and family events so they can compete and train. Their entire being is laser focused on their sport and on winning gold, every hindrance to that goal is set aside. They push through injuries and setbacks and as a result accomplish some of the most amazing feats of skill, strength, and endurance. I am not sure if the Olympics were a thing when Paul was writing his letters, but he certainly had seen foot races before. He used these athletes as an inspiration for the church in Corinth and for us today, ...

  We live in a culture that is saturated with lust. It seems everywhere we look we are inundated with images, songs and videos that are either explicitly sexual or are heavy with innuendo. It is like we cannot even tell a joke these days without making it into something sexual. This makes for a challenging environment for those of us who are committed to following the Lord with all our hearts. I have been a Christ follower from when I was a child, and since puberty fired my veins with sexual desire, controlling lust has been a daily challenge. One area of difficulty for me has always been masturbation. There have been a couple periods in my life when I resigned myself to thinking that there was nothing really wrong with masturbation, but for most of my life, I have believed that it was wrong and have fought to control it. In the previous post we looked at the connection between masturbation and fantasy. We saw that if we are indulging in lust in our hearts, even if we are not...