To pick up where I left off, I think we need to talk to and pray with each other about our sexual sin. But I have to bring up the verbal masturbation thing again. Our conversations should not be a corporate exercise in the very thing we are saying we hate doing. In conversations with one another in which we speak about our idiosyncratic turning away from what God has for us—whether that be celibacy, singleness, marriage, or something else—we shouldn’t speak for the pleasure of ourselves without also being helpful to one another. If our intentions behind confession are for our own relief, or the release of something inside us that we just think has to come out, then we are doing each other a disservice. In this, we lose the ability to actually take our burdens to the place where we have been promised we can actually lay them down. Instead of in prayer, we look for solace in one another.
This is not to say corporate confession cannot be beneficial to our walk. I would actually argue that confession to one another is a natural and even necessary gesture of our faith. All I’m saying is that getting together to dwell on how bad we are at any given thing doesn’t actually help us mature. (Philippians 3:7-16) Supplication does. The Spirit’s continued work in us does. (Romans 8:9-11)
I say all this from personal experience. I felt wonderful after the first time I spoke about the ways in which my sexuality has confused me. I had got everything off my chest, told everyone about my shame and sorrow, and others were even prompted to share. But, in a way, I was still celebrating ourselves. The way I saw it, in that moment, I had done what needed to be done. This was it—the new leaf turned over. I was now able to be the person who I knew I really was. I would be the guy people could look up to again—the righteous one. Little did I realize then, but I was the Pharisee praying next to the tax collector. Christ had already bought the righteousness I thought I could achieve through confessional catharsis. This became routine. However, mere routine honesty didn’t bring progress, but rather numbness to both God and sin with a long list of reasons why I shouldn’t be saved.
Confession of our sin is not like getting our tonsils removed. If, later, someone says to us, “Hey, I think you may have messed up some,” we don’t respond, “No way, you’re totally off. I had my surgery last week.” Fighting sin, especially addiction, is like dental hygiene. You brush when you wake up and before you go to bed, and when someone says you have a piece of broccoli in your teeth just after you ate broccoli you don’t say, ‘No, you don’t understand. I brushed my teeth this morning.’ We have to be alert and constantly vigilant, because our fight against self-indulgence will be a fight to our deaths and we will need others keeping us accountable along the way.
We also can’t take these moments of accountability personally, because we are not our own anymore. When Christ said, “It is finished,” he meant that his suffering and judgment on the cross was and is sufficient to cover all human sin. Not just the sin of those who have committed heterosexual sin, who looked at Maxim but never Playboy, who only took a long look at someone but never did anything about it later, or who borrowed ten thousand talents and couldn’t pay it back. He has paid what we owed when we could not. He has balanced our account. He owns us now. Part of this means, as Paul encourages us, “that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 1:6) The writer of Hebrews tells us that, in our Savior, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) We can all identify with Christ, no matter the multiplicity of all of our sin, because we are promised he was “tempted as we are.”
What does this tell us about our sexual brokenness? That none of us are too far gone to know the love of Christ and the saving power of the Holy Spirit, because he who was tempted as we are was able to go where we couldn’t “as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever.” (Hebrews 6:20)
With this knowledge, we can also be such a gift to each other by listening without judgment of or disgust with one another, because, at least I believe, all of our different sexualities are confusing to all of us. Let us then in joy confess our sin knowing our immense need of him.