Everybody, welcome back to this week’s podcast glad you’re with me. Do you need to look at your past? If you want freedom from unwanted sexual behavior? Do you need to go back there? Do you need to think about mom and dad and kids at school and wounds you experienced if you want to be free? We’re going to talk about that in today’s podcast. I remember years ago, when I was going through recovery myself, there was a guy in my small group who did not want to look at the past, he thought it was kind of an act of, I don’t know, rebellion against God to look at our past, he was blaming our past on our present sin. Now, when we talk about looking at our pasts, we are not talking about blaming wounds we’ve experienced on our sin, we are responsible for our behaviors. Nonetheless, at Regeneration, we do spend time helping people unpack their stories, and by stories we mean their lives in the past, up to the present, and looking forward into the future. And we do that because we believe it’s incredibly beneficial, and illuminating and powerful, as we want to draw nearer to Jesus, and heal from those things that have hurt us. So we can walk in greater sexual integrity. Here I think about Peter, and this is a good example, I think of, of one one place that Jesus does this. And I think there are a few others where we can infer that Jesus was, was helping unpack or uncover or on Earth, something that happened in the past, to help someone heal in the present. But one of the most obvious examples of that is the end of the of the Gospels, where Peter has the told Jesus that he would die for him. But in the end, he ended up coming into the, the, the courtyard where Jesus was arrested, warming himself by a fire. And when people around him said, You’re with Jesus, aren’t you? Three times Peter denied Him? Not just said, you know, No, thanks, or Yes, I am. But you know, please be easy, denied him, even cursed I you know, what the, I don’t even know that God denied him. And then you know, you know, the story, the the be leaving weeping, what he had done, denying Jesus, whom he loved so much. When we look at the end of the book of John, and after Jesus’s resurrection, Jesus, there’s a scene where Jesus has has built a fire on the shore, and is cooking fish for his his disciples. And among those disciples at that point is Peter. And, and Jesus asked Peter three times, Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me? And, and requires Peter to answer three times and there’s this beautiful interaction? Well, I think that’s one example of what Why was Jesus doing that? You know, Peter denied Him out of fire. Jesus lit a fire on the beach. Peter denied three times, three times Jesus asked him, Do you love me? Now, this wasn’t a penance. It wasn’t it wasn’t. Peter wasn’t required to do this, in order to be forgiven, Jesus had forgiven him. He wanted to restore Peter, he wanted to re enter that scene, to meet Peter there and to draw him out into a new place so that Peter could be become the leader of the early church powerfully as he was and know with confidence that he and Jesus were good, that he he is good and that his past had been healed. Well, in our experience, looking at our past can be incredibly helpful in healing in walking away from unwanted sexual behavior. So I want to frame it up this way for you just to help you understand a little bit. Let’s talk about wounds from our past, when we experienced wounds, and we all have experienced wounds in our past, when we experience wounds, oftentimes those wounds do not come, just come and go. John Eldridge points out that that usually when there’s a wound, especially a significant wound, like a parent, leaving a parent dying, a parent being abusive, verbally, physically, sexually, when there’s bullying at school, when a when a child has a embarrassing or shameful moment, when they don’t do well in school. I mean, you name it, I mean, all sorts of wounding experience we have, why do we have winning experiences because we live in a fallen world and it hurts down here, right? That bad things happen. When we have these these, we experience these wounds. It’s like we are we’re hurt in some area. And then frequently, what happens is the enemy comes right in that moment or in the subsequent moments, and he offers what elders calls an interpretation of the wound. Why did this happen to you? What does this mean? So for example, if a kid is bullied at school, some kids are picking on the the boy or the girl. The enemy will come in and in the silence of that kid’s own heart and begin to offer suggestions offer interpretation. Why are those kids picking on you? Here’s why. Because you’re different, because you’re klutzy because you’re whatever, in that situation that the enemy might even, you know, just say, well, the things they’re saying are true. I’ve talked to so many adults who when they think back on their childhood, there, they had repeated experiences of either being sexually abused, or being bullied or being called names or being accused of this or that. And frequently that the question that arises them is like, Why me? What do