Sex was God's idea!

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”  Those words echoed in my mind one evening on the way home from work.  Sounded Biblical to me, so I vowed to look it up on a computer Bible program when I got home.  They certainly were not my words.  I had never used the word “locust” in a sentence; all I knew was that it was some kind of cricket type of bug.

 

When I got home I looked it up and it was in Joel 2:25.  I took it to mean that the Lord was going to make something good out of my past.  He had already done a great job in a lot of places in my life but there turned out to be another area where I had really blown it: I had followed the culture when it came to sexual sin.  Most movies, commercials, and music sell sex as a prize.  Or they at least sell love, and then sex seems to likely follow.  So, He was going to repay me for the years the locusts had eaten.  Yuck!  I didn’t even want to think about thinking about the past.  I was a born-again Christian so why couldn’t He just wave His magic wand and make all those memories disappear?  I did not want to face this pile of garbage that was in my past.  Yes, it was indeed in my past.

Shortly after that, I went to a two-day women’s Christian conference and one of the events that we could attend at the break was at a certain business.  The business happened to have the same family name of my first “boyfriend”.  I went to my Bible study the following week.  We were starting a new group with new people and one of the ladies at our table again happened to have the same last name.  I’ll just tell you this, it was not like Smith or Jones, it was an unusual name, known likely only to this area.  I said, “Really Lord, do we have to do this?  I don’t want to!”  

Later in the same time period a customer came into my work.  He was  a man I had had an affair with years ago.  He did not know I worked there.  I wanted to press the proverbial “delete” key and make this all go away.   “Why, Lord, why do we have to do this?”  God was indeed getting my attention.  Yes, I was a Christian, and yes, I was forgiven but I had to heal from the damage my personal choices had made.  I wasn’t damaged goods, I’d been given new life.  And He was going to teach me that.

I was living it on the outside of my life.  I was living honestly, no longer looking for love in all the wrong places.  I was giving my total attention to Jesus.  I was living a clean life. That was good enough right?  I was living honestly but God wanted more.  He wanted me to come to terms with my sexual past and leave it at the cross in order for Him to bring me to the next level.  I was not to carry these scars with me.  That meant surgery and surgery hurts.

If you ever get to the point where God will not let you go further until you submit, you have this choice.  Stay and dry up or get on board and grow with Him.  With shoulders shrugged and head shaking side to side I decided I wanted Him more than covering up my embarrassing past.  One thing that really helped is He provided an opportunity for me to be alone with a close friend from church and talk about some of the worst hurts I remembered.  Her answer was not judgment or humiliation but compassion and understanding.  I told her things that had never been spoken out loud.  She even shared with me some of her own sins.  It had been my thinking up until this point that most church ladies could not relate.  So I spoke it out loud for the first time after 30 years.   Oh, I’d rehearsed the stories to myself millions of times but I was always too ashamed to tell anyone.  But in sharing the stories the strangest thing happened – they lost their power over me.  

It had been festering in the dark but once exposed to Light, surgery a success!  Satan will encourage you to sin then urge you not to tell anyone, that they won’t understand,  and all the while make you feel ashamed and so the cycle continues.

The bleeding had to stop (sin) then God could do surgery (restoration) to get me ready for the next level.  I put Him first, I allowed Him to dissect my past and get me ready for a real, solid new beginning to a marital covenant where He is the center.  Sounds simple, right?  Well I’m a bit slow it only took me 48 years to figure it out.

It did not work for me living the world’s way until I made Him first.  And yet I don’t think it was a waste of time those 48 years because it has helped produce in me a harvest of compassion for others.  I get it.  I had fallen for it.  I could listed 1,000 reasons why I lived the way I did.  And they came honestly but just because I had a reason does not mean I had a right to do as I pleased.  Not only that, it was self-destructive.   God was not holding out on me or anyone when He said, “Thou shall not commit adultery”.  He knows what is good and right for us.  For crying out loud it is one of the big 10!

I am glad to tell you I am happily married for almost six years now and I am right and clean before God.  He wanted me, His child, to have the best.  Parents do that for their children but I had to cooperate.  He did not want me to compromise.

So here is my advice for the single people out there.  If you are not married don’t have sex outside of marriage.  If you are married don’t have sex.  I’m kidding of course.  If you are married stay faithful and don’t have sex outside of marriage.  And put God at the center of your life in every place including your bedroom.  Oh, how’s that for direct?

I am here to tell you His way works.  You can play in the mud outside of Disney World all you want or you can go in.  It’s your choice.