Two days ago, I landed in South Korea and will be spending time with my in-laws and family over Christmas. I will be back in Sydney on Dec. 27. In the meantime, I will still be contactable by email and will be working through this period. Of the many things that I will be doing, I will be developing resources for pastors and pastoral workers to help those in their congregations with unwanted same-sex attractions. I will also be developing a guide for all and any who come through our support groups.
Many reading this website may not know this, but before I worked at Liberty Ministries, I lived in Korea for about 1.5 years as an English teacher; hence, coming back here this week leaves me not feeling like a tourist at all. In fact, I feel like a Korean! I can speak the language to some extent and am familiar with its customs. At the time that I lived in Korea, I honestly couldn’t stand it, but not because Korea was bad. The problem, as I came to see it, was me: I was self-pitying, controlling, impulsive, negative, carping, and distracted. While living in Korea had actually taken those characteristics to reach their ultimate nadir, I had actually been like that for quite a long time before then. Korea didn’t ‘make’ me all those things: I had been like that before I arrived. Living in Korea ‘tipped my cup’, to use an expression. Before living in Korea, I knew I was like this but had never known how bad it was until God put a mirror in front of my face. Eventually, I returned to Australia in a huff of desperation, and God has been using that to take me to a counsellor who has been quite successful in holding up the mirror up to my face in order that I see what is really going on in my heart and how God can heal it.
In Scripture, there are countless examples of how certain people had been taken out of their comfort zones in order to have their true inner ugliness exposed. But that exposure is never to disgrace and shame them, but to heal and even comfort them in God’s love. Examples of this are Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, David, and Jesus. Many of these characters were already in a habit of sin (e.g. Jacob), but their wilderness period highlighted the fallen character which they already had in order for God to make His point more pronounced. (The examples which stand against this are Joseph and Jesus.) On almost all occasions, the sins that Biblical characters indulge in are in order to survive and control the uncertain circumstances in which they find themselves.
I know that in my life and many of the people whom I have counselled in Liberty discover themselves in sins of self-preservation, control, survival, and self-medication because no-one has ever taught them how to feel and take all of their humanity to God. In fact, they fear that God will reject them or that their feelings, the things which they have denounced in their own minds as being of no significance, even though they are what will bring them healing and deliverance. That was the great and tragic flaw of Israel’s first king, Saul. Jesus, however, never feared His emotions, frailties, or how His will diverged from that of the Heavenly Father’s, but actually took them to Him and used them for change and deeper intimacy.
Jesus didn’t just survive: He thrived in how He related to God and that gives hope to all who trust in Him. He had friends who didn’t understand what it meant to take emotions to God- even as He prayed with blood, sweat, and tears in the Garden of Gethsemane, they remained asleep. His pain really meant nothing to them, even as He called them ‘friends’. Even His own family denounced Him as a crackpot and was abandoned by blame-shifting parents as a child, as well as on the cross, it did not stop Him. Yet it never separated Him from God because He took all that need and the ‘Why?’ For what reason? Because God’s goodness was known to Jesus and the sufficiency of having relationship with the Father.
Many people do not have that relationship with God, which is sad, but it is there for the taking. If you want that kind of relationship, you can ask Him for it:
Dear God my Heavenly Father, I cannot stop what sin I am in and I feel guilty, shameful, and so unworthy of Your grace. It is so bad that I feel I can never be forgiven again by You: sometimes, I do not want to even forgive myself. I cannot think that even you can, or even want, to forgive me. But You see me as I am: You know my heart, and how hard it is to take all of my life to You, including my feelings. Please help me. Please put people in my life who can model the kind of intimate relationship with You that Jesus had. Please keep taking me to Jesus, so that I not only know what it means to have Him as saviour, but to apprehend it and act in out in faithful trust. Please forgive me for not taking my feelings to You, but it is so hard. You know what that is like. So please heal those parts of me that are hiding myself from You and help me to bring them in faithful trust.
In the name and authority of Jesus Christ, Amen.
Haydn, Liberty pastoral worker.