11 Sex: Are You Living As If You’re Poor?
The missionary told a compelling story, one that got my attention and still has it today. He was ministering in a horribly impoverished country to people who literally had nothing. One time as he was walking to the market to get provisions, he happened across a wandering pack of little boys. He didn’t have much money himself, but his heart went out to these boys, who have little hope and a dark future ahead of them. He reached into his pocket and gave the boy who seemed to be the leader of the pack the equivalent of ten American dollars. That boy held riches in his hand that he had never imagined and would surely never see again. “Use it wisely,” the missionary said as he went on his way.
After purchasing his provisions, the missionary walked home from the market along the same road. He heard the sounds of happy chatter before he saw the same pack of little boys. To his shock and surprise each of the boys had ice cream in his hand. The missionary couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Immediately anger welled up inside him, and he took the leader of the pack aside and scolded him, saying, “I gave you more money than you’ve ever seen, and this is what you do with it?” With little hesitation the boy responded, “Sir, yesterday we were poor, tomorrow we will be poor, but today we have ice cream.”
You see, poverty is not just a condition; it becomes an identity. The boy was saying, “You do get it, Mister. I am poor; I will always be poor. Your money won’t keep me from being poor, so today I’ll numb myself with pleasure, because I have no hope of anything ever changing.” Sadly, many people who call themselves Christians and say they believe in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ live with a poverty mentality. They feel that they have nothing with which to face what they daily must face; they have little hope of ever having anything, so they numb themselves with the pleasures of the moment. But there is something underneath the poverty mentality.
I am convinced that there is much confusion of identity in the body of Christ. I am convinced that there are many believers who simply don’t know who they are. This is significant, because every rational human being assigns some kind of identity to him- or herself. In that influential and informative self-conversation we are always having, we tell ourselves who we are. And the identity we assign to ourselves determines how we go about dealing with the stuff on our plate.
When you have confusion of identity, you tend to live with a poverty mentality, which makes you a sitting duck for sexual insanity. Only riches can deliver you from riches. In other words, only the heart-satisfying riches of the grace of Jesus can protect and free you from the deceptive and dissatisfying “riches” of this fallen world. Only when your heart is content can you have lasting protection against becoming addicted to the temporarily satisfying pleasures of the created world. It is vital to understand the riches you have been given in Christ. It’s essential to approach life as one who is rich. It makes no sense to go out on the street and beg when you have been given an inheritance beyond your wildest dreams.
– – –
He sat slumped in the chair with his head down once again. He had the look of an utterly defeated and hopeless man. He had come to see me, but he didn’t want to be there, and he had said a few things, but he had no interest in talking. No trial had brought him to this point. No, he had finally seen himself with accuracy, and what he saw had taken his breath away. He now knew that his struggles were bigger than he had ever imagined and his weakness much greater than he had assessed. After what seemed to be hours of silence but was actually less than a minute, he looked up at me and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more weak and discouraged.” The moment he said it, I was relieved. He was right—his story was a chronicle of weakness. He was right—there was no hope for him all by himself.
If you can stare your personal sex insanity in the face and say, “No problem, I can handle this,” then you are a person in deep spiritual trouble. Only when you are crushed by your poverty of desire, ability, and hope will you begin to get excited about the riches that are yours in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. And only when you daily read to yourself the gospel of those riches will you have the insight and courage to fight the battles that God calls and graces you to fight.
I knew in that moment that I would not help him by minimizing his daily temptations. I knew it wouldn’t help him to negate the power of the war he was living in. I knew it wouldn’t help him to pump up his assessment of his own strength. To do any of those things would have been to play into the deceptive power and attraction of sexual insanity. As I sat there with him, I was once again reminded that hopelessness is the doorway to hope. Only when we abandon our hope in our own righteousness, wisdom, and strength, and only when we abandon our hope that the created world will be our savior, will we reach out for the riches of the righteousness, wisdom, and strength found only ever in Jesus.
Who do you tell yourself you are? Do you assign to yourself riches of independent righteousness and strength you don’t have? Do you assess that you are wiser than you really are? Or do you preach to yourself of your aloneness, poverty, and inability? Are you better skilled at convincing yourself that you are more hopeless than a person of robust hope? You see, both the “I can handle this” believer and the “There is no hope for someone like me” believer suffer from the same thing: identity amnesia. They have been saved by the blood of Jesus, but between their past forgiveness and their future in eternity, they have simply forgotten or never truly grasped who they are. So they will not seek the help they need, rest in the grace they’ve been given, or fight their battles with the weapons they’ve been given by grace.
