When Will God Let Up?

"Once I get this under control, I'll be okay." How many of us have said this. I think most of us have-over and over again. What might differ is our definition of what "okay" is. It ranges from a delusional "I'll be perfect" to a hopeful, "Then I won't have much trouble handling all my other problems."

I have been a Christian for 28 years. God delivered me from two of my greatest problems at conversion-my desire for sex with men and smoking cigarettes. (I don't know if it has any significance, but both the smoking and the sex started twenty-six years earlier when I was twelve years old). Of course these were not my only sins or weaknesses. God soon had me dealing with other problems; my fear of men, my attitude towards money and security, the way I treated my wife, . . . and on and on.

For twenty-eight years God has been laying out before me, usually one or two at a time, serious problems that were keeping me from being the man He wanted me to be. And for years I would say, "Once I get this under control, I'll be okay." But eventually I started to ask, "Is this ever going to stop? How many more things do You want me to deal with Lord?" Then finally, a few years ago I figured that it would never stop, that there would always be something else-my critical spirit, sloth, unrighteous prejudices-something else that God wanted me to work on. I may have been more messed up than most others when they come to Christ, and I may be as slow learner-both are probably true-but I suspect that this is reality for most Christians. When we get over one big problem, when we gain victory over one sin, then there is the voice of the Holy Spirit bringing up another.

Few Christians find that life on this earth is an uninterrupted stroll on a smooth path through a lush meadow on a beautiful day. Rather, the Christian life is more like climbing a mountain on a stormy and dark day, and when finally getting to the top, discovering that there is another mountain to be scaled, and another and another.

What I am addressing here are not the circumstances that challenge us from outside ourselves-they vary tremendously from person to person and from time to time-but rather those problems that come from within, from our hearts, problems that keep surfacing in our tendency to sin, our habits of seeking relief from pain in the wrong places, our repeatedly hurting others through our selfishness and judgmentalism. These problems in multiple forms and to varying degrees are universal among Christians.

All Christians Struggle

The realization that other Christians struggle for much of their lives with areas of weakness and sin shows that you have not been singled out. Your struggle with homosexuality or sexual addiction is not a sign that you are under a special curse. Nor do these particular sins elevate you to some sort of super-sinner category True, these are heavy problems, but as you gain perspective, you will see that your sexual sins are your particular manifestation of broader areas of sin that challenge most Christians.

Our Sins Are Not Compartmentalized

It is very likely that when you set out on your journey towards healing, you thought that if you could put these sexual struggles behind you, everything else would be a piece of cake. But at some point into the process you start to see the bigger picture, and you recognized that your homosexual problems were simply manifestations of certain bigger problems. The bigger problems might be envy, bitterness, excessive self-protection, judgmentalism or unforgiveness. Hopefully you have been able to deal with these sin problems to the extent that they were keeping you in the grips of homosexuality, but the bigger problems remain.

Our sins are not compartmentalized. They overlap, and they manifest themselves in many different areas of our lives. God will use the healing process to show you the broader and deeper sin areas. And because He is more interested in your becoming fully the man or woman He created you to be, than in your overcoming same-sex attractions, He will call you to deal with these broader areas.

Part of the good news is that once you have achieved a degree of healing in the homosexual area and have turned to these broader issues, the healing that He has already done in the sexual or sexual identity area will grow deeper and more solid. A lot of our healing from homosexuality comes after we have stopped focusing so much on being healed from homosexuality.

The Struggle is a Good Thing

In fact, I'll go one step further than Scott Peck. I'll say that, if our life is tough, it is a good thing. We are being blessed. Our resolving one problem with the Lord, only to face another and another, is what makes life tough for Christians, and we can thank Him for this. Here's why I believe this:

1. God is preparing us for something. This is happening on several levels. First, we are in a growth process, and each matter dealt with successfully, enables us to move on to the next, and in this process we are becoming more and more the man or woman He wants us to be. Who wants to see this process stop?

