Shocks To The System: Breaking Free From Denial

It took a huge shock to David’s system to help him break out of his denial. Can you imagine the moment? Here’s this prophet suddenly exposing the two worst things you’ve ever done! Nathan lived in reality; he didn’t live in the false fortress of David’s fantasy world where God’s laws no longer applied. Thank God for the Nathans of this world!

It typically takes a major shock to the system—multiple shocks, in most cases—before we can start seeing our own denial. Most of us wait until we get swallowed by the whale of life before we have enough incentive to start changing long-term addictive patterns.

I’ll never forget the first major shock to my system (see my testimony in the Introduction section for more). As a junior in high school, my health teacher gave me a copy of an article called The War Within: An Anatomy of Lust. To this day I can feel what seemed like body blows as this pastor—anonymously—described his torturous path down into the pit of perversion. His brutal honesty took my breath away. I had literally in my life never heard anyone talk like this. I could see my life in his life as plain as porn. And then, even as I was already reeling from cutting conviction, God scared the hell out of me with a mental vision of a circular stairway down into bottomless flames.

I owe my life, my marriage, my children, and my ministry to this man. Through the courage of this pastor—as far as I know, the first Christian leader in the history of the US to ever share openly about personal sexual sin—God planted a deposit in my heart that to this day is bearing good fruit via Pureheart Ministries. The book you’re reading now was born the day that pastor chose to write that article.

Sadly, after reading that article it took me another 20 years before I finally started experiencing consistent purity. Back then there was no help of any kind for sex addicts. And thus, I needed more shocks to my system before I finally started coming to grips with my denial.

My next shock was reading a book by Stephen Arterburn on addictions—it had only one chapter on sexual addiction, but this chapter contained a short survey measuring one’s level of sexual addiction. Honestly, the chapter and the survey were not that great—this was still the early days—but it was the first time in my life anyone had ever asked me to objectively quantify my addictive behavior. I answered the questions honestly, tallied the results, and then was surprised to see that my score qualified me as an addict. To this day I remember being offended by the term addict! I had never once used that term to describe myself—the thought had never entered my mind.

Today, of course, I look back and think, What an absolute and complete IDIOT! How could I have been so blind, so ignorant, so hard of heart? So utterly oblivious to the years and years and the thousands upon thousands of times I repeated the same old—dare I say it—addictive patterns! Talk about living in the closed system of my own denial!

If denial is so powerful and so dangerous—so much so that it took down the First Couple and the Man after God’s Own Heart—is there any hope for the likes of you and me? Absolutely! Truth can set us free from anything, denial included.

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Excerpt taken from Pureheart Ministry’s Basic Training! Stage 1: Operation Purity

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