Here is a powerful testimony I came
across yesterday and wanted to share it with you. It is powerful in its raw
honesty and its presentation of Biblical truth and grace.
The Dead End
of Sexual Sin
Unbelievers don’t “struggle”
with same-sex attraction. I didn’t. My love for women came with nary a struggle
at all.
I had not always been a
lesbian, but in my late 20s I met my first lesbian-lover. I was hooked and
believed that I had found my real self. Sex with women was part of my life and
identity, but it was not the only part—and not always the biggest part.
I simply preferred everything
about women: their company, their conversation, their companionship and the
contours of their/our body. I favored the nesting, the setting up of house and
home, and the building of lesbian community.
As an unbelieving professor of
English, an advocate of postmodernism and poststructuralism, and an opponent of
all totalizing metanarratives (like Christianity, I would have added back in
the day), I found peace and purpose in my life as a lesbian and the queer community
I helped to create.
Conversion and Confusion
It was only after I met my
risen Lord that I ever felt shame in my sin, with my sexual attractions and
with my sexual history.
Conversion brought with it a
train wreck of contradictory feelings, ranging from liberty to shame.
Conversion also left me confused. While it was clear that God forbade sex
outside of biblical marriage, it was not clear to me what I should do with the
complex matrix of desires and attractions, sensibilities and senses of self, that
churned within and still defined me.
What is the sin of sexual
transgression? The sex? The identity? How deep was repentance to go?
Meeting John Owen
In these newfound struggles, a
friend recommended that I read an old, 17th-century theologian named John Owen,
in a trio of his books (now brought together under the title Overcoming Sin and Temptation).
At first, I was offended to
realize that what I called “who I am,” John Owen called “indwelling sin.” But I
hung in there with him. Owen taught me that sin in the life of a believer
manifests itself in three ways: distortion by original sin, distraction of
actual day-to-day sin, and discouragement by the daily residence of indwelling sin.
Eventually, the concept of
indwelling sin provided a window to see how God intended to replace my shame
with hope. Indeed, John Owen’s understanding of indwelling sin is the missing
link in our current cultural confusion about what sexual sin is—and what to do
about it.
As believers, we lament with
the apostle Paul, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is
what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do
it, but sin that dwells in me” (Romans 7:19–20). But
after we lament, what should we do? How should we think about sin that has
become a daily part of our identity?
Owen explained with four
responses.
1. Starve It
Indwelling sin is a parasite,
and it eats what you do. God’s word is poison to sin when embraced by a heart
made new by the Holy Spirit. You starve indwelling sin by feeding yourself
deeply on his word. Sin cannot abide in his word. So, fill your hearts and
minds with Scripture.
One way that I do that is
singing the Psalms. Psalm-singing, for me, is a powerful devotional practice as
it helps me to melt my will into God’s and memorize his word in the process. We
starve our indwelling sin by reading Scripture comprehensively, in big chunks
and by whole books at a time. This allows us to see God’s providence at work in
big-picture ways.
2. Call Sin What It Is
Now that it is in the house,
don’t buy it a collar and a leash and give it a sweet name. Don’t “admit” sin
as a harmless (but unhousebroken) pet. Instead, confess it as an evil offense
and put it out! Even if you love it! You can’t domesticate sin by welcoming it
into your home.
Don’t make a false peace.
Don’t make excuses. Don’t get sentimental about sin. Don’t play the victim.
Don’t live by excuse-righteousness. If you bring the baby tiger into your house
and name it Fluffy, don’t be surprised if you wake up one day and Fluffy is
eating you alive. That is how sin works, and Fluffy knows her job. Sometimes
sin lurks and festers for decades, deceiving the sinner that he really has it
all under control, until it unleashes itself on everything you built, cherished
and loved.
Be wise about your choice sins
and don’t coddle them. And remember that sin is not ever “who you are” if you
are in Christ. In Christ, you are a son or daughter of the King; you are
royalty. You do battle with sin because it distorts your real identity; you do
not define yourself by these sins that are original with your consciousness and
daily present in your life.
