Introduction
Men of God, listen to me.
Your enemy, the devil, is preying upon you and the ones you love while you aren't watching.
I have been wrestling with whether or not the Lord would have me write this to you. In a season so littered with information and sensationalism, my concern has been that because of the gross amount of noise the most delicate parts of my own story might just become fodder for the trail. I have arrived at the conclusion that I have to leave that in the God’s hands and offer this to you because I love you as brothers in Christ and as men who have impacted my own life for the Kingdom of God in various ways at different times. I do not want the enemy to take advantage you and bring harm to you or God's ministry in your life because of tactics he is using of which you are likely completely unaware.
Current events in our world have prompted me to examine the way the church arrives at its corporate opinions, and I am highly concerned that some of our stances may be damaging our credibility to the lost. I am concerned that we are becoming a stumbling block to them. We seem eager to call the world out for its lack of morality on one side while ignoring or making light of other forms of immorality on our own side. Apparently, many of us have deceived ourselves into believing that those forms of immorality which do not make us uncomfortable are somehow less offensive to God, particularly if it is convenient to our own personal habits or a cause we are supporting. There is nothing more at stake for Christians today than the witness of a Church who is called by God to love the lost while living righteously without hypocrisy.
I will be as brief as I can, though I cannot, merely for the sake of brevity, forfeit the weight of the message I am compelled by God to share with you. This may be long, but I assure you that I will give you the most abbreviated version possible. There are some of you who will not be able to make it through what I am about to write, either because the content is too heavy or the length is more than the responsibilities you currently have will allow you time. Please be released. If you see me tomorrow or years from now and started to read this but did not have time to complete it, there will be no loss of love or respect for you on my part, nor will I feel that you did not care about me or what I had to say. I am writing this for your consideration in obedience to the Lord, and I want to bring this to the attention of any I believe might have ears to hear with a heart attuned to the voice of God (and not my own), but I do understand that each one of you has much responsibility apart from reading this and completely understand if you are not able to read it immediately or in its entirety.
Countless Victims
Numerous academic studies and research journals have published similar findings to the following which were published recently by the CDC: 1 in 4 females and 1 in 6 males is sexually abused by the age of 18. That means that 20% of all the people you are pastoring or worshiping next to have experienced this. You may think the statistics are different within the church, but I assure you that because the people you worship with leave the confines of the church walls to live their lives, they can be just as vulnerable as anyone else is. And the space within those walls is often a place where the enemy all too easily slips in masquerading as an angel of light because he knows we are under the assumption that we are safe.
One pastor who I know of was informed by some congregation members that the teenage son of his children’s pastor had touched their then 5 year old daughter inappropriately. The parents got professionals involved in order to confirm what had actually happened because they did not want to wrongly accuse anyone of anything, but once details were confirmed they decided not to press charges. Instead they wanted the pastor to help place the teenage boy in counseling or rehab or whatever was needed because obviously the boy who had done this was struggling. The pastor told them that the family of the teenager was already going through a hard time, his father had had an affair and was leaving the boy and his mother (who was the children's pastor), the boy’s life was in upheaval, his mother was infuriated by the allegations of the mother of the 5 year old (who had been her best friend for years up to that time), the boy did not want to talk about it, and the pastor couldn’t make him accept help he didn’t want. Nothing was done. The family felt unsafe for their child to be in the children’s area of church any longer because the boy would inevitably drift over into that area at times to see his mother and as a result have continued contact with their child and other children there which greatly concerned them given his history. They left the church. They had grown up from being infant Christians among the members of that church body, but they knew that their first obligation to God was to do everything in their power protect the child He had entrusted to them, so they found another church. They knew some of my story and approached my parents about what they ought to do in order to help their daughter process and heal from what had happened. As I learned of the incident, I was initially infuriated by the pastor’s inaction, but what I realized was that many pastor’s do not realize the significant pattern an isolated event such as this one can create for either or both parties involved or how common these things are even among church members. The longer I carried this frustration I knew the pastor had acted in compassion toward the perpetrator and the perpetrator's mother because he knew they were already going through so much, and though it still angered me that compassion toward them came at the expense of compassion toward the victim and her family, I realized the inaction was due to ignorance toward the issue, not malice toward the child involved.The prayer that arose in my heart for him and others who make the same mistakes became, “Lord, I pray that it would not take one of their own daughters becoming the victim of such a thing in order for their eyes to be opened.” The truth is that any family who has more than one daughter has a 50% chance or higher of walking through something like this. I begged the family to allow me to go to that pastor in the company of another pastor they could trust, but they were so emotionally spent from what had happened that they felt unprepared to deal with any fallout that might come from such a meeting. They did not want to further traumatize their already confused child.