   Second, He may be equipping us to help others in the Body of Christ. For most of us, the areas in which we are able to help others are those in which we have struggled and achieved some level of victory ourselves. If I had not been so messed up, and had to deal with many, many issues, I would not have been able to write these articles for the past fifteen or so years. Our struggles often become the raw material for our ministry.

   A third area of preparation might lie in our preparation for the next life. Although it cannot be backed up by specific Scriptures, here is a theory that I have heard, and it makes sense to me. Heaven will be a joyful place for all of us, but different people will receive different rewards in heaven (Matthew 5:12). How then will our joy not be diminished by the knowledge that we are missing out on some of the joy that others are experiencing? I believe that each of us will be able to enjoy heaven to the limit of our particular ability to experience joy, and that certain people-the martyrs for example-will have a far greater capacity to experience joy than others. For us, with each victory over sin and weakness that we experience in this life, we might just be increasing our capacity for joy in the next life. Ponder this.

2. God is merciful in not laying all of our sins on us at once. If soon after my conversion God had shown me a full picture of what I had been before my surrender to Him, and in some respects the dark places that still dwelt in my heart, I would have been overwhelmed. But God has been merciful, and He has revealed the truths of my inner man to me only as I have been able to deal with them. Step by step He has showed me the depths of my selfishness and the enormity of my pride, but He has done it in a way and at a pace that has kept me from being devastated.

   God is merciful and He will not lay on us more than we can bear. That's why we hear Him saying, "Okay, we've dealt with that. Now let's go on to . . . ."

3. Life is an adventure. What will God do next? Often we have no idea, and I find this exciting. The essence of adventure is challenge, and the Christian life is certainly one of challenges. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great adventure because of the challenges that the hero faced. In the face of the problems and challenges that we encounter, we can choose to see our life either as an ordeal or as an adventure. Given the nature of God, and the fact that He always wants what is good for us, I believe that it is much more realistic to see it as an adventure.

   The cartoon picture we see of heaven as being populated by angels lounging around on clouds playing their harps seems outright hellish to me. I want something more exciting, and the Christian life is exciting. As we deal with the sins and weaknesses that God lays before us, and as we with His help conquer them, we are moving to higher and higher levels of attainment. I never would have dreamed that God would have brought me to the place where I am today, and I don't know just where He is taking me, but wherever it is, I am finding the journey exciting. What will He do next?

4. Our challenges draw us closer to Him. It is a sad but true about fallen mankind that when our lives are free of struggles, we are most apt to forget the Lord. And conversely, when our struggles are worst, we seek Him the most. God has so set up things such that we cannot resolve the deep sin problems in our hearts all by ourselves, and He is seldom willing to zap us out of them. Our only choice is to deal with them with Him. Praise God! It is in this process of dealing with them, with Him, that we come to know the depth and breadth of His love, His mercy, and His power.

5. God will deal with the leftover problems through His grace. I doubt if any of us will live long enough to have dealt with all of the sins and problems in our hearts, but that's okay. If I wind up tonight as road kill on I-95, I know that my undiscovered and unconfessed sins will not send me to hell. God wants to purify us as much as much as we will let Him in this life, but certainly He has ways of dealing with what didn't get dealt with here. Our job of getting ourselves cleaned up may not have been completed in this life, but His job of redeeming mankind has been completed, and we are the beneficiaries of that completion. Maybe God will somehow zap us between here and heaven, or maybe the nature that we find ourselves with in heaven will be partly determined by what we did here, as I described above, or maybe God has some way none of us have ever dreamed of, but because of Jesus, we have nothing to fear.

Your struggles with sexual sin may go on for quite a while, and once you have significant victory in this area, God will almost surely call you to move on to another challenge. Will you ever be able to rest? Not really. Will you ever know peace? Yes, absolutely. But an essential element of peace is accepting what is, and what is for each of us is a continuing journey with the Lord as he leads us further and further into wholeness and righteousness. You can know the peace that passes all understanding in the midst of your challenges.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Matthew 5:6