Today, I want to share with you a personal story about God’s great mercy. This is a tough confession for me to share. But, I believe God’s Spirit is prompting me to do it for His glory. You see, the more our Truth in Love Podcast and the GoFaithStrong ministry have become widespread, the more I want to sacrifice all I am for the sacred trust of the Great Commission. The mission of discipleship and sharing the Gospel is all for God’s glory and I want to maximize this sacred purpose each day.
I don’t ever want God’s character impugned by my failures.
The enemy of the Gospel always finds a way to blame GOD for the sinful behavior of His children. I mean, how many times have you heard someone say, “I quit going to church because the preacher is a hypocrite, and he…[relates the offensive behavior…]” So I want to take the wind out of the enemy’s sails. I don’t want anyone to hear about my failure from the enemy; I’d rather you to hear it from me.
If you have read my testimony, you know that by the time I left my husband I had hit rock bottom. And that’s where God found me. He led me into this amazing relationship with Himself. But it’s legitimate to ask, how did a born again believer, a person who outwardly seemed to be such a “good Christian,” hit the bottom so hard?
Well, let me back up to before I was married.
Back then, I had the mistaken belief that having a husband would somehow make me feel completely loved. I dreamed of romance, unbreakable friendship, and the experience of being unconditionally loved by another. When I met my husband, we were both newly born again and I was beyond excited about our life together. I believed he was my Prince Charming. I was finally going to live my big dream! But within a year after we were married, I began to realize my dream had some huge problems. I was so disappointed. Of course, I blamed him. But the problem wasn’t HIM—the problem was ME. I had laid the burden of my expectations for love on a man who was as flawed as I was.
No other person can satisfy our crushing need for unconditional love.
Only God can. I didn’t realize this so I tried to work even harder at being a fully committed Christian to fill the void. But I was missing something. As my hope for love became more and more crushed, I began to look for “love” in other places. Children, career, beauty…none of it was enough. Of course, our marriage had problems. But what I didn’t realize was that the biggest problem was our respective relationships with God. After all, we were both doing the committed church thing—full throttle.
But you see, my quest for love was off course because I believed the world’s definition of love.
I had no idea that the pursuit of admiration and “love” from someone else would be perpetually dissatisfying. No degree of “love” from another person was ever going to satisfy my need for love from God. It was not the answer. I simply had no clue that being physically, emotionally, and intellectually desirable to someone else was really asking for more of the same mess.
More importantly, I had no idea that God was the only one who could satisfy my need for love.
How had I been a born again believer and yet missed this critical truth? Well, looking back, I can tell you there are two reasons. One, my Christianity was more about the rules than the relationship because after I was born again, I didn’t grasp how to build a deep relationship with God. Two, I had the totally wrong impression of God. My beliefs about who God is were overshadowed by the enemy’s lies.
I believed God was a wrathful judge who wanted me to live a life of abject misery in order to work for some unseen “heavenly reward.” God seemed esoteric. God’s purpose for my life seemed small. I had made God’s presence smaller than what I considered to be the “realities of life” like law school, rearing children, paying the bills, etc. Unfortunately, I had not experienced the fruit of God’s Spirit in my life, nor had I seen it in the lives of very many Christians. Sure, I’d glimpsed genuine love, joy and peace in other Christians, but it seemed more of an anomaly than a common experience. Of course, now I know it was actually all around me.
But, my friend, our fleshly desires make us see what we WANT to see, while we remain blind to what we NEED to see.
God’s love was buried in the garbage-mountain of lies about real love. The joy He offers was sullied by the fleeting and false promises of happiness based upon circumstances and people. Although a child of God, it was as if I were living in a spiritual coma, oblivious to all the goodness of a relationship with God.
My friend, I was a perfect candidate for infidelity.
You know, I think the most alluring aspect of sexual sin is that it falsely promises us a lasting euphoria. But then—when it is over—it’s always just you and that other sinner. How can one beggar give another beggar bread? After the euphoria, what’s the big point anyway? You’re simply more empty than you were before. Soon you think, “it’s this other person, I need someone different.” We crush the relationship with our desire for what we think is real love.
This was me—stuck in counterfeit love.
I finally came to the end. I still remember the weekend I left my husband. I told my children about my infidelity and I apologized to them. At this time they were old enough to understand and I knew they would be told anyway. I wanted them to hear about it from me. I can’t remember many more painful experiences in my life than these conversations. Even though I was still in a spiritual coma, I was still desperate for their forgiveness. My self-centered search for “love” had ended as a journey of horrors. But despite my lack of love-relationship with God, His powerful Word had affected me and given me important moral set points in other areas of my life. Thus, it was important to me that they knew I was owning my behavior and seeking their grace and forgiveness.
Their grace was the first glimpse of the light of God’s love in my darkness.
Ah, my friend, this was the beginning of the remarkable journey with God I’m on now. If you’ve read my testimony, you know many of the incredibly loving things God did to reveal His REAL love to my desperately seeking heart. I promise you, if I could do life again, I’d do it much differently. But I can’t change the past. Now it’s part of my story and it is my hope that—like King David’s story of adultery, murder and repentance—my story will help you know that God desires to reconcile to ALL of His children.
Failure does not erase God’s love and—I am proof.
You see, even as born-again Christians—we all have sin we don’t want to talk about. And some of it we should NEVER reveal because it is not necessary. But for me, God’s Spirit revealed that this was necessary. I don’t know all the reasons why—I don’t have to. In the past decade, I’ve come to trust God’s leadership. This past chapter of my life is an extremely painful reminder of how far we, as born again believers, can fall from our glorious purpose.
We all innately know that we were created in the image of God and created for a magnificent purpose. The Bible says:
“What may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.”
Romans 1:19
“I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.”
Psalms 139:14
We live on a battlefield in constant conflict with our three enemies. The flesh is always ravenous and it’s never any better than the day we were born again. Paul explained:
“For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.”
Romans 7:18-19
My present experience of living in the supernatural love of God has lessened my desire to live in the superficial moment of “love” the world offers. Yes, the temptations are still there. Sexual sin is like a drug. We MUST have something better in order to resist it.
God’s presence is far better than the short-lived pleasures of sin.
Like the Apostle Paul said, the struggle is ever-present. Temptation invades every open crack of our mind. We must guard our mind against our enemies. But putting our guard up is not enough. We must learn to find supreme satisfaction within a rich relationship with God. It is only when we have something much better that we build lasting habits and thwart our desire to have those things which will never satisfy us. This is one reason the BE-Attitude series was such a game changer for me. The development of winning attitudes and a new way of thinking is a powerful tool for perpetually defeating the flesh.
By God’s grace, as I draw closer to Him, His magnificent presence is strongly manifested through my life. Sure, the flesh still wants what it wants, so I must guard against my weaknesses. But there is nothing in this world that compares to God, the fountain and foundation of all the best goodness in this world and beyond.