A few years later a girl who I had known from childhood heard bits and pieces of my testimony and confided in me that when she was in early elementary school, she was raped in a church stairwell by a boy she assumed to be a high schooler, and that she had been repeatedly molested by another boy who was in a different family in that same church. This was in a thriving, well-respected church where the truth and grace of God were both preached and practiced, not what we would think of as a sick cult full of perverts! The men were likely busy providing for their families and discussing politics and church doctrine while women were likely busy homemaking and forming their own opinions about their husbands' conversations. Many were probably quite godly, but they were preoccupied with issues they deemed "more likely". This happened right at the dawning of the internet and personal computers in the home. What we know now is that statistically nearly as many men (including pastors) in the church regularly use pornography as those outside of the church. Friendliness with any evil spirit dulls our senses to its insidious nature. The spirit of sexual immorality has sinister intentions, promising pleasure while diverting our attention away from the painful consequences which are inevitably to follow. It could reasonably be concluded that the men of the church missed warning signs relating to this high school boy or the 5 year old girl he victimized because they themselves were friendly with the spirit who was behind the scenes orchestrating the whole thing. Jesus tells us that "a stranger's voice they will not hear", but the voice of sexual immorality was familiar so they listened to it and were deceived as it lulled them into apathy and told them "everything's okay".
Fast forward to a different church in a completely different part of the country. An incident occurred which, at that point, I identified as my worst fear realized. While I went to a doctor's appointment my 3 year old child went to a mother’s day out program at a local church where many of our friends highly trusted the workers. While driving home one of my children stated that their bottom hurt, but honestly, I thought maybe they had a rash or something else of a minor nature, and I didn’t even think to check it because there were so many reasonable explanations, and they didn’t seem to be in major discomfort nor did they mention it again once we got home. The following day after they woke up from a nap I was taking off the pull-up they customarily slept in at that time and noticed redness and what appeared to be an area of flesh that was torn. Immediately my heart began to race, my palms got sweaty, my stomach tied in knots and my head started spinning. I tried to ask questions that were not leading. The child told me that a bigger child had been on the playground and had put a “stick” in their bottom. In a panic, I called a friend whose children had also been there on that day, and she said that when she arrived to pick up her children she had noticed a much older child who did not belong there in the room with the younger children. The following morning our doctor examined our child and confirmed that not only was there evidence of what had happened but also that it was certainly not self-inflicted. We went to the director of the mother’s day out program and the pastor of the church. The director wept and tried to reassure us that their church really was a safe place for our children to be. An older child who normally would not have been on site that summer day had missed the field trip bus with the older children and stayed with the younger children as a result. We called the police because we were concerned that the older child involved had probably been abused themselves, and we wanted to make sure they were safe. The pastor assured us that contacting the police was unnecessary as the child came from a good family in his church, and he would talk to them, but we felt it best that Child Protective Services be able to ask questions objectively to make sure that the child was not in danger in any way. The police interviewed our child. Weeks later the police called to tell me that the pastor and his program director had told them that what we claimed was not even possible because at no time was that older child (who turned out to be an 11 year old) in any position to be alone with our child. Our child had mentioned the playground so we believe it probably happened in an enclosed area of a slide on the playground where workers could not see, and that they were too concerned about the liability of what had happened on their property to take responsibility and do the right thing by telling the truth. The police officer told me that she knew the doctor’s report corroborated our child’s story, but that if we did not want to press charges there was nothing more for her to do, and that Child Protective Services would conduct a separate investigation to make sure the older child involved was not being molested by someone else. My husband’s take on the whole thing was that it was an absolute shame that a church so respected in our community would try to cover up something like this through dishonesty just because they were worried about what others would think, but that we didn’t want to drag our child through a public court case that would probably only further traumatize them, and that we just wouldn’t be able to allow our children to return to that church anymore.
Obviously, safety does not come by church walls but by the protection of people convicted to live righteously by the power of the Holy Spirit and sensitive to the Holy Spirit in such a way that they are on guard, even within the church walls, not fearful but trusting Him to show them where they need to be watchful. Anywhere can be unsafe because lost people and even saved people who are disobedient at times are everywhere. They need to be in churches because that is where they find fellowship with others through whom the Lord may speak His truth and set them free. But because of this we must know that it is all the more imperative to address sexual immorality and sexual violence rightly. If we do not, we are, by our own ignorance, creating a world that is absolutely hostile to women and children. It is time for men of God to lead the charge!
My Own Story
I pray you will bear with me as I recount a few events from my own life, some of which almost no one has known about up to this point because I told myself they would be too immodest to share, though if I am completely honest, the main reason I have not shared them is that what was done to me caused me to feel so degraded that I was literally ashamed of it. I will avoid gratuitous descriptions, but I want my brothers in Christ to be able to understand the very raw emotions that 25% of all females are carrying around by the time they are 18 years of age, and I believe giving certain details may help you have a deeper sense of compassion for those of whom I am speaking. You need to know what a culture that makes any allowance at all for sexual perversion in spite of being called to “not even a hint” is doing to your wives and daughters and mothers and other sisters in Christ. I am done being ashamed of someone else’s actions, and moving forward I intend to call them what they were. I will reserve talking about them for moments it is truly called for, but it is called for in this moment, and I will not keep them hidden in the darkness any longer because as a daughter of God He says I am worthy of being permitted and even called to walk in the light. It may seem strange that I would want you to know any details of my own multiple sexual assaults, but this subject matter needs to become personal to you because you minister to others who are walking through similar things right at this very moment and you may have the opportunity to prevent further damage from happening by keeping your eyes and ears open to the Holy Spirit. Sexual immorality and sexual violence are affronts to the Kingdom of which you are a part. It is easier to keep the truth at a comfortable distance when we convince ourselves that we and those we love are untouchable to certain forms of evil. What I want you to know is that I am one of your own, and it happened right under your noses, and it is very likely happening to others right under your noses even as I am writing this. I share this because sexual assault is far more common than you may realize and has far more profound consequences than you might believe no matter how small some of the incidents may seem. Your convictions, when lived out authentically, have the power to produce a shift in our culture if you will band together with your brothers in Christ and stand in unity to fight for God's Kingdom to come on this earth as it already is in heaven. Your convictions are more than just attitudes. And they are more than just the words you speak in individual conversations or from a stage on Sunday mornings. Your life is preaching whatever your convictions truly are. It is even preaching when no one but God can see or hear. There are many you are pastoring or going to church with, particularly women, who are wrestling with your witness as to what the heart of God is about the things they themselves have walked through, and you need to know it and live like it matters because it truly does.
