I am not the only one who thinks this must change. In this video, Scotty Smith, Justin Holcomb and Trillia Newbell discuss how congregations can practically recognize, love, and care for victims of sexual abuse.

The most powerful point in this exchange  for me came from Pastor Holcomb. He says, “The first thing is just having a culture within the church where you actually expect people to share their burdens with others.”

That sounds dangerously like the Gospel.

The good people at Renovaré have devoted themselves to helping people grow spiritually through fine books, retreats and online resources. I encourage you to visit their site often and learn from them.

A good first step to ongoing spiritual growth is to sign The Renovaré Covenant. It states:

In utter dependence upon Jesus Christ as my ever-living
Savior, Teacher, Lord, and Friend,

I will seek continual renewal through:
• Spiritual Exercises
• Spiritual Gifts
• Acts of Service

You can sign the covenant here.

Before getting to his list, it’s worth exploring why the arts are so important to a life of faith. Ryken quotes Francis Schaeffer here:

“For a Christian, redeemed by the work of Christ and living within the norms of Scripture and under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the lordship of Christ should include an interest in the arts. A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God—not just as tracts, but as things of beauty to the praise of God.”

With that, let’s look at Ryken’s list of ways that churches can discourage their artists:

• Treat the arts as a window dressing for the truth rather than a window into reality.

• Embrace bad art.

• Value artists only for their artistic gifts, not for the other contributions they can make to the life of the church.

• Demand artists to give answers in their work, not raise questions.

• Never pay artists for their work.

• When you ask them to serve through the arts, tell them what to do and also how to do it.

• Idolize artistic success.

• Only validate art that has a direct application, for example, something that communicates a gospel message or can be used for evangelism.

• Do not allow space for lament.

• Make artists not feel fully at home in the church.

You’ll need to read the full article to get the deeper meaning of some of these, but it’s worth pondering that the importance of art and beauty to the Gospel may be incalculable. Let’s close, as Ryken does, with what W. David O. Taylor writes in For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts:

“Whether through paint or sound, metaphor or movement, we are given the inestimable gift of participating in the re-creative work of the Triune God, anticipating that final and unimaginable re-creation of all matter, space, and time, the fulfillment of all things visible and invisible.”

Michael John Cusick is one such religious leader who found himself trapped by pornography and sex addiction. He has written about his struggles in Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle.

He also shared his story on The Huffington Post. He writes:

“My message to those who are in the snares of sexual compulsion is two-fold. First, you can be free and whole. Trying to manage and white knuckle this issue is not as good as it gets. Others have walked a trusted path to healing and recovery, you can too. Start by deciding you will come out of the shadows and into the light. Talk with a friend, professional counselor, or Twelve-Step Group like Sex Addicts Anonymous.

“Second, sexual compulsions are not actually about sex. …Beyond bodies seeking and experiencing sexual pleasure –all of us reach toward some spiritual mystery we cannot see, touch, or comprehend physically. …To deny the spiritual hunger hidden within the sexual impulse is to set ourselves up for a never-ending cycle that only leads to desperation, despair, and bondage.

“God is not mad at you if you are struggling with sexual compulsion. In fact, that secret, hidden place of your greatest struggle, failure or shame is exactly where God wants to meet you and give you a great gift. I should know. It happened to me.”

These are good words. You can be free. Struggle does not need to be your lot in life. If you allow Him, God will teach you something truer about yourself than your search for sex. He will teach you that your true identity can only come from Him. God wants to do this and He waits patiently for us all to realize it.

Writing in the Guardian, Dobelli gives ten reasons why the news is bad for your health:

News misleads. “We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.”

News is irrelevant. “The consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognize what’s relevant. Media organizations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.”

News has no explanatory power. “Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect. The more ‘news factoids’ you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand.”

News is toxic to your body. “It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress.”

News increases cognitive errors. “In the words of Warren Buffett: ‘What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.’ News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities.”

News inhibits thinking. “Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory.”

News works like a drug. “The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.”

News wastes time. Adding up all the time spent watching news, a person might lose half a day every week. Writes Dobelli: “Information is no longer a scarce commodity. … Why give away your mind?”

News makes us passive. “News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon …grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic.”

News kills creativity. I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t.”

For my part, I began moving away from news and televised media about ten years ago. A little, but brilliant, book by historian C. John Sommerville helped convince me. Now I try to limit my news intake to what I need for my job. Although I indulge here and there a bit still, I have never regretted my extended news “fast.”

How about you? Do any of these ten points ring true?

___________________________________________

You can order C. John Sommerville’s book, How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society from our Amazon store.

Are you one of those people who always need to know? Do you watch or listen to the news religiously, convinced that what you hear will give you an edge? You might be surprised, then, to learn that the news is bad for you and that giving it up might make you healthier and happier.