Rich Grace
It is one of my favorite passages of Scripture. It has been a long-time friend. It gets me up in the morning. It reminds me who I am, it helps me to correctly assess what I have been given, and it gives me courage to face the battles of the day. It is one of those passages in which God paints for us a beautiful word picture:
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
hear, that your soul may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David. (Isa. 55:1–3)
What a gorgeous picture of the heart-satisfying pleasures of grace! You will never understand who you are, what you have been given, and the resources that are yours right here, right now until you understand that as God’s child you have been invited to dine at the banquet table of the King. It is an invitation you couldn’t have bought. It is a meal you don’t deserve. Yours is food you couldn’t have earned. Only when you get who you are and the table that grace has put your feet under will you quit trying to feed your soul on what will never satisfy. Only resting in the riches you have been given will free you from seeking riches where they cannot be found. Only a full and satisfied heart is free from the insanity of a ravenous heart. Only when you are eating with joy the food of the King will you quit seeking food elsewhere. Only when you rest in the reality that you have been given life will you quit looking to sex satisfaction to give you life. When you begin to understand that you’ve been invited to a meal that will never end, that you’ve been welcomed to the King’s table forever, you’ll quit looking to sneak a bite at other tables.
The Rich Food of Redemption
So what does it actually look like to affirm your identity as a child of God and live in light of his lavish resources of grace? What does it mean to approach the struggle of sex from the perspective of the gospel of Jesus Christ? What new ways of living would result from truly believing that you have been welcomed to the soul-satisfying banquet table of the King of kings? What is the right-here, right-now gospel that each of us must preach to ourselves every day to protect ourselves from the sex insanity that is often inside us and everywhere around us? Below is a starting place.
In your struggle for God-honoring stewardship of your body and the purity of your heart, you must tell yourself again and again that if you’re God’s child, if you have been redeemed by his grace, and if you have been welcomed into his eternal family, it is absolutely impossible to ever be alone. There is no situation, no relationship, no location, and no struggle in which you exist all by yourself. No, your life has been invaded by the Savior, the King, the Lamb, the Captain, the victor Jesus Christ. He is your spiritual life. He is your power, your wisdom, and your hope. He is the food and the drink at the King’s table. God’s most wonderful gift to us is not a thing—it is a person. Our need was so great, our battle with sin so profound, that he knew the only thing that would help us was himself. So he gave us himself in the gift of his crucified, resurrected, and indwelling Son.
This means I can no longer look at my life and my struggles with sex in a “me against the world” way. I cannot allow myself to assess my potential to defeat the next temptation based on my previous track record and the size of the thing I am facing. I can’t go around thinking that I’ve been left to my ingenuity and strength. This kind of thinking denies the gospel realities of who I am and what I have been given. The presence of the Lord with me always belies any personal assessments of aloneness or inability.
Now, this reality of his presence seems counterintuitive. Doubt, fear, anxiety, envying another’s life, wondering if you have what it takes, and wishing life were easier are natural; but living in light of the constant presence of the Redeemer isn’t. This is why it is so important to preach this truth to yourself again and again.
2. I have all the resources I need.
The apostle Paul says that God has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing” (Eph. 1:3). He also ends his discussion in Romans 8 about life in the fallen world with these words: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (v. 32). Peter writes to suffering and struggling people these encouraging words: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Pet. 1:3). Yes, God has chosen to keep us here for a time, where the full range of the temptations of sex insanity exists and in some way greets us every day. Yes, we still live in a world where the Devil lurks about as a ravenous beast. And it is true that between the already and the not yet we still carry inside ourselves the susceptibility to sin. But it is not true that we have been left on our own without any resources.
Grace means that God will not leave you on your own, and he will never call you to a situation or location without giving you what you need, to do what he has called you to do. So I must at times flee, and there are times when I must stand and resist. I must avoid the tendency to name myself as more wise, righteous, and strong than I actually am. I must resist the dark lie of the Enemy that comes to me in a variety of forms and seeks to get me to believe that life can be found outside of the Savior. I must fight the draw to look for heart satisfaction in a thing like sexual pleasure. I must deal with my temptation to love the creation more than I do the Creator. I must always watch what I surrender my heart to. But I do none of these things in my own power or with my own resources. I can stand and affirm that I have no power on my own to either resist or defeat sin and be perfectly at rest, because I have been blessed with the rich resources of amazing grace. I don’t have to hope that I’ll have what I need. No, the cross assures me that I already have in my personal spiritual storehouse everything I could ever need. Could it be possible to preach this to yourself too much?
What often drives the sex struggles underground, giving room for sin to do its ugly work, is the powerful triad of self-righteousness, guilt, and shame. First, in an act of irrationality I attach my inner sense of well-being to my own righteousness, forgetting that the best of my righteousness is like a filthy rag, so I try to prove to God and myself and demonstrate to others that I am righteous. Because of this, I minimize, deny, excuse, rationalize, or shift the blame for my sin. I work to make myself feel good about what is not good. I recast my own history, and I rewrite my own stories, all for the purpose of self-atonement. Meanwhile the insanity of sex attraction, temptation, and addiction are growing in my heart.
