Thoughts From a Boiling Frog

Over and over, I am surprised to find out how far I am from God. He gives me a revelation, and I think I get it. Then a week or two down the road, he tells me the situation is even worse.

It reminds me of dealing with house renovation. The contractor comes in and says he can fix your house for $60,000. Then work starts. A month later, you have a $15,000 surprise. You keep going. Two weeks later, another $20,000.

Contractors do it because they miss things at first, and because they’re dishonest. They like to hook you with low prices and then jack the cost up later, when you’re too committed to say no.

God does it–I think–because we can’t handle all of the truth at once. His criticism is life-giving, but receiving too much at once would be like injecting yourself with a whole bottle of insulin. You would be crushed by despair and self-condemnation.

Modern America is not as far as we think from the kind of corruption that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. We are extremely filthy these days. We are cruel and obsessed with sex. We are very arrogant. We lack empathy and patience. We celebrate sadism and abuse.

I want to think I’m above all that, but that is not the case. I participated in it with enthusiasm for decades. I worked to make myself prouder and less kind. The whole time, I felt I was a better person than I really was.

You can’t undo that process in a minute.

Israel’s Muslim enemies know that the Messiah is supposed to enter Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate, also known as the Golden Gate. They also know Elijah is supposed to be his herald; he shows up first. In a childish gesture, the Muslim ruler Saladin bricked up the Golden Gate, and the Ottomans established a Muslim cemetery just outside it. They believed a Jewish priest could not pass through a graveyard, and they apparently thought Elijah was a priest. No Elijah, no Messiah.

This is a classic physical illustration of what the Bible calls “a stronghold.” Strongholds are barriers that seem impregnable. They are big and intimidating. They defeat people who have no faith.

The devil uses strongholds all the time. Slavery in Egypt was a stronghold. Jericho was literally a stronghold; it was a massive walled structure designed to prevent enemies from coming in and taking over. The other walled cities of Canaan were strongholds.

For Jesus, death was a stronghold. Satan killed his flesh, and he thought the job was done. The barrier between the dead and the living is a pretty serious barrier. Satan didn’t realize it was impossible to keep a sinless man in hell.

Satan–with our eager participation–builds strongholds in us. He causes bad things to happen to us, and he gets us to blame God, so we will never turn to him and be saved. He tempts us to do evil, and then he convinces us God will never want us, or that God has given up on us. He puts filthy habits in us to grieve the Holy Spirit. He makes salvation and victory seem impossible.

Over a period of decades, you can build walls of petrified filth around yourself, so deep and so high you can’t see any way past them. This is what I did. I am still in the process of getting free. I still slip. I still do things I hate.

God is wonderful after I fail. At the very moment when I think he will surely give up on me and let me be destroyed, he comes to me with more power than usual, as if I had just done something that pleased him greatly. The process continues. It can’t be stopped. It’s very strange. It’s hard to get used to receiving that kind of charity.

Our values and our knowledge of God are not adequate. We are very backward. We are lost. We are jaded. We aren’t disturbed by things that should shock and disgust us. We’re in our necks in sewage all day; we think it’s normal. When we make a few small moves in God’s direction, we think we’ve done a great deal, and we wonder why he’s still distant. We wonder why things go wrong. We don’t realize we’re still standing on the dock, in a land across an ocean from God.

People–especially liberals–use the term “slippery slope” with contempt in their voices, the way they used to say “domino theory.” Christians say our values and beliefs move gradually toward depravity. We say abortion cheapens life. We say condoning perversion will lead to the approval of things like incest and bestiality. We’re right, but our enemies can’t see it.

I was driving on I-95 the other day, and I saw a sign advertising something, and in big letters, it used the common slang term for testicles. Like that’s okay. Kids ride past the sign in cars and see it. No problem.

When I go to serious news sites on the web, I see sexual clickbait. Fox News and The Daily Mail, to name but two of many such sites, have little photo links with sexual content. A current Fox ad says, “Wardrobe whoopsies: On purpose, or an accident?” It shows a woman’s rear end in a see-through dress. A Daily Mail ad says, “Leggy blonde Victoria Silvstedt struggles to control her flirty mini-dress and flashes her behind as she boards a boat in Cannes.” Another Fox ad says, “Khloe’s wardrobe whoops.” Thanks to major news organizations, grandmothers now know what “nip-slip” means.

Imagine yourself in 1975, when things were already pretty bad. Try to picture news organizations and advertisers behaving this way back then.

If you could move someone from 1975 to 2016 instantly, he would be shocked and disgusted. We made the journey gradually, so we became acclimated.

We can’t even imagine how God-fearing people are supposed to live. We’re completely unfamiliar with their mindset. We eat excrement and think it’s caviar, because our frame of reference has shifted.

I am part of this. I can’t claim to be exceptional. When I slip, and when things go badly for me, I have to admit that I still belong to the class of people who live filthy lives. I am not a finished work. I have barely started. The walls of the stronghold are thick, and I’ve barely scratched a depression in them.

I write this in order to understand my situation better, and to give hope to other people. It may sound strange, telling people they’re filthy in order to give them hope. But it means there is room for improvement and increased victory. How would you feel if I said you were doing everything right, and that this is as good as it gets? That’s not a blessing. It’s a statement of despair.

My advice is to give up the idea that you can belong to the world and still get along with God. It’s the fountain of youth. It’s a perpetual motion machine. It’s a mirage you will never reach. TV ministers keep dangling the carrot in front of us in order to get our money and admiration, but it’s a lie. It will never, never happen. It never has.

Being filthy is bad. It’s terrible to know that the things you’ve done can never be undone. But think about it. If you’ve risen above it, how can it harm you? It’s terrible if you call yourself a Christian, yet you’ve beaten your wife or you’ve used prostitutes. But what if it’s behind you, and you can say so with certainty? Whatever you used to be, you don’t have to be ashamed of it if God has given you victory over it. That’s possible, and it’s something to pursue.

It would be painful to have to tell people you’re a junkie, but telling people you used to be a junkie wouldn’t be so bad.

I plan to keep going forward. Things are being removed from my life; it’s as if God were digging up the bodies outside the Golden Gate. The more things are removed, the better life will be. I don’t have to be perfect or even very good right now, as long as I keep going. As God has told me many times, location is nothing; direction is everything.

I think this will help you if you apply it. It is certainly helping me.