This is the story about what God saved me from. It is His story, bought and paid for at a higher cost to Him than any I will ever experience myself. The book of Revelation says that we overcome the enemy by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of our testimony. I am not sharing this looking for pity, and I am certainly not sharing it to glorify the things done in darkness. I am sharing it to expose the darkness to the light, and in doing so to give God the glory for what He has done.
I grew up in church, was there every time the doors were open, knew all the right Sunday school answers, had great Christian friends, made straight A’s, played musical instruments and sports, and was always considered well-rounded and mature spiritually and otherwise by most adults who knew me. At the age of 3, I was “inappropriately touched” by the much older son of a family in our church. The boy stuck his hands into my underwear and when caught claimed he was checking my diaper, the only problem was that I was already potty trained and not wearing a diaper. I did not know why what he was doing was wrong, but I did know lying was wrong so I had a bad feeling about it. I can only imagine he might have been reenacting behaviors he had experienced himself, but I cannot be certain. One day my dad walked into a bathroom and saw me naked and the boy standing there staring at me. He didn’t witness anything else, but because he had a bad feeling about it further interactions with that family were kept to a minimum and extremely supervised. It was 20 more years until I was finally able to articulate to my parents what had happened. Years later in middle school I was much more sexually aware and involved than any of my friends were (which I believe is tied to a term called sexualization that is actually referred to in the Bible in Song of Solomon when it talks about not arousing or awakening love until it is time). Boys would comment on my developing body, call on the phone and ask me for a description of my underwear, ask me to divulge things about my sexuality, and write lewd comments in my yearbook. I had no idea why. I did not understand their preoccupation with sexuality or where it was coming from, nor did I realize the gravity of it, the recourse I could have had, or the role it was playing in setting me up for events that were yet to come. By the start of high school I completed the True Love Waits program at my church and wore my promise ring every day. When I was 15, an almost 18 year old boy expressed interest in me. He was a clean-cut star athlete. He was always “nice” to me, and though he did not go to church he was the grandson of a pastor. My parents did not like our age difference, but one night he asked to take me to dinner, and I guess dinner in a public setting seemed harmless enough. The problem was that he never did take me to dinner. He took me to the trail of a local park claiming we were going to have a picnic, laid out blankets (without food), and started kissing me. He knew I was involved in many campus ministries at that time, and I had told him I planned to save myself for my husband, so though I found his behavior somewhat odd, I felt relieved that at least he knew I wasn't planning on having sex with him until he became much more assertive about putting his hands in places I did not want them. I wish I could forget the moment right after I told him "stop" when he penetrated me anyways, said, "oops" and chuckled about it. Apparently he thought it was funny. This incident was the beginning of the end of the whatever faith I had had in God up to that point. I had been a people pleaser all my life. If I had fallen short in any area I had had conviction and remorse or at least known that a lack of it was a sign of spiritual mayday and to act like it anyways, but in light of this incident I was angry with God. Dan Allender, the leading Christian authority on the topic of sexual abuse likens my reaction, which is typical among abuse victims, to shaking one’s fist in Almighty God’s face. By then I knew I should have listened to my parents and not reciprocated interest in this boy so I felt it to be at least partially my fault, but I never thought it would result in anything like this, especially when, in my estimation, I had been living for God so I assumed He would protect me. The possibility of anything like this happening wasn’t even on my radar screen at the time, in fact I didn't even know the formal word for it so I wasn't equipped to readily name what had happened to myself or anyone who cared about me. I didn’t know how to describe to my parents what had really happened in any way that could result in anything good. Surely my dad would do something that would get him put in prison if he knew, and the last thing I wanted to hear then was, “I told you so.” I was scared he might have given me one of those STDs I had been warned of during our church abstinence class so I simply told them I had had sex with him, which caused them to question if any of my devotion to God up to that point had ever been sincere. Four years passed before I told them what had really happened, and by then I was in the throes of a complete spiritual and emotional meltdown. In the time that had passed I continued to play church, looking good on the outside, but secretly conducting myself quite differently. Slowly I began to question God’s love and power more and more until I came to a point that I just didn't think I wanted anything to do with Him. “If he is really good how can he allow these things to happen? Maybe he is good but just not able to stop them.” Eventually, early in college I just gave up. I knew far too many non-Christians who lived their lives by more principle than the Christians I knew did. I thought I would rather be like them. The problem is that when our hope is in ourselves, our hope is fragile because we are intimately acquainted with our own weaknesses and duplicities. This became terrifying. Obviously I couldn’t trust my own judgement because my own judgement had gotten me into this predicament in the first place. Over the course of my late teens