Healing Quick or Slow

In the church I work mostly with men that believe in Christ and have a long standing relationship with God. Some of them have been in church most of their lives. Yet they are addicted to sex, porn and masturbation. They want to be healed. They are sick and tired of acting out and failing to be able to stop. They feel powerless and cry out to God for healing.

I believe that God does heal. I believe that sometimes he heals miraculously and immediately. Other times, for reasons only He knows clearly, He heals us through a long process. Also, other times he does not heal us but grants us the grace to endure the problem.

When it comes to sexual sin I believe there are several factors to consider for the believer. First, as with all sin, Christ's death on the cross and resurrection has paid the penalty of sin and released us from the monopoly of sin in our lives. Read Romans 6 and 7 and you will learn that because we have died and resurrected with Christ we have died to the law and its controlling power over us is broken. We are now free to chose to not sin. We can chose to make our members instruments of sin or righteousness everyday.

That is the foundation of our healing. It is finished and in place. But we must work on the foundation Christ has laid down for us.

Next, we need to pray for God to heal us from our addiction. It is clearly God's will that we should abstain from all sexual immorality (1 Thess 4:3). He wants us to stop and he has given us everything we need to stop. Believe that and you have built a little on the foundation Christ has made for us.

Next, we must understand that our experiencing God's healing over sexual sin for the rest of our lives will require that we follow a process...and we will learn from the process. For example, if we cry out for God to heal us immediately and let's say he does it. The reality is that we still have three problems. We have a sin nature or flesh that still exists in us and for years if not decades we have trained that flesh to indulge in sexual sin. That flesh or sin nature will be with us till we die. We must learn the process of walking in the Spirit so we do not fulfill the desire of the flesh.

Second, we live in a fallen world that is saturated with using sex to sell everything. Sex is available to us daily in multiple ways. We have to learn to live in the world and yet not let it get to us. That takes the process of daily discipline and developing a strong relationship with Jesus.

Third, we have an enemy, the powers of darkness, spiritual forces of evil that are working against us. We must learn to use the full armor of God and how to resist the devil so that he flees from us.

Now I believe that God has broken my addiction to sexual sin. But it is only in working the biblical and spiritual processes that God has given me on a daily basis that I experience continuing freedom from acting out in sexual sin.

So healing is both quick and slow. But it all comes from the new life that Jesus gives us in His Spirit. Thank God for what He has already done and then get working on your own salvation from sexual sin...for it is God who works in you both to will and to work for His good pleasure. (Phil. 2:3-4)