3. Extinguish Indwelling Sin by Killing It
Sin is not only an enemy, says
Owen. Sin is at enmity with God. Enemies can be reconciled, but there is no
hope for reconciliation for anything at enmity with God. Anything at enmity
with God must be put to death. Our battles with sin draw us closer in union
with Christ. Repentance is a new doorway into God’s presence and joy.
Indeed, our identity comes
from being crucified and resurrected with Christ:
We have been buried with him
through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through
the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we
have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall
also be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old self
was crucified with him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with,
so that we would no longer be slaves to sin. (Romans 6:4–6)
Satan will use our indwelling
sin as blackmail, declaring that we cannot be in Christ and sin in heart or
body like this. In those moments, we remind him that he is right about one
thing only: Our sin is indeed sin. It is indeed transgression against God and
nothing else.
But Satan is dead wrong about
the most important matter. In repentance, we stand in the risen Christ. And the
sin that we have committed (and will commit) is covered by his righteousness.
But fight we must. To leave sin alone, says Owen, is to let sin grow—“not to
conquer it is to be conquered by it.”
4. Daily Cultivate Your New Life in Christ
God does not leave us alone to
fight the battle in shame and isolation. Instead, through the power of the Holy
Spirit, the soul of each believer is “vivified.” “To vivicate” means to
animate, or to give life to. Vivification complements mortification (to put to
death), and by so doing, it allows us to see the wide angle of sanctification,
which includes two aspects:
1) Deliverance from the desire
of those choice sins, experienced when the grace of obedience gives us the
“expulsive power of a new affection” (to quote Thomas Chalmers).
2) Humility over the fact that
we daily need God’s constant flow of grace from heaven, and that no matter how
sin tries to delude us, hiding our sin is never the answer. Indeed, the desire
to be strong enough in ourselves, so that we can live independently of God, is
the first sin, the essence of sin and the mother of all sin.
Owen’s missing link is for
believers only. He says, “Unless a man be
regenerate (born again), unless he be a believer, all attempts that he can make
for mortification [of sin] … are to no purpose. In vain he shall use many
remedies, [but] he shall not be healed.”
What then should an unbeliever
do? Cry out to God for the Holy Spirit to give him a new heart and convert his
soul: “Mortification [of sin] is not the present business of unregenerate men.
God calls them not to it as yet; conversion is their work—the conversion of the whole soul—not
the mortification of this or that particular lust.”
Freed for Joy
In the writings of John Owen,
I was shown how and why the promises of sexual fulfillment on my own terms were
the antithesis of what I had once fervently believed. Instead of liberty, my
sexual sin was enslavement. This 17th-century Puritan revealed to me how my
lesbian desires and sensibilities were dead-end joy-killers.
Today, I now stand in a long line
of godly women—the Mary Magdalene line. The gospel came with grace, but
demanded irreconcilable war. Somewhere on this bloody battlefield, God gave me
an uncanny desire to become a godly woman, covered by God, hedged in by his
word and his will. This desire bled into another one: to become, if the Lord
willed, the godly wife of a godly husband.
And then I noticed it.
Union with the risen Christ
meant that everything else was nailed to the cross. I couldn’t get my former
life back if I wanted it. At first, this was terrifying, but when I peered deep
into the abyss of my terror, I found peace.
With peace, I found that the
gospel is always ahead of you. Home is forward. Today, by God’s amazing grace
alone, I am a chosen part of God’s family, where God cares about the details of
my day, the math lessons and the spilled macaroni and cheese, and most of all,
for the people, the image-bearers of his precious grace, the man who calls me beloved and
the children who call me mother.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
is a former tenured professor of English at Syracuse University. After her
conversion to Christianity in 1999, she developed a ministry to college
students. She has taught and ministered at Geneva College, is a full-time
mother and pastor’s wife, and is author of Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely
Convert (2012) and Openness, Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely
Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ (2015).