and the first couple of years in my twenties random guys would sometimes outright proposition me for sex. Or if we were not in a public place they would grab my hand and stick it down their own pants. I hated myself. In my estimation sex was the only reason a man would ever want anything to do with me, and I hated sex because it represented everything that had ever hurt me, but I believed it was the only way I would ever be loved. I was a serial dater during those days, always moving from one promiscuous relationship to the next. When I graduated from college I rekindled a relationship with an old love interest. I was a 21 year old graduate of a respected university and working at a respected restaurant in a management capacity just before leaving that job a few months later for a corporate job. From the outside life looked promising. He said, “All my friends keep asking how a guy like me got a girl like you.” But the longer we dated the more fearful I became of caring for him so much, still under the assumption that all men were really only interested in one thing. Before we met I had dabbled in substance abuse, but the longer he and I were together the more numb I had to be so that I didn’t have to hear that little voice in the back of my mind telling me, “no one will ever love you for anything other than sex, you are damaged goods, he will use you for sex and be done with you and then he will find someone else”. It didn’t help that he also had substance abuse issues. He had his own set of baggage for different reasons. The deeper I got into substance abuse the harder time I had juggling all the privileges and responsibilities of that new promising adult life. I was coming undone. One night we got into a fight. He said, “You are such a failure, I am embarrassed by you, and I feel sorry for your family because they are stuck with you.” Assuming he meant to end the relationship I went out drinking with a mutual friend of ours to try to forget my misery the following night. We ran into some guys who had known him from high school but were a little older than him, and they listened as I cried about what had happened on the previous night. They put their arms around my shoulders and told me not to be sad, that it would all be alright, and that I should come with them back to one of their houses to hang out for a while so I could forget my problems. The friend who had come with me had gone to the restroom, and I told them I probably needed to let him know what the plan was, but they told me they would just let him know where to meet us. I remember getting in the car with them, but then I blacked out and the next thing that happened is something that I would give anything to erase from my memory. When I came to, two of them were raping me while one watched. These were businessmen I met in a restaurant, not creeps lurking in the shadows of a back alley. I was barely conscious enough to hear one of them making remarks about my body. I lost consciousness again, but I honestly am not sure if it was substance induced or if it was literally like a paralysis of the nervous system that often happens to people during trauma. The following morning one of them had gone to work and left the other alone there with me with plans to return on his lunch break and drive us both home. I learned of this when the one who was still at the house woke me up by shoving his genitals in my face and making demands. I will leave it at that. I confided the story in a girl I worked with the following day without ever using the terminology of sexual violence at all, chalking it up to my own stupidity for going out drinking, but indignantly she cut me off and said, “Oh my gosh, they raped you!” They later bragged to all their friends about their night with me, and the guy who I had been dating up to that point was embarrassed and enraged. We met to exchange belongings thereby signifying the sure termination of our relationship. At that meeting he spit in my face, grabbed me and shook me so hard that I had bruises in the shape of handprints where he had gripped my shoulders. And then he said the worst part. “This is all your fault. It’s not like you can say that they raped you. You went with them willingly.”
Three days later Jesus delivered me from the addiction I had developed in the process of it all, and that was when healing began. I wish I could say it was instantaneous, but the truth is that isn’t usually the way healing happens. It is a process, and most of the time that process is painstaking. It took years for the voice that told me I would never be wanted by a man for anything other than sex to go away, and occasionally it still creeps in off in the distance if I get too lost inside my own thoughts without realizing it before taking it captive and making it obedient to Christ. Dan Allender says that trauma of this nature has the ability to literally rewire the brain, causing PTSD so that the victim lives in a constant state of “fight or flight”. Anxiety is no longer so much a choice of whether or not to trust as it is a physiological state produced by the trauma. And perhaps just as bad is that anytime someone with PTSD recalls the traumatic events, the effects on the brain and body can be just as severe as they were when the events actually happened. The same racing heart, sweaty palms, stomach in knots, head spinning feelings come back. Some people even become temporarily paralyzed or black out--just from remembering. Stop and think about that. This is why now, as much as I can help it, I only revisit these memories when the Lord asks me to do so for the purpose of deeper healing or sharing with someone for the sake of the Kingdom like I am doing with you now. But the effects are more than just mental and emotional. Because of the deep integration of all the body’s systems the shutdown of one system can trigger imbalance or shutdown of other systems, not only during the event, but in an extended manner or even permanently, particularly if the trauma is not fully addressed. For instance, inflammation and autoimmune disorders are highly linked to anxiety that is produced by trauma.