all these people see in me that this keeps happening? To me? Well, the enemy comes and says, Well, because it is you, this is what this is happening, because this is you. This is what you’re worth. This is who you are. And I know some of you can relate with that. Another example even those just take a divorce of a father leaves a family or monthlies a family, the enemy will come into that wound and interpret Well, why why did that happen? Because of you, it’s your fault. If you were more lovable than your father would have stayed, your mother would have stayed. That’s, that’s actually part of my story. I mean, I’ve had conversations with my dad as an adult about this, that there was a message that came to me in his absence. Now I heard him say that he left the marriage, he was divorcing my mom, not me. But in my heart of hearts as a little kid, I couldn’t help it interpret on some level. Like, it’s, it’s because of me, if I had been more lovable if he if I had been better, he would have stayed I would have been worth sticking around for is incredible. The wound itself, my dad’s absolute was incredibly hard. But the interpretation of the wound was another wound on top of that. So notice this, every time the enemy comes every time then becomes to offer a foul interpretation of a wound you’ve experienced. It is for the, for the sole purpose of creating shame in your life. He wants you to feel shame, about who you are, about what you’re worth, about your value. And by shame here, I don’t mean to shame you, I mean, specifically this, that there’s something uniquely wrong with you. There’s something uniquely wrong with you. It’s not you know, hey, we’re all broken, we all have problems, but you specifically, that’s the way the enemy attacks, you specifically, there’s something uniquely wrong with you. And it’s going to define the rest of your life. That’s what the enemy does with with our wounds. So a wound comes in sometimes the enemy is involved in that a wound comes the enemy offers a foul interpretation of the wound to produce shame in our lives. And then the enemy on top of that comes in suggest to us a way out, here’s how you can escape the pain of the wound and shame you experience. Right? Check out pornography, it’s fantastic for you get involved in this relationship. Assume that this that you’re that you’re gay or lesbian. They’ll hook up with your girlfriend or boyfriend I mean, whatever it is, like he’s, he’s, he’s going to offer you, here’s how you can offer here’s a salve to your pain to your shame. Not only that, he’s not just offering you a salve, and escape from the pain he’s offered, also offering you how to resolve the shame, right? Sometimes what he’s doing is actually saying, This is how you can undo the shame you experience. Here’s how you can be better, here’s how you can do better. And if you do this, then you’re going to outrun the shame, you’ll get past it, he did this in the garden with Adam and Eve. First he told them, you’re not really like God, even though you’re creating his image, you’re really not like him, you have to eat from this guy who doesn’t want to eat from this tree, because then you will be like Him. And once they they bought that lot. Or once they bought the lie that they weren’t like him. He’s also adding there, this idea that like, now, here’s how you, here’s how you can resolve this, like, just eat from this tree, and you’re going to be okay, he wounds us, give us an interpretation, and then offers us a way out of it. And we see that over and over again, in the area of unwanted sexual behavior. We see it over and over again in the area of people taking on identities that are that are faulty, that are shame driven, as a way to try to resolve the shame their experiences they’re experiencing. And then most recently, in the last few years, thanks to the work of Jay stringer and his book, unwanted. And his his methodology for addressing things like your sexual arousal template and your and your fantasy life. He’s identified through his research, that they’re actually connections between the wounds you’ve experienced, and the kinds of sexual behaviors that you’re drawn to the kinds of fantasies that you have the kinds of acting out that you typically want to do. And so that, and as, as I’ve worked with people, and even in my own life, and I know that others on our staff have to, as we get into the story into story work in that way. Some of the dots really connect pretty clearly, between things that that have happened to us wounds we’ve experienced and the kinds of pornography that we go go towards, or the way that we’re trying to hook up with somebody. Oftentimes they have a power over or power under dynamic. So if we were overpowered in wounded in that way, in some way in our in our past, then then maybe our fantasy life is that we’re the one power we’re the one who’s overpowering somebody else. And in that we were trying to reverse that that power differential that we experienced from younger. That’s a whole nother topic. And we’ll we do a lot more on that in this ministry because we want to help people unpack those