Or I panic in the face of the clear sex-struggle evidence that I am not righteous at all. I give way to fear because I blow it in big and small ways again and again. And in moments when I am not acting out, I am constantly attracted to or desiring things that I should not. I cannot escape the guilt of my street-level unfaithfulness and am not able to make it all look okay. So I hide in shame, fearing the rejection of others and the anger of God. I cannot believe that God could place his love on a person like me. This too is a function of debilitating self-righteousness that completely forgets the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It doesn’t matter how exotically righteous you are. It doesn’t matter how pure you are in your dealings with sex. It doesn’t matter how strong you are against temptation. Your standing with God is never based on your righteousness, but on his. His perfect life, his acceptable death, and his death-defeating resurrection guaranteed your standing with God. All your sins—past, present, and future—have been covered by his blood. His righteousness has been attributed to your account. So even in your moment of greatest failure, you do not have to hide from God or fear his presence. Your penalty has been paid and eternal acceptance has been granted, so you can run into God’s presence, lost and broken as you often are, without fear of his rejection. Grace guarantees your forgiveness, pays the penalty for your guilt, and lifts the burden of shame off your shoulders. You simply can’t preach forgiveness to yourself too often.
4. There is someone who understands me.
The writer of Hebrews assures us with these words: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). In writing these words, the author exposes one of the cruel lies of the Enemy. This lie is meant to paralyze you as you seek to battle the myriad of sexual temptations that regularly greet you. The lie goes this way: “No one understands what you’re going through because no one is dealing with what you’re dealing with.” This lie is not only fashioned to get you to embrace the discouraging thought that no one could ever understand you, but it is also designed to do something even more debilitating. It is designed to get you to doubt the goodness of God. Here is the underbelly of this lie: “No one will understand you, because you have been singled out. Look around you—no one is going through what you’ve been going through. Maybe God has forgotten you. Maybe he is not always there. Perhaps he does, in fact, have favorites. Maybe he doesn’t always answer prayer.” All this is meant to get you to doubt God’s goodness, because if you don’t trust his character in your moments of sexual temptation, you won’t run to him for help.
But the writer of Hebrews says that the exact opposite is true. In a grace-driven desire that you would have just the right help in your moment of sex-struggle need, Jesus exposed himself to every kind of temptation you face so that you would always know that you seek help from one who knows exactly what you’re going through. And because he knows exactly what you’re going through, he is able to offer help that is form-fit for you and for the battle of the moment. So you don’t have to give way to the hesitation of doubt. No, you can go to him with complete confidence. He knows, he understands, and he greets you with the sympathy of someone who has not only been there but has defeated what you now need to defeat. Wow! There is not a day when you and I don’t need to hear this.
All this means that no matter now many times I have failed, how many times I have said yes to what required a no, or how defeated I feel, I am not stuck; change really is possible. My existence has been taken over and altered by powerful, zealous, and unstoppable grace. No matter how great my sin, no matter how foolish I am, and no matter how messy my track record, grace will ultimately win. God’s kingdom will come. His will will be done. He will not relent until every microbe of sin is delivered from every cell of every heart of every one of his children.
In our battle with sex insanity, you and I are blessed to be the sons and daughters of a zealous and dissatisfied Redeemer. He doesn’t get discouraged. He doesn’t panic when things are hard. He doesn’t wonder if he made the wrong choice in placing his grace on you. He doesn’t wring his hands and wish the problem would go away. He won’t give up with the job half done. And he surely won’t drop his work in you and walk away. You can change, not because you have the right motives or the right amount of power, but because he will not sit down until the final enemy has been defeated.
You and I simply cannot allow ourselves to give way to the paralysis of hopelessness. Yes, there will be moments when change does look impossible. There will be times when it seems that things are getting worse, not better. There will be times when we will be tempted to wonder if God is there and if he is who he has declared himself to be. There will be times when we’ll wonder if grace has forgotten our address. But we must remember that our Redeemer is not like us. He would never, ever consider forsaking the work of his hands. He is covenantally committed to completing in us what he has begun. Our hope for change rests not so much on our character but on his. Now, that’s good news!