I have had a particular health issue which began right before I got married. It has worsened over the last year or so into flare ups every few weeks that have lasted several days at a time and then subside for a few weeks before cycling through again. Very recently I caught a glimmer of hope only to relapse again, but I do believe complete healing is coming. I will spare you some of the details since I have unloaded so many on you already, but this health issue which has been nearly impossible for doctors to diagnose and treat has made sex particularly physically painful for me -- I have been tested for everything they know to test for and results have been negative every single time. At first I couldn’t help but question why God would allow me to encounter a health issue that affected my sex organs after all I had already walked through, but I truly believe the Lord is good, and His perfect love triumphs over all. In recent moments He has reminded me that I have His Word that He is causing all things to work together for my good. He is using this very difficult physical thing to dispel the lies the enemy has told me about not being worth anything apart from my sexuality. God is taking the very thing that evil intended for my harm and using it for my good. He is ensnaring my enemy in the very trap my enemy meant for me.
God rescued me from darkness, and He is making beauty from ashes. As my husband has said to me, when God makes beauty from ashes, the ashes are not even recognizable as ashes anymore, they are just beautiful. When I retell my story it is no longer about me, it is a story about a different person. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come." I do weep sometimes when I retell my story, but it isn't for myself, it is for that little girl who believed the lie for so long that she would always be unlovable to any man if it was not for sex and unworthy of God's love because she was so unclean. That is not who I am today. I am a new creation. While I was in rehab the Lord began to speak to me. I had been out of church and had not opened my Bible in years. He told me that He had given me a new name, "Lily". I remembered that God had given certain Bible characters new names so this didn't seem far fetched to me, but the significance of this new name did not register with me until my mom happened to look up the meaning of it and sent word to me through my counselor. Lily means pure. God was telling me what my new identity was in His very own eyes. There are many worshiping right next to you in church or walking on sidewalks in your town who wish they could believe our God is powerful enough to make them new and compassionate enough to care that they wish He would. He is both powerful and compassionate, but those people will not become convinced of it until they encounter His power and love for themselves, most likely through the people of God around them.
Common Responses
There are some of you who are likely in shock that I would write with such candor or that I would reveal some of these things about myself at all. My intention was not to be crude, and believe me, I have spared you most of the details, but just imagine what it is like to live with these sound bytes and images I wish were not any part of my memory. I wanted to help you understand by giving you some of the details of my own story that this is what reality is like for 25% of the women you call sisters in Christ.
There are some of you who are so furious with the males I have mentioned that your mind is reeling about what ought to be done to make things right. There is nothing, nothing at all short of the cross of Christ that can make this right. We often tell ourselves we want justice when what we really want is revenge. Justice undoes the effects of harm and makes things good as new OR justice provides such restitution for what has been stolen that the victim is even better off after harm than they were before. Vengeance gets even by repaying harm for harm leaving both parties damaged and no one is better off. No amount of vengeance could make this better, but there is something that can. The blood of Jesus that makes all things new and touches even the furthest reaches of His creation with redemption can heal this harm AND bring a double portion of blessing instead of shame. I do not want revenge, I want my abusers to know Jesus. I want them to know the One who can make their crooked places straight and set their feet firmly in a spacious place no matter what they have done or had done to them. If they do not surrender to Him then I have a perfectly just Judge to plead my case to on judgment day, but my prayer is that they are cleansed of all guilt and bow before Him in worship with me in eternity because He is worthy that I lay down my right to revenge if they would give their lives to Him and He would be glorified through it, which would ultimately bring me far greater joy than watching them suffer anyway. My husband proofread this letter for me and he responded by saying his first reaction (as he was hearing some things for the very first time) was that he literally want to slay someone in vengeance, but then he realized that God had felt even greater anger because of His righteousness and was capable of even greater wrath because of His power and yet is patiently restraining Himself until judgment day, because He Himself bore the vengeance due to them on His cross if they would only repent. If God's kindness to them in the form of my forgiveness can lead them to repentance then I pray it would be so. I do want to say for the sake of clarity that forgiveness does not mean we refuse to acknowledge harm done, in fact, I would say that if we refuse to acknowledge harm done we cannot actually forgive because what would we have to forgive if there were no harm to speak of? If we minimize sin, our own or that of others, we actually minimize the cross. Let that sink in. We make much of sin because in doing so we make much of the cross which is even greater. We make much of sin, not to magnify shame, but to magnify the glory of the One who took sin and shame, nailed it to the cross, and in doing so made a mockery of the kingdom of Evil. Acknowledging harm gives opportunity for sorrow. That sorrow can go one of two ways: godly sorrow that God who has chosen us as dearly loved sons and daughters has been dishonored--this will produce repentance leading to life; OR worldly sorrow that the consequence of sowing bad seed is reaping bad fruit--this will only lead to death. We cannot control how others respond to our acknowledgement of sin, but if we shy away from it we rob ourselves and them of an opportunity for repentance and gratitude for God's provision of forgiveness for our own sins and sustaining grace that carries us through even the most devastating sins committed against us.
