When battling sin or addiction, especially sexual sin, we often feel the pressure to change everything all at once. We have to completely give up that particular sin and rededicate our lives to Christ; if we falter and sin again, we think we’ve failed and are back at square one. We forget Jesus’s gentleness in wooing people to himself and replace it with our own harshness. This makes our failures...
True self-acceptance is a key to change. A skewed self-acceptance refuses change.
Sin doesn’t grant you permission to do what you want. It gives you no option but to do what it wants. And worse yet, to believe the want has come from you.
Too many people have the unfortunate problem of managing quite nicely. Quite nicely is nice when all things are well, but when there’s a secret moral failure, a destructive pattern, a relational problem, or a long-buried wound, managing quite nicely is a problem. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. It’s a silent misery. As a 19 year old Christian college student, I was harboring secret sexual sins...
Like a cat with its tail on fire, we run thinking it’s a matter of self-preservation. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Our sexual sins hurt the entire Body of Christ. Most of us recognize that when we engage in sexual sin with another person—even a very willing one—we have hurt that person by helping to facilitate their sin. Is sexual fantasy a sin? But even our “solitary” sins, such as sexual fantasy or lusting in front of a computer screen, do damage beyond just the corruption that takes place in our own souls...