As I grew up and frequented youth group, church events, and read popular books on the subject of overcoming pornography, I heard the same message over and over. Even now, most of the published messages, media and books on the subject say the same thing: the greatest hope is to an ‘active struggler’… to be a ‘wrestler’… to constantly ‘take every thought captive’.
So, for someone who was bound by homosexual, heterosexual, and every type of curiousity, to be at a “2” and only have a hope of ever attaining an “8” (1 being totally addicted and captive, 10 being completely free), it was not worth the effort.
If you tell someone who needs to lose 100 lbs to be healthy and live an active lifestyle, that they can only lose 80 lbs and it will be ‘pretty successful’ and they will be ‘mostly active’, what is the hope for starting the journey? If they still can’t live how they want to live, it is much easier to just keep eating donuts as often as you want!
My issue with the popular and ‘successful’ Alcoholics Anonymous program is that it is based on a core belief that ‘once an addict, always an addict.’ As we will discuss later in much more detail, either ‘new means new’ or it does not! What Paul said ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away and behold all things have become new!’
If I draw you a picture and you crumple it up, scribble on it, and step on it, and I ask you for a new picture – what will you do? Flatten it out and give it back?
Is that what new looks like?
No, you would draw me a new picture on a fresh piece of paper. That’s what new is.
So it is with Christ!
Many of us have made choices the equivalent of tearing, crumpling, stomping on our identity in Christ. We have shattered what was once precious. But there is good news! Christ makes things new! To those who give their heart to Him, He makes all things new!
New does not mean that your crumpled up mistakes that have marked up, scribbled over, stomped on and torn will be flattened out and made ‘like new’ and hung back on the wall. It means a new picture will be drawn; a new name will be given; and new heart transplanted and a new mind implanted.