Some of you probably feel the need to weep at the heaviness of my story. Allow the Holy Spirit to move you through that and grieve freely, but don't grieve as those without hope. God has bound up my broken heart, redeemed my life, and I’ve got a victory story to tell--one that is still being written even now. Just because some of us were victimized in the past does not mean we remain victims. The Lord means to raise each of us up a warrior wise to the enemy's tactics so that we can apply what we have learned on the battlefield and share with our brothers and sisters who may not know what we know from personal experience. In the case of some of the events in my life, I did nothing to open myself up to the enemy’s attack. He came looking for me. In other events, though the perpetrators in my story were certainly responsible for their own actions, by putting my trust in myself rather than in God I put myself in harm’s way. I sinned by rejecting God, and I made it easy for the enemy. I walked right out of God’s camp and into the enemy’s camp unarmed. That was foolish. And even so I have the assurance that my story will go something like this: “Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy. Though I fall I will rise; Though I dwell in darkness, the LORD is a light for me. I will bear the indignation of the LORD Because I have sinned against Him, Until He pleads my case and executes justice for me. He will bring me out to the light, And I will see His righteousness” (Micah 7:8-9). Do not weep for me. If you weep let it be because the heart of God has been broken by all of our complicity to our society’s sexualization and sexual violence by way of its minimization of and silence toward sexual sin.
There are some of you who will want to ask forgiveness for not having had eyes to see this before and for not having done more to protect me or the other’s among us with similar stories. I honestly do not believe you need my forgiveness or theirs. You need to take that to Jesus. You need to confess before Him, and you need to receive forgiveness and trust that any complacency in addressing this up to now has been completely washed away. But you also need to hold that forgiveness in such high regard that you do not drift back into complacency. Do this for those who are looking to you as an example of God’s fierce love for them. Do this for the those among you who have been victimized or may love someone who has. Do this because the original meaning of the word compassion is "to suffer with", and that is how God describes Himself and we are to be like Him.
Call to Action
So what is your call to action then? It is not an easy call, but the greatest sacrifice leads to the greatest reward.
The truth is that my heart breaks for you, men of God! We are living in such a highly sexualized culture that sexuality is shoved in your face every day all day long, in spite of your calling to not even a hint of immorality. You cannot even drive up the road without a barrage of images entirely unsolicited by you coming across your line of sight on the skyline, and yet you are accountable for what you do with your eyes and your thoughts in response to those traps set by the enemy. These are difficult days for men of God to do battle in. The enemy uses unfair tactics, but that is just his nature, and we have to become wise to those tactics and shut down his attempts to infiltrate our hearts and lives. Many women come to church to have a need for love fulfilled, and since they confuse love with sexual attention, they walk through the doors of our churches dressed provocatively so that they can feed their appetites for being noticed. Visually pleasing as they may be, you must come to see these women, not as sex objects, but as people who are hurting and so desperate for love that they have become willing to degrade themselves in order to obtain a cheap substitute for the love they are seeking due to their inability to identify the real thing. You have to turn our eyes away from their empty immodesty and toward their dignity as those created by God, asking Him to fill their needs for love and clothe them in His righteousness. Even in my compassion for your struggle I am here to call you to God’s standard rather than the world’s standard. It is not because of ignorance or insensitivity to the enormous temptations you are facing, but because compassion for you and your families that I would urge you to set yourselves apart from the world entirely in the matter of sexual purity, making no opportunity for the devil to gain a foothold by which he would drag you under. We have to take every single thought captive and make it obedient to Jesus Christ.
The story you read above could just have easily been about your own wife or daughter or sister or mother. Take a moment to let that register. We need the men of God who have been lulled to sleep by ministry responsibilities (however godly they may be) and moral compromise to wake up and fight for those who are powerless to defend themselves. This unsafe world has been created by nonchalant attitudes toward sexual perversity which we are seeing run rampant in society and even accepted in our churches today.
I am sick and tired of seeing men (and some women) of God fall prey to moral failures, and I am sick and tired of seeing women (and some men) and children fall prey to sexual predators while many among are busy giving a silent nod to the very immorality that is creating these catastrophes in our lives by refusing to deny the enemy a point of entry. I think we make the mistake of assuming the perpetrators of sexual violence have been born (more) morally defective (than the rest of us) and were always destined for lives of sexual deviance. That is not scriptural. Does the Word of God not tell us that no temptation has seized (any of) us except that which is common to man? Many of us have known people who have fallen extensively and thought, “I’m glad I would never do that”. Does scripture not tell us to be careful when we think we are standing firm because that is when we are really most vulnerable? Let me be very specific for a moment. We have known many precious men of God who we knew to love God deeply because we walked in community with them day in and day out and saw them love, not with words or tongue, but with action and in truth. Some of these same men have veered ever so slightly off the path that God had for them at one time, and instead of correcting course, remained on the same trajectory only to find themselves a million miles off course further on up the road. What began as an inch left of center, when they did not correct their direction, wound up so far away from God’s calling and purpose that they were unrecognizable to the world as His children anymore. Sin marred their ability to reflect His image correctly. And yet there is still hope for whomever is cleansed by God and renewed in His image to reflect His glory. If the wounds are ever surrendered to God scars remain as visible reminders of what He has done to miraculously heal the wound itself, but not without leaving evidence of the harm inflicted by disobedience, a reminder not to be deceived in the same way again. Specifically, our family has known men who have literally been in flourishing ministry and then many years later been arrested for some form of sex related crime. At first glance people would likely say they had never been sincere in the first place, but there was so much good fruit in previous days that we can be sure at one time they had sown good seed and eventually just grown weary of doing good and begun sowing bad seed instead until it yielded a harvest of bad fruit in their lives. When living a life of compromise, one compromise leads to another and to another until eventually we are incapable of telling the truth apart from lies anymore. That is not to say that some may not be born with a greater tendency to sexual deviance than others, just like it is not untrue that some people are born with a greater tendency to become addicted to certain substances more quickly than others, but it is to say that given enough compromise in the area of sexual immorality, anyone could be capable of becoming what the world would identify as sexually deviant, and it is also to say that though a person might be born with a greater tendency to sexual deviance, just as a person who has a greater tendency toward addiction might avoid addiction by never picking up a substance, so a person who has have a greater tendency toward sexual deviance might avoid it altogether by never engaging in immorality at all in obedience to God--God's "not even a hint" standard would literally save them from the sexual deviance they might otherwise have had a proclivity toward. A godly person does not wake up one morning and say “I am going to go do something so unthinkably godless that I will look as bad off as all the lost people of this world”. David, a man after God’s own heart, is a perfect example of this. His moral failures did not prove that he did not know God. They proved that God’s people, when resistant to His conviction, are capable of sin that is just as unthinkable as that of the world. We need to learn from David’s example rather than having to relearn it from our own failures.
