redemption

"I want that, however, I want you more, God!"

- Sy Rogers

YWAM hasn't wasted any time on conflict-free issues, but instead has dove head first into the issues of sex, lust, homosexuality, temptations... and God's design in it all. Sy Rogers is an amazing man with a global ministry, and has spent the week pouring into my class some of the truths he has learned in his life, his struggles, and his redemption through the love and grace of God. I won't tell you his whole story, but it's definitely worth reading at www.syrogers.com.

Sy has a gift for painting pictures in my mind, for taking simple images and giving them great depth. Take, for example, crooked teeth. Now, when someone is saved; goes through the powerful event of accepting Christ into their heart and confessing with their mouth he's lord over their life, do their teeth automatically become straight? What if you go down to the alter and pray, "Please, Father, make my teeth straight. I know I could advance your kingdom so much more if only I had a great smile!" Now, while the intent is good and motives pure, have you ever seen this miraculous event take place? And if you haven't, is it because God's not able? He has healed people of diseases and given sight to the blind, and it's even true that he has the power to raise one from the dead. So why won't he straighten your teeth? Instead of a zap, quick fix deal, it's a process. A slow, painful, and humbling (well, sometimes even embarrassing) process of doctor's exams, x-rays, braces, tightening, pulling, and eventually, the result of beautiful, straight-teeth smile.

As silly as it seems to expect a quick fix zap for crooked teeth, as Christians we often see that as the only approach to God with our struggles and hurts. I want God to wipe it away, to erase my mind from what used to trip me up or hurt me, what has broken me or left me shamed. But instead he offers me a process. A slow, tedious, painful process of retraining my thoughts, of admitting to the things I want, but declaring that I want God more. Sexual sin doesn't just come from the spiritual realm. It's biological. It's psychological. And the Lord has given us ways to overcome ALL of it.

I don't feel like I can do Sy justice. I want to somehow condense the pages and pages of notes and graphs and scientific research I have written down to share with everyone, because I'm realizing that's so much of the problem. The knowledge I'm gaining in class is so factual, so practical, so essential to every person who deals with the struggle of being human. Of offering simple love and redemption to one another. Yet it's not taught. In churches, in schools, in families (and I'm speaking in generals, of course there are exceptions to each I listed).

So I guess my question now is, "God, knowing what I know now, what do you want me to do with it?"