• Breaking the Stranglehold of Habit
  • Spiritual Warfare
    • Pleasure Secrets
      • The Unexpected Thrill of Obeying God
        • Demons?

You’ve made it!

Blinding light flashes from the Throne. Creation quakes. On Heaven’s Throne is a shining figure robed in purity. Powerful. Majestic. Holy. Who is this mighty victor, the one deemed worthy to rule forever, the joy of the Father’s heart? You. Yes, you, the butt of jokes, the focus of Satan’s slur campaign.

Christian, through the miracle of spiritual rebirth, you and Christ are one. (Scripture) That makes his victory, your victory. Before him, every knee in every universe and dimension must bow. That’s your victory. Right now, no matter how defeated you may feel, you are enthroned with Christ as head of the universe. (Scripture)

A little boy walks tall when his father becomes world champion. Even though the boy contributed nothing to the achievement, his father’s glory exalts him, flooding him with new confidence. Total strangers give him new respect. That’s the faintest shadow of what Jesus’ triumph has done for us. We walk ever so tall because our supernatural union with Christ far exceeds the deepest bond between father and son, and Christ’s incomparable victory utterly outclasses any human achievement.

Suppose a billion dollars were deposited in joint names in a special bank account, and one of those two names is yours. All you would then need to live like the billionaire you have just become is learn how to make withdrawals.

With Christ, you have joint claim to the highest honors. His victory was for you. Heaven sees you as the champion of champions. For this eternal fact to be seen on earth, all you need do is learn how to draw on the victory that all of heaven recognizes as being yours. In the rest of this webpage we’ll examine how to make that victory obvious. No matter what illusions temporary circumstances might suggest, however, in the eyes of all spiritual powers, whether satanic or divine, you have already made it.

Living a holy life is simply letting Christ, who now lives inside you, express himself through your actions. It’s letting run wild the divine genes (the new nature) you inherited when you were born again into God’s family. Living a Christian life is not about exercising will power, but reveling in God’s love, living the supernatural; doing all manner of things that were previously impossible for you.

Being free from enslaving and degrading habits is a wonderfully fulfilling and liberating way to live, but don’t imagine it is the way to gain God’s approval. You won that approval the moment you trusted Jesus for your forgiveness. You can’t get any more forgiven, and any more the object of divine favor than the moment you first trusted Jesus to do it all for you – when you had nothing but sin to offer your Lord.

Non-Christians suppose that by cutting sin out of their lives they could reach a holy God. It could never work. Lifetime perfection is God’s minimum standard. We cannot even start with a clean sheet, because none of us can remove our past failures. Because of Jesus, however, Christians have already reached God. They can live a holy life because the holy God lives within them.

When Diana Spencer married Prince Charles, she suddenly became rich. Suddenly, she was royalty. Suddenly, she was famous and important. She was one with Charles. His assets and honor became hers, as much as they had ever been his. That is rather like your transformation, the moment you were born again. Your status and assets skyrocketed, although at the time you were only vaguely conscious of the enormity of what happened. (More)

After that famous wedding, Princess Diana underwent a second, much slower and uneven transformation. Step by faltering step, a shy, plainly dressed girl gradually became a confident, sophisticated, superbly dressed woman who captured the admiration of millions. That second change was only possible because she firmly believed in the reality of the first transformation – that she really was royal, rich, important and famous. Had she kept telling herself that she was insignificant, that she had no right to Charles’ money, that nothing she did was of any consequence, she would still have had much, but that second change would never have occurred. As it was, she would probably have blossomed further, had she felt more secure in Charles’ love and in the acceptance and approval of his family.

This webpage focuses on that second type of transformation that can be yours. The change will be slow and uneven, teetering on how secure you feel in God’s love, and how convinced you are of that change of status that occurred the moment you were united to Christ.

Temptation is spiritual rape

Do you think the holy Son of God was tempted to lust? Was Christ tempted to punch someone, to hold a grudge, to be lazy, to swear, to get drunk? That is surely what Hebrews means.

Temptation occurs when an evil intelligence violates your mind, invading your inner person with its filth. The temptation could be anything that is not in your highest interest. It might be to hate yourself, to over-indulge, to doubt, to smoke, to hold a grudge; the list is endless. It is something that in the short term seems right or desirable but in the long term ends up robbing and hurting you. For brevity, I call the source of temptation Satan, or the devil, although we are more likely to be tempted by one of his underlings than by the Prince of demons himself.

