God, A Woman, and Me

Introduction My Personal Testimony What was I thinking? Being a Christian, the good life? When I first became a Christian, the good life was far from what I had. I assume that we all agree that the good life, even for a Christian, is having a sufficient amount of money, a working car, someone with which to share life, and a job which can at least be tolerated. My point is that I had never experienced the good life. So what was there to make me believe that salvation was going to make things any better? The fact of the matter is, I wasn’t thinking. The choice of salvation was my own, but the conviction came, not of my own will, but from the will of God. I was being drawn to God by His Spirit. When I turned myself over to God, I began to experience a wrestling within me that was very fierce. I hated it. Most days I abhorred my life as a Christian. I felt dirty, apathetic, worthless, and disgusting. As one may suppose, my expectations of salvation were far from what was happening to me. The truth is, in the beginning, I felt as light as a feather and as free as a bird. Then salvation truly began to work within me. My misconception of what being saved was supposed to do was quickly cleared up. How could I expect my life of sin to all of a sudden be made to magically disappear? How was it that I could expect, what seemed like, a life time of sinful manifestations to immediately dissipate into oblivion? Albeit, that was the way that I thought, and that is exactly what I expected. What was I thinking? I wanted to give up. Then and there, I wanted to die, and hopefully be allowed into heaven. But, of course, God wasn’t letting me off that easily. What was I to do? When I came to the knowledge of the fact that I had to fight against the behaviors I had once allowed, I was very discouraged to move on. Such a task seemed too perplexing, burdensome, and tedious. One might think that the sins I had committed couldn’t have been so bad as to cause addictions and sinful repetitions. What could I have done to make me so corrupted that I would want to get saved and die immediately rather than work out my soul’s salvation and live a life full of purpose and service to God? If possible, just before a person decides to give himself over to God through true repentance and salvation, the devil will try to get that person deep into some sinful act against God; an addiction, a weakness with which he can prey and use against the person in order to dissuade them from keeping the right path. Satan sustained a deep grip within my mind. Before I came to Christ I became inescapably addicted to sex/pornography. Unbelievably, the feeling that my flesh encountered was somehow made to seem greater than it possibly could be. Mentally, the sensation was the ultimate satisfaction; the pinnacle of earthly living. As ridiculous as it may seem, that is the way sexual gratification made me feel. Nothing could bring the satisfaction that sex and sexual gratification brought; not the women, not a relationship, not even love. With that sensation came the lie that I couldn’t go one day without feeling it, and that I needed sex in order to be content with life. At that point I became an addict. The worst enslavement known to man is for the mind of man to be controlled by his body. I was in that predicament. Whenever my body craved for sexual gratification I indulged myself, and I liked it.