things. So let’s, let’s come, let’s come back, I gotta end this podcast. But I asked the question initially, do we need to look at our past in order to be free from unwanted sexual behavior? And the answer is no, you don’t need to. But will it be beneficial for you to? I would suggest it would. And let me give you three reasons why. The first is just what I’ve described, that so often, our specific unwanted sexual behaviors are attached to wounds that we’ve experienced. And by understanding the connection between our unwanted sexual behaviors, or our temptations, or our sexual arousal, and the wounds of experience, we can better place those, those those temptations today. And instead of believing that this is kind of who we are, and we’re inevitably going to go this direction, we can begin to say instead, no, that’s actually connected to this wound from the past that’s being triggered in this moment. So that’s reason number one. I know there’s a whole lot more to that. But that’s helpful. Reason number two, it’s good to look at the past is because so frequently, the ways that we’ve learned to relate to other people have been shaped by the wounds that we experienced in the past, our most significant wounds are always relational, they always happen in the context of relationship. And so many of us learn to relate in ways that our responses or reactions, the wounds that we experienced. And if we’re trying to leave unwanted sexual behavior behind, we have to recognize sexual behaviors always connected to relationship, because sex at its core is relational. And so the way that we’re relating with people today is going to impact or is going to be connected to our ability to walk free from sexual behavior. So to make that practical DVD example, if we’ve learned in the past, if we’ve taken messages that are shaming, and we believe ourselves to be uniquely defective, or deficient or dirty in some way. And we’ve learned that the way to deal with that the enemy has kind of held it, the bait, the way to deal with that is to not let anybody in, well, then we’re we’re keeping people out, we’re not being honest about what we experience, we’re not being honest about our sin. We don’t tell people what we really feel. And that’s, that keeps us from the kind of intimacy that we need to heal, healing, being able to walk in sexual integrity. Being able to be sexually whole means that we let people in means that people know us means that we can be metaphorically naked and unashamed with others in our lives. And that requires that we that we heal from those past wounds, and renounced those, those lies the enemy told us. Third reason that it’s good to look at our past, in order to to heal and to walk in sexual integrity today is that so often our past experiences and relationship, or past experiences relationship, impact how we view God, and impact our relationship with Him. So I mentioned, for example, this is just one example. But if you’ve experienced a wound from a mother or father, in your life, and most of us have in some way, they were distant, they weren’t available. They were harsh, and short tempered, they were abusive. They left, all of those things serve as kind of a template into the wet cement of our forming lives as little kids. And it’s very easy than for us to project those experiences onto God. If you had a mother or father who was critical of you, it’s more likely that you’re gonna believe that God is critical. Even if your theology in your head is right, it’s more likely in your heart, you’re going to, you’re going to be kind of expecting God be critical. You had a parent who was abusive and angry, more likely, you’re going to experience God to be abusive and angry. If you had a parent who left or who was distant emotionally, it’s more likely you’re gonna believe that God is distant, or who is going to leave you. And so by looking at your past, you can, you can invite Jesus as He did with Peter on the shore, to meet you in that place of wounding to meet you in that place where you have beliefs and and faulty about him. So you can experience him as he really is. And then, as you move forward, you’re more freed up in the area of temptation. As you work through your past as you work through your wounds as you try to walk in sexual integrity. Whatever it is, you’re more freed up to walk hand in hand with the Lord, in a free relationship, where you know that you’re loved and cherished by him. Friends, that’s one of the most beautiful things and powerful things about this ministry. And one of the reasons I love it the most. sexual integrity is great, it matters. It’s important that we that we grow in virtue, but to walk in intimacy with God, to walk in friendship with him. That’s the glory of life. That’s the beauty of life. Actually, Jesus said, it’s eternal life, if you didn’t know him is eternal life. And that’s what we want for you. Lord, would you help us help us to grow to help us to see the things in our past that hold us back, that we might walk in union with you today? And to walk in sexual integrity with ourselves and with others, we pray in Jesus name, Amen.