“Cliner, what were you doing?! Get it hard off the boards and out!!”
I was playing junior hockey for the Red Deer Rebels. Our coach, Brent Sutter (of the legendary Sutter family), was using my error to teach me the right way to play.
No doubt I would have been more open to learning had I not been so concerned with what others were thinking of me.
This mindset carried over to dealing with my sexual sin.
“As long as nobody knows, I won’t be embarrassed,” I’d tell myself.
One day, I felt God whisper something to me that brought my secret to light:
Matt, if you never tell anybody about your secret, even if you get the victory, nobody will be able to celebrate with you.
God was encouraging me that people wanted to help me. Even better, they would celebrate with me when I broke free.
We can learn so much from our mistakes—especially when we let others in. When we focus on the embarrassment of others knowing about our sexual sin, we often put more effort into concealing the sin than learning from it.
Proverbs 27:17 says, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.”
Here are two key things we can learn from our mistakes as we seek counsel from God and trusted men in our lives:
1. Our sexual cravings can often indicate unhealed pain points from our past.
At 18, I got a concussion that gave me intense headaches for six years. As I spent years of my 20s primarily in bed and medical clinics, my peers were starting careers and getting married.
As I grew into my 30s, I started fantasizing about things I could have done in my young adult years if I hadn’t gotten the concussion. The sexual fun I could have had if I had been healthy!
Instead of simply feeling shame and trying to ignore it, I sought the Lord for why I was having these thoughts.
I talked to my wife and some trusted men about the disappointment I had in my 20s over what I had lost due to my injury. As I grieved that season with the Lord, my heart healed, and my mindset changed. Today, I don’t experience those sexual cravings at all.
The freedom I have is not because I simply resisted my sin. It’s because, more importantly, God and others were allowed to use my sexual sin to help me heal from the unprocessed pain of my past. I don’t remember when my cravings stopped, but as I healed emotionally, they disappeared.
2. Dismantle your justification.
We will never sin without first justifying it.
Therefore, dismantling the justification we use for sin will open up a world of opportunity for growth and healing.
Here is a justification that many porn-addicted men have used: “Watching porn just one more time won’t hurt.”
Dismantling this highlights a few lessons that we can learn.
First, if we’re willing to engage even one time with something we know will produce shame, guilt, and demonic strongholds, it reveals a gap between the value we put on ourselves and the value God places on us.
In this case, we can consider some questions: Why don’t I value myself like God does? How was I influenced to believe that porn was tolerable? Why does God think so highly of me that Jesus died for me?
These reflections will kickstart a journey of thinking about ourselves as Jesus does.
1 Peter 4:1 says, “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin.”
Having God’s Word replace our justifications is a spiritual armour that helps us resist sin in our lives.
Secondly, this justification can highlight the lack of knowledge we have about the destruction of sexual sin. Hosea 4:6 says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
If you struggle with sexual sin, take time to learn about the connection between sex trafficking and porn, the science behind sexual sin, or the reasons why even one encounter with sexual sin is so damaging on a spiritual level.
We can learn myriad lessons from our sins, but we all have blind spots. This is why we need to talk with men who want to sharpen us and let God guide us into truth through them (John 16:13).
Shame will always keep us from others, limiting our growth and healing.
Our current sexual sin always reveals brokenness that God wants to heal. When we let God and others speak into our lives as we learn from our sexual sin, we will find more permanent healing and deliverance from the sexual sin we’ve tried so hard to resist.
I praise God that I am living proof of that.
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