I am concerned that the reason we fail to confront certain types of immorality within the church is because those who would likely be doing the confronting know they are not completely innocent themselves, and they are afraid to confront another for fear of heaping condemnation upon themselves or even for being called out simultaneously. To put it plainly, we let things slide because we know we aren't perfect either. Instead of holding ourselves to a higher standard we just lower the standard altogether, and the spirit of perversity waltzes right on in among us because we have left the door cracked open to him. We need to accept that all sexual immorality comes from the same spirit. We may think we are allowing just a few impure thoughts to go unchecked or a few questionable comments to be made, and the next thing we know someone in our flock has been victimized, and we are completely mystified and wonder how that happened. We may think someone just has a little problem with porn or some run of the mill lust, and the next thing we know they are being arrested and brought up on criminal charges because they became so consumed with that little bit of lust that they lost all control of their sexual impulses. They gave away their ability to discern good from evil one indecent thought at a time until there was no discernment left. Instead of refusing to address certain sins because we know we may be guilty in varying degrees ourselves, we all need to admit our own faults, and rather than using one another’s faults to justify or minimize our own, we need to deal with them while encouraging one another to do the same.
As American Christians we often find it easy to take certain forms of immorality very seriously. From our pulpits we preach that liberal immorality is offensive to God while ignoring other forms of immorality by which many conservatives are not made as uncomfortable. Statistics suggest that about the same percentage of men in our churches are looking at pornography as those men who are completely unchurched, and we make justifications for locker room banter claiming that it is just how men talk. Have we forgotten that our eyes are the lamps of our bodies and that from the overflow of our hearts our mouths speak? That may be how men of the world act or speak, but God has called His men to be set apart, and we ought not to defend the practice of any such behavior by minimizing it. Many in the church have come to believe that as long as they are referring to the sexual desire of a man for a woman it is not perverse or that it is less perverse than other forms of immorality. That is an inaccurate concept of purity. The only sexual desire that is not perverted is that which is kept in the context of the covenant of a faithful marriage between and man and a woman. Sexual thoughts, words or actions about any woman other than a man’s own wife (or about any man other than a woman’s own husband) are perverse by God’s standards. They are a twisted representation of His intention and, hence, a violation of His covenant. They are no more righteous than any other form of immorality that we might normally associate with liberal moral standards. Isn't it interesting that the Bible uses the terms for siblings to describe how we are to think of God's children. Unless I am married to someone, which can clearly only be one person, then my thoughts toward others are to be as those toward a brother or sister, and certainly I know that incest is a perversion. Perceiving a person as beautiful is not sinful, but I can recognize a person as beautiful without turning my thoughts of them toward sexuality. This is honor and holiness. This is the way of God.
