I’ve got to tell you, God and I stopping the lust express before it trainwrecked my life was pretty amazing. And while I still struggled intensely with my eyes and stuff I shouldn’t look at, I managed, with the self control of the Holy Spirit, to “put to death the misdeeds of my body” (Romans 8:13).
As I said yesterday, I confessed every single time my heart crossed the lust line to Shauna. Like, I’ve never kept a single fall from her. This is now 15 and a half years later. I’d better explain. See, I promised BOTH God and her and asked him to hold me to it. He’s done that. So every time I cross the line, I get a heavy feeling, like a weighted blanket on my soul. My stomach sometimes turns. So it feels like I’ll be sick if I don’t confess. Sometimes I don’t even think I technically did anything worth confessing, but if the conviction comes, I go with it. Every single time. He won’t let me off the hook, praise God. It’s pretty cool, actually.
But the battle was still raging inside me. I felt like I had poison Ivy and wanted desperately to scratch the itch but couldn’t. Like it was inevitable, one day I would scratch unless I dealt with the rash somehow. That flushed, heart-palpitating, weakening temptation still thrashed me every single day, multiple times a day. No, I didn’t give in, but one day I said something like this to God: “There’s GOT to be more than this. This isn’t victory. This is full on, drag-em out war!”
I felt like a dog — you know… how if you find that special doggy nerve and rub it, how their legs involuntarily start jackhammering up and down? Yeah, like that. Satan knew my triggers, all the pressure points. It felt like I was totally at his mercy. So I started praying, asking God to reveal that trigger that Satan kept pushing. What was the missing piece?
I soon found out. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the coup de grace in this drama.