To understand the nature of spiritual rape, we need to consider physical rape. I’d rather avoid this distasteful subject, but I feel the need to demonstrate just how disgusting temptation is.

Suppose the trusted boyfriend of a virtuous girl one day goes way too far. He forcibly but painlessly immobilizes her and begins to gently and seductively violate her. Her mind is repulsed by what is happening, but her body is designed to respond to certain stimuli by sending pleasure signals to the brain. This physiological fact has nothing to do with her purity or morality. It simply means she is normal. After the ordeal she ends the relationship and yet, for years afterwards her sensitive conscience is tormented with false pangs of guilt; wrongly imagining she must have the morality of a harlot to have had her feelings of horror tinged with the slightest feelings of pleasure.

She eventually marries but she cannot forget her involuntary bodily reaction to the rape in which pleasure signals were sent to the brain. She so despises herself for feelings she had no control over that she becomes convinced that her husband must secretly loathe her for her past, even though he actually sees his darling as being utterly pure.

Despite all her husband’s loving assurances and tenderness, this poor woman so focuses on that awful event that she continues to feel immoral, unloved and unwanted. Overwhelmed by this illusion, she starts telling herself that she has so ruined her life that she could not be more immoral if she became a prostitute. Tragically, after years of such thinking, convinced she is doing her husband a favor, she leaves the man she mistakenly thinks can no longer love her. Finding no other means of support and imagining she has no purity to preserve, this highly moral woman ends up the harlot she wrongly saw herself as being.

Sadly, such a route to promiscuity is not uncommon for sexual abuse victims, harassed by false feelings of guilt over the pleasure signals involuntarily sent to the brain when their will was violated.

A similar tragedy could be played out in anyone of us if we condemn ourselves over the fact that temptation, by its very nature, makes sin seem enticingly pleasurable.

When Jesus was being tempted, the purest person ever to walk this planet was being spiritually raped. The Holy Lord was subjected to the inner urge to sin; a craving to do wrong. His mind and spirit were repeatedly and shamefully violated. You know he emerged from the horrific experience with his purity intact.

So do not despise yourself when evil thoughts come to you, or when you find yourself longing to do wrong. It simply means that, like God’s holy Son, and all his saints, you have been spiritually molested. And like the most despicable child molester, the Evil One tries to make his innocent victim feel guilty for his crime, and for pleasurable feelings he induces.

It’s only if you cease trying to resist those evil thoughts and urges, that the harassment could touch your purity. And even if you totally gave in, you would have no rational basis for continuing to imagine you are impure, because the instant you return to your Savior with genuine regret, you are again spotless in the eyes of the Holy One.

Does Satan often appear and speak to you face to face? He’s far too cunning. He speaks in your mind, pretending to be your own thoughts. Disown those thoughts. Refuse to cave in to false guilt.

Imagine how hard it was to tempt Jesus. Satan had to try to persuade the Son of God to act totally out of character. And yet it is exactly the same when the Evil One tempts you. He tries to inflict you with a desire to do something utterly contrary to your nature. The real you is Christlike. From the moment you were born again, Christ took up residence inside you. You gained his goodness, his holy character, his purity of motives, his inexhaustible love. You might have committed a certain sin hundreds of times a year since childhood, and continued for the many years you have been born again. Nevertheless, every time you commit that sin, you are acting out of character. Satan will muster all his brainwashing skills to try fooling you into thinking that sinning is your real nature. You will be like a rape victim plagued by a wrong self image. This is more than just unpleasant; keep believing that false self image, and you will end up acting as if it were true.

We find ourselves back at the same point as when we considered Princess Di: so much hinges on us fully grasping the enormity of the transformation that took place when we were born again and how special that makes us in God’s eyes.

Facing temptation is engaging in spiritual combat in which victory depends on whether we can trust God to love us enough to be our personal bodyguard. It would be highly dangerous to go into spiritual battle, tragically handicapped by imagining you are one of God’s less loved children. Before engaging the enemy you need the assurance that God’s love for you is so intense that he is fiercely devoted to protecting you. You need to know you are one of God’s favorites, and that he has made you so pure that he is proud of you. If you have the slightest doubt about this, or could benefit from the slightest building up in this area, bookmark this page (or note this website address) and go to the following webpages.