6. Weakness is not my big problem, but my delusion of strength is.
Here are paradigm-changing words, words that are designed to revolutionize what you think about yourself and life in this fallen world: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). When you think you’re strong, or when you work to make yourself believe you’re strong, you won’t seek and rest in the powerful grace you have been given in Christ Jesus. We all just need to get a grip. Our stories present ample evidence that we are, in fact, quite weak, and in our weakness, quite susceptible to surrendering to things we should resist. We have all given way to sexual temptations that we should have run from. But we needn’t panic. God knows just how weak we are. He is not shocked or surprised by the evidence of our lack of power. No, his grace isn’t thwarted by our weakness. The opposite is true: his grace does its best work precisely at the moment our weaknesses have been exposed.
You see, our hope rests not in the size of our strength but in the inestimable magnitude of his. Grace can deal with all our weaknesses, but when we tell ourselves that we’re strong, we have little interest in that grace. It would do all of us a whole lot of good to listen to the message that our struggle with sex preaches. There are few areas in our lives that preach a gospel of neediness more than our struggles with sexual purity of heart and hands. If you listen to that message, you will be a seeker and celebrator of the powerful grace that has been lavished on you.
7. I have been given rich wisdom for daily living.
One of the sad effects of sin is that it shrinks all of us to fools. We don’t need any more evidence of the foolishness of sin in the stupid choices human beings make than what we do with sex. Consider King David’s adultery with Bathsheba. What was he thinking? In his mind, what was the end game? What did he imagine God would do? Did he really think he would get away with it? How did he convince himself that this illicit relationship was okay and would end okay? What a powerful picture of the foolishness of sin.
Foolishness is the problem of every human being because it is one of the inescapable effects of sin, and we are all sinners. We cannot escape this foolishness, because we cannot escape ourselves. So it is here that the gospel of Jesus Christ greets us with such power. The gospel declares that wisdom is not first a book, a blog post and tweet, or a theological essay. No, wisdom is first a person, and his name is Jesus. Paul says in Colossians 2:3 that Jesus is the one “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” To rescue us from our foolishness, God gave us the only thing that would help—his Son.
But not only have we been given the Son, who is the Word; also we have been blessed with the Word of the Son. Every page of Scripture gives us wisdom that we do not have on our own. There are things you need to know as you struggle with sex insanity, things you would never know by means of personal experience and collective research. These vital truths are known only by means of revelation.
God gifts us with his Word so that we may know him and his plan, so that we may understand ourselves and our needs, and so that we may know where lasting hope and help can be found. The purpose of God’s Word is not so much religious and theological information but personal transformation. So the Son, who is the Word, and the Word of the Son mean that we are not left to our own foolishness. There is One who is wisdom, who gifts us with wisdom we would never, ever have without him. We need to tell this to ourselves again and again.
8. Only the riches of grace satisfy my heart.
I don’t need to say much more about this, other than to repeat that this is a truth we need to preach to ourselves every day. You and I will only ever get vertically the heart satisfaction we all seek. It simply cannot and will not be found horizontally. Every created thing is without the capacity to satisfy your heart. The created world was designed to point you to where your heart will find its contentment and rest: in God and God alone. The sex insanity that harms and/or destroys our lives is the result of seeking from creation what can be found only at the foot of the Creator.
9. It’s guaranteed that my struggle with sex will end.
The victory of Jesus assures your victory. In farming terms, he is the firstfruits. The appearance of the first apple on the tree is a guarantee of more apples to come. The empty cross and the tomb of Jesus are your guarantee that your sexual temptation, sin, and addiction will someday be defeated, and you will live forever and be free of internal and external insanity. That guarantee of its future defeat is also a guarantee of all the grace you need along the way.
Yes, we do live in a world that has gone sex insane. And, yes, that insanity still lives in some way in all our hearts. But we needn’t panic; we needn’t succumb; we needn’t think that our battles are leading nowhere. We must not give way to assessments of poverty, aloneness, and impossibility, because the insanity has been invaded by the Messiah, Jesus. He faced every insane thing we face, and he defeated it all on our behalf. He did all this so that you and I would have the grace we need to face the sexual struggles we will continue to face until eternity is our home and the insanity has been quieted forever.
Review and Reflect
1. “The identity we assign to ourselves determines how we go about dealing with the stuff on our plate” (p. 168). How does this truth play out?
2. How does acknowledging personal weakness actually produce strength? See 2 Corinthians 12:7–10.
3. Reread Isaiah 55:1–3. How does this passage impact your thinking about your sex life?
4. The gospel of Jesus Christ can reshape our identity—including our sexual identity. Explain how the gospel truths laid out in chapter 11 alter your thinking. Which of the nine truths Paul outlines impact you most deeply and why?
5. Sexual insanity has been invaded by the Messiah. How is Jesus Christ the only path to sexual sanity?
Heart Reset
Isaiah 55:1–3
2 Corinthians 12:7–10
Ephesians 1:3–10
Hebrews 4:14–15
2 Peter 1:2–4