Messages from Your Soul

It is strange, sad, and bothersome that I lived in the "far country" for so many years, wreaking havoc on myself and many others. It's worse that I was supposedly a "professing follower of Christ." I lived quite the opposite. Most of my sin was due to "stinking thinking" as they say in AA. My thoughts and beliefs about myself was jacked up. Sadly, it started in early elementary and carried on through adulthood. Much of my "recovery" work has been to apply many of God's truths, particularly Romans 12:1-2 (The Message):

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Or as the NIV says, "but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will." 

My mind was so skewed. I suffered from self-hatred, deep shame, and was longing for acceptance - and looked for it in "all the wrong places." I had it from God through Christ AND from Amy. However, I didn't let their love sink in and undo the inner turmoil of sin and selfishness. It took a major fall out to wake me up.

One of the best books I have read on purity of mind and body has been Mark Laaser's book, Taking Every Thought Captive. He has great insights that explain why the mind and brain are so key to our purity. Plus, how to "take those thoughts captive unto Christ" rather than staying stuck in a life of sin and ungodly living/thinking. Our brains need to be reprogrammed so that our old ways of coping are replaced with new, healthy ones (2 Corinthians 10:5).

Dr. Laaser explains why sex is often misused. He says,

Every sexual act symbolizes some form of excitement, acceptance, love, nurturing, power, or control; sexual acts are always ways we symbolically try to solve our emotional issues. Your thoughts and actions mean something about your soul. Your ... thoughts can be your teachers. They bring you messages from your soul.

God loves us. Yet we do not always know or understand that. Our fantasies are our attempts to love ourselves, to meet the needs of our soul. God's love for us has been the answer all along, but do we know how that works? The psalmist says that if we "delight...in the LORD...he will give us the desires of our heart" (Ps. 37:4). Could it be that being obedient to Christ means that we'd better learn how God loves us and wants us to love ourselves so that we can love others? 

When we struggle with unwanted thoughts and impure thinking, the temptation is to try to avoid having those thoughts at all costs. We think if we distract ourselves and ignore them that they will go away. Though we need to "take these thoughts captive" and not dwell on the particular images/thoughts, we need to seek to find the "meaning" behind those thoughts. The longings of our soul are crying out. We need to listen. Dr. Laaser has great insights on how to deal with this issue.

Take time to know what the longings of your soul are and where in your past they come from...When unwanted thoughts come into my brain, my first question is going to be, "What are these thoughts trying to tell me? What are they trying to teach me?" I don't tell them to go away. I ask them to stay, and I interview them. Then I ask myself, "Am I particularly tired or lonely? Am I stressed and overworked? Am I feeling disconnected from my wife, family and friends?" Then, "What do I need? How can I love myself? What do I need to ask for?" When I take time to do this, I can honestly say that I am free of unwanted thoughts and fantasies and am much more able to love others. God is good. He is the answer. I seek to be obedient, and I seek to love others as I love myself.

I am grateful for people like Dr. Laaser. He has been in recovery from sexual sin for over 25 years. He has had the courage to be honest, accountable, and seek Christ for his healing and wholeness. He has a tremendous ministry to men and couples (www.faithfulandtrue.com). He and his wife have a passion for sharing God's message of hope, despite the fact that he fell hard into sin and hurt so many people. Interestingly, when his "fall out" occurred back in the 80's, he was around the same age I was when I fell. He is a living example of how God can change a person. I want that testimony as well. What Satan intended for evil, God has used for good.