Posted on by Abe Austin

Redeemed Through Christ- Part One

This last Sunday I was invited to speak to my congregation, where I shared my personal experience with redemption. Preparing this message brought up some new ideas that I will explore in greater detail with upcoming posts. Other stories and ideas I have already covered in this blog. I don’t wish to bore you with redundant messages, but I did think that seeing my speech might be interesting to some of you. I’ll post the first half of it today, and the second half tomorrow.

Part One)

Stories of redemption, where people fall, and are then raised even higher, are woven all throughout our scriptures, our myths and legends, our history, even our books and movies. But of all the many stories of redemption, today I would like to focus on the one that I know best: my own. And I want to talk about it in terms of the pairings that it was made up of. The first of these pairings was the reality of damnation and then the reality of being saved.

My great demise came in the form of addiction to pornography. The whole thing started when I was about seven years old and progressed through various stages over the next twenty years. 

Now, from the very beginning I felt guilty about what I was doing, I knew it was wrong, I knew I had to repent of it. But I didn’t necessarily feel damned, because the whole time I insisted it was in my power to fix this on my own. So I tried, over and over, to just make myself be better. I kept telling myself that this next time would be the last time. I repeatedly prayed that God would just give me the determination to do things right.

And even though this approach never worked for me, I clung to it, because the only alternative would be to admit that I had become so lost that I could never find my way back again. And if you had asked me if I believed the atonement of Jesus Christ could rescue me, I would have said “yes,” but, looking back, I really only believed that in my head. I didn’t feel it in my heart. So, accepting that I was lost would include not having any confidence that anyone would ever come and find me.

Rather than accept that, I kept my addiction secret from everyone, even my wife, and pretended like I wasn’t damned. But no matter how I tried to hide it, there was a genuine darkness inside of me, and its nature was to damage me, and those closest to me. Thus, even as I was trying to preserve my life and my relationships, I was actively destroying them instead. When I finally saw this pattern, when it clicked for me, I finally decided I would rather be honestly damned than falsely holy.

So, one day, when I was alone in the house, I wrote a letter to my wife. In it, I shattered the facade I had been living behind and explained what was really going on. I left the letter just inside the entrance to the house, got in my car, and drove as far away as quickly as possible. I knew that I had to get far enough that she would make it back to the house before I could, because then I knew it was done. I couldn’t take it back, even if I wanted.

This is how I came to embrace the reality of my own damnation. At this point, for the first time in my life, I truly accepted that I was on track for hell and all that came with it. This was an absolutely necessary chapter in my personal story of redemption. I was never going to get any further without first taking this leap into the void.

What came next was a whirlwind of confession, surrender, and connection. My wife scheduled a meeting with our Bishop that very night, our Bishop recommended us to LifeStar, which does therapy for sex addicts and their couples, and my LifeStar therapist encouraged me to join a group of other men in recovery. Put simply, there was a long and difficult path of repentance and recovery set before me, one that I am still taking steps on to this day.

But while the journey has been long, redemption, much to my surprise, began immediately! Right from the day that I wrote the letter, I started to feel like my real self again. I felt like I had a soul! This was something I didn’t even know I was missing; it had been so long since I had felt it.

That rediscovery of the soul in addiction is not unusual, but what you might find unusual is that many of us addicts actually express gratitude for our addiction, even though we are in recovery from it, and we certainly don’t endorse it! See, from our perspective, if we hadn’t had something truly break us, we never would have sought out a real connection with God and the soul. And once we have found that connection, the journey that led us there, no matter how painful, is worth it, and we wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I like the way a good friend of mine put it: “if your sin isn’t real, your salvation isn’t real.” I would also say, “if you haven’t been truly broken, you don’t really know what it is to be restored.” Or as Eve, herself, put it in Moses 5:11: “Were it not for our transgression we never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption.”

Now, this isn’t meant to say that we all need to get enslaved to an addiction, but I would say that we all need to exercise our awareness of the hopeless state that we would be in if not for Christ. Sooner or later, each one of us commits a sin that is a deliberate and willful violation of our own conscience. At a certain point, each one of us sacrifices something that we know is good, for something that we know is wrong. This is a fundamental betrayal, and when it happens, something inside of us breaks, and we can either run from that, or hide it, or we can go into that broken place, accept the reality of damnation, and there meet Jesus.

To be continued…

Posted on by Abe Austin

Grit vs Surrender- What I Held Back

My Enslavement)

In my last post I promised that today I would share a personal example of my own struggles with vice, how I exerted great effort to overcome them and failed, but then found that freedom could come at a much simpler price.

I have already shared before about my addiction to pornography, and how I spent many years under its power. Perhaps some people do not feel guilty when they take their first steps into addiction, but I most certainly did. From the very first day, I was ashamed and disappointed with myself. From the very first day I tried to stop. I had fits and starts, I tried to make deals with God, I told myself again and again that this next time would be the last time. But no matter what I tried, I remained a slave to my lust for twenty long years.

Because for twenty years I wasn’t willing to try the one thing that would actually work.

Practically from the very start of my addiction, I knew that I needed to make confession. My conscience would consistently prick me to shine a light on this secret shame, but I would always make an excuse not to. I told myself that all I needed was God. He and I would work this out somehow, no one else needed to be involved. God would know how to fix me. That was ironic, given that I was deliberately ignoring what God was telling me to do in my heart.

For so many years I couldn’t make a confession because I couldn’t tolerate being seen by another person at that level of intimacy. It was a boundary that had never crossed in my life, not even in my marriage, and frankly I didn’t think I would ever be willing to have it crossed. That was the part of my autonomy that I kept holding on to, the surrender that I wasn’t willing to make.

Light Streams In)

Then, one day, I finally accepted that there was no salvation in the path that I was walking. I finally admitted to myself that I was getting worse, not better, and that as ashamed as I was of what I had done thus far, I would yet do things more shameful. I realized that for all of my attempts to keep myself whole, I was fracturing apart even so.

That was when I decided to finally make the surrender that God was asking of me. That was when I made my confession. Not just once, not just twice, but over and over again to my wife, to spiritual leaders, to therapists, to twelve-step groups, and even to all of you reading this blog. I surrendered my need for darkness, and finally let the light in.

There were other surrenders that came as a part of this, too. I surrendered my need to hate and punish myself. I surrendered my pride, my need to solve things on my own. I surrendered the fate of my future.

Making these surrenders wasn’t easy, but the transformation that followed them was. In fact, the transformation was effortless. The very changes that I had been trying so hard to make for twenty years took place on their own practically overnight. I didn’t have to wrestle them into submission, I didn’t have to choke them out, I didn’t have to force myself to be worthy by sheer force of will. None of that. I just changed, and there’s no explanation other than that God worked a miracle inside of me.

Now, to be clear, I am not saying that I am impervious to temptation now. I do still need to watch myself. I do still need to make deliberate choices to remain true to who I was born to be. I do still need to remove myself from situations that are going in a bad direction. But for the first time I actually can do those things, and they actually work! I am not free from temptation, but I am free to deny it.

In my following posts I will break down a few key themes in this story, but for now I hope it is clear that God’s way is not one of constant, painful exertion. Following Him and becoming a better person is supposed to be easy and joyful, not tedious and brutal. Jesus was really telling the truth when he said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28, 30). In the following posts, we will examine more closely how that could be.