Have we forgotten that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Are we not to confront an immoral person among us in order to lovingly but firmly call them to repentance? I am not talking about the lost who wander in to hear the truth, but about those who identify themselves as mature Christians and yet habitually knowingly live in a manner unworthy of God’s calling. It is sometimes hard to tell these apart at first glance, but the Spirit bears witness about who is really lost and seeking but not yet arrived at the truth versus who really knows the truth and is living in rebellion against it. Please do not think that I am saying there is never a time for mercy. Sometimes godly men make mistakes and are truly repentant for having grieved the heart of God, and there is certainly mercy for that. We can't expect perfection but we absolutely should expect to see fruit of the progressive work of sanctification in one another's lives with confidence that He who began a good work in each of us is moving us toward that end. When we lovingly confront a fellow believer for this it isn't because we think we are morally superior or because we are condemning them as a person. It is because we are condemning the sin that is creeping in and choking the very life out of them unbeknownst to them. This is actually far more merciful than ignorance or silence. It is because we love them and do not want them to be another casualty of war along with their family members. When we discern that a person is losing their sense of conviction because of the hardening of their hearts through habitual sin, it is not a loving thing for us to let them slide further and further into that abyss without any resistance from us. Once we give them resistance if they are determined to go their own way we may have to release them to reap the consequences of their choices, but only in hopes that those consequences would teach them future obedience. Obviously we are not responsible for that which we do not know to address, but we certainly are for that which we do. In church discipline we have to abide by God’s own principle of opposing the proud but giving grace to the humble. When someone is wrong and confesses and asks for forgiveness it is doled out liberally by God, and we ought to do the same. On the other hand, when someone is clearly in the wrong and either insists that he does not need forgiveness or claims that he has repented in spite of a clear body of evidence that he has not, we really shouldn’t even entertain or accept the obviously false claims of repentance when there is a lack of any fruit. We ought to be resolutely in opposition to his self-deception for his good and the good of the lost who are watching him call himself by the name of Christ in spite of his living to the contrary. I am not encouraging mercilessly condemning anyone for failures about which they are convicted and repentant of, I merely insisting that we not candy-coat what God says about these things in order to tickle the ears of someone who is clearly deceived and in bondage. That is not love. That is at least spiritual laziness, and perhaps at worst an act of giving another a pass in one case in hopes that we will be given a pass in another. That is dangerous. Biblical confrontation is not self-righteousness, it is merely cutting off the source of the little bit of yeast which would leaven the whole dough, just read 1 Corinthians 5:1-6. Sometimes we have to love a person enough to disregard whether or not they might dislike us for it at the time and confront them. Sometimes we even have to love them enough to be willing to temporarily damage their reputation (and perhaps ours if they are part of a ministry we are involved in) in order to be a catalyst for godly sorrow by confronting them in the presence of others if they will not listen to us alone. At times we refuse to remove the sin from our camp in the name of compassion claiming we do not want to crush someone's spirit if they are already struggling. Of course, we should be patient and gentle, but also be persistent and firm, sticking with them as long as they are willing to be stuck with, and we should never, ever give into the notion that immorality is alright or that we are just going to have to live with it a little bit. True compassion will see a person who is suffering with entanglement to sin and set about to do everything scripture has told us to do in order to disentangle them rather than leaving them entangled just so as not to make them or ourselves temporarily uncomfortable. It hurts to clean out a wound, but it must be done in order to eradicate infection which, if left, would consume the good life out of a person. I only wish that at the time I was entangled in sin someone would have done this for me sooner. It would have saved me so much worldly sorrow in the long run.
As I said in the beginning, there is nothing more at stake for Christians today than the witness of a Church who is called by God to love the lost while living righteously without hypocrisy. Will we not be known by our fruit? We cannot watch movies that glorify immorality or defend locker room talk and expect the world to believe our message in the presence of such hypocrisy. We cannot justify one person's form of immorality as less immoral than another's immorality. 2 Corinthians 10:12 says very clearly that using one person as a standard by which to measure ourselves or others is unwise. God is our only standard. If we minimize the significance of immorality such as locker room talk in the Christian community, those who have been victims of the behaviors described in some locker room talk are bound to interpret (rightly, I might add) what Christian leaders are saying to mean, "suck it up, buttercup, you need to just get over it and take one for the team, whatever happened to you wasn't a big deal". It is a big deal. Imagine the effect of such a thing on victims walking the halls of your church. They feel betrayed by their pastors and their brothers in Christ. Because of where I am in my journey I can hear such things and not take up offense toward those who speak them because I truly believe it is in naivety that they speak. Because of where I am I can hear the godly men who defend such things and not take up offense with God because I know that their words are not an accurate representation of His heart. But that is not the case for many others. Many survivors go to their graves carrying this baggage, some of them prematurely because the baggage was so heavy that they were literally crushed underneath the weight of it all. We owe it to those struggling with the fallout of such things to correctly identify that which is contrary to the heart of God as such. Minimizing godlessness misconstrues God’s heart. We, His people, should not be willingly guilty of such a thing.
As a church we have been making concessions to immorality as long as we have self-righteously determined that it falls within "normal" limits. And yet, the Lord tells us that not even a hint of immorality is appropriate for people who call themselves by His name. All immorality is abnormal for God's holy people. In order for anything to be pure there can be no adulteration at all—not even a hint. The moment even the slightest amount of immorality is permitted, the character of the individual or the church body is no longer pure unless cleansed by Christ. Thus we can be no more anti-homosexual immorality than we are anti-heterosexual immorality or else we find ourselves in the predicament of the log and the speck of dust. When guilty of this type of hypocrisy it becomes evident that we really do not mind immorality itself, we are merely opposed to being made uncomfortable by someone else's immoral preferences which are different from ours. This is the hypocrisy which makes our message unbelievable to an unbelieving world. We must stop making excuses and concessions, and we must start reclaiming surrendered ground. To be clear, I am not saying that some women are not just as guilty. I was once part of the problem, a person who called themselves a Christian but lived immorally, and in doing so I seared my conscience against the conviction of the Holy Spirit until, by God’s grace, my eyes were opened to the damage my sin was causing myself and others, and I repented. The people of God are looking to the men of God to lead, but very few are leading so the remainder are wandering aimlessly in the wilderness following their blind guides. We need to repent as an entire church, men of God, and the rest of us are looking to you to lead the way so we can fall in behind you. When will you stand up and take your place on the front lines? We are ready to follow you into this battle, but God has called us to follow you as you follow Christ. Now is the time.
I love each and every one of you, and I respect you regardless of how you receive this, not because of your opinion or response to this but because of Christ in you.
Lindsey
