Because God is not a control freak, and because he longs for mutual desire and gives us the freedom to choose, and because we chose to be gods ourselves, we’re living in a world broken from such a perfect relationship with our creator.
If you haven’t already, it’s only a matter of time until your church faces the question, “Should a divorced and remarried couple really separate when they join the church?” If you’re background is like mine, you typically have taken a fairly strict stand, viewing remarriage after divorce to be living in sin. But is that actually true? Should we really make couples separate?
As the serpent got Adam and Eve to disobey God by wounding their confidence in His goodness, so he gets us to disobey God by wounding our confidence in Him. All addictions, and particularly sexual addictions, exist because deep in our hearts we believe God isn’t good.
The last few articles I’ve been releasing mini glimpses into the content of my upcoming book Live Free – making sense of male sexuality. The book is a conversation about my own journey and what it means to live sexually whole and free as a man. This book is for men, by a man.
But I wanted to pause and acknowledge that lust isn’t just a man’s problem. Women struggle with it too.
In my last post, I said we can live without sex, but not without intimacy. Having a great sex partner is not the key to sexual gratification. Finding the most beautiful spouse in the world won’t keep one from lusting after others. The desire for erotic pleasure comes as the result of a lack of meaning and purpose and nothing in life is truly meaningful without its relational value.
What I didn’t say in that post is what intimacy looks like. I didn’t really explain how to have meaningful relationships.
As I said before, I don’t necessarily feel like an expert at relationships yet, but I am slowly learning. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden with God provides excellent training material.
Our churches have become too perfect for handling messy people of the world.
The worst part of it is that at the core, we have become too perfect for ourselves: we no longer share with others about our struggles because people don’t know what to do with them.
This years’ fifth most-read post was No Broken People Allowed, and I think you’ll understand as you read why this resonated with well over three thousand viewers. Check it out, leave a comment and share it with a friend. Let’s become people who care for each other in our brokenness.
Within the Christian culture, we don’t do well at caring for broken people, especially in a church mainly filled with multigenerational believers. We’ve known all of our lives how to live appropriately and so Christianity becomes more about living rightly than faith and transformation in Christ.
Requirements for church membership focus more on outside sins (smoking, dress, habits of leisure) instead of internal sins such as gluttony, gossip, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, anger, rebellion, materialism and many more. The idea is, once you have your outside life altogether you can become a member. And then, don’t show anymore imperfections after that.
The problem is, that only cultivates fake Christians.
Author Asher Witmer knows what it’s like to want freedom from sexual sin only to continually fail. We’re often told we need more personal discipline, that we need to think godly things instead of fleshly things.
What if I told you that discipline won’t solve your problem with lust?
Our male sexuality is given by God for advancing beauty and goodness. But somewhere along the line it becomes something that causes devastation and guilt. The good news is we don’t have to live with guilt. In Live Free, Asher Witmer shows us how we can find freedom from sexual sin, live with nothing to hide, and be able to fight for others.