So argues author Rolf Dobelli. Writing in the Guardian, Dobelli gives ten reasons why the news is bad for your health:

News misleads. “We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.”

News is irrelevant. “The consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognize what’s relevant. Media organizations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.”

News has no explanatory power. “Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect. The more ‘news factoids’ you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand.”

News is toxic to your body. “It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress.”

News increases cognitive errors. “In the words of Warren Buffett: ‘What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.’ News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities.”

News inhibits thinking. “Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory.”

News works like a drug. “The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.”

News wastes time. Adding up all the time spent watching news, a person might lose half a day every week. Writes Dobelli: “Information is no longer a scarce commodity. … Why give away your mind?”

News makes us passive. “News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon …grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic.”

News kills creativity. I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t.”

For my part, I began moving away from news and televised media about ten years ago. A little, but brilliant, book by historian C. John Sommerville helped convince me. Now I try to limit my news intake to what I need for my job. Although I indulge here and there a bit still, I have never regretted my extended news “fast.”

How about you? Do any of these ten points ring true?

——

You can order Sommerville’s book, How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society from our Amazon store.

Healing from Girl with a Curl on Vimeo.

Transcript:

“One poem I read, once, had the words…when Jesus was scratching in the dirt, he was writing the words, ‘Where is the man?’ I always thought that was really profound that we’ve judged the woman for her wrongness, but where’s the man? She didn’t commit this alone.

“But, I find it actually very appropriate for what’s going on in culture today because the whole situation – all this anger, this blood lust, this blood thirst that we’ve got to deal with this, this is going to corrupt all of our culture if we let this go. And yet, Jesus waits, waits, waits and calmly says, ‘Okay, whoever is without sin, you can handle this.’

“And I find this so interesting that this happened around a sexual issue. Again, I go back to ‘everyone is sexually broken.’ And, no one could throw that stone. I think there’s a lot of judgment and condemnation in society and there probably always will be. What Jesus wanted to teach us is that it ought not come from us, because it’s not coming from him.

“And, I think that’s one of the reasons Jesus was not afraid to be seen with sinners. It’s because he knew more than they knew that all their acting out, everything they were hungering for and thirsting for, ultimately, it was him, and he wanted to offer himself to them. That’s the model of healing. If we find all the things we’re hungry and thirsty for, all the things we want to take from others, we’ll find that in Jesus. He wants to give that to us.

“Meeting the woman at the well, very similar. She was known and loved, not judged, and she became the chief evangelist of that town. I think if we would understand, if we could give people true healing—not ostracize them, not judge them, not condemn them, but, again, recognize that we’re in this together, we’re all in need of forgiveness—these people will transform the world.”

Copyright © 2013, Daniel Weiss. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Copyright © 2013, Daniel Weiss. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Christian counselor Rob Jackson has developed a helpful diagram to show how sexual acting out is just the “tip of the iceberg.” Driving the toxic behaviors are distorted thoughts, damaged emotions and deceitful desires.  To find healing, a person must be willing to travel down the iceberg to the deepest parts that are broken, which ultimately reveals a wounded spiritual condition.

Many seeking help for sexual wounds feel distant from God and believe that if they would simply stop acting out with pornography, they will feel close to God again. That may be true, but it also fails to understand that driving the pornography use is a broken relationship with God. It’s a Catch-22. We all have a need for meaning, identity and true relationship, but the addict seeks to fill these needs with counterfeits that ultimately drain their soul. According to Rob and others, the solution isn’t to stop looking at pornography, so much as it is to open oneself completely to the working of the Holy Spirit. If the Bible is clear about one thing, it is this: we cannot save ourselves. We need a savior and we can only approach God because he first approaches us. Sin has closed us around ourselves. A key part of recovery is to begin to open up to the working of the Holy Spirit, whose role is to reveal Christ to us.

As Rob teaches, only through the ministry of the Holy Spirit can our hearts be set right. As we begin to trust in the love of God (rather than cowering from his wrath at our wrongdoing), we will find that our desire is more for God and less for selfishly serving ourselves. We also can heal from the pain of our damaged emotions and begin to correct the poor and confused thinking that led us onto a path of darkness. The fruit of this inner transformation is seen in the godly actions we exhibit. One of the hardest things about recovery is to wait for our actions to change. Most would start, finish and call complete and good the mere ceasing of an acting-out behavior. But, as countless addicts have found, failure to address the underlying issues leads to more acting-out behavior, often in new forms.

The great thing about Rob’s iceberg model is that it isn’t just for addicts. We ALL struggle with distorted thinking, damages emotions and deceitful desires. All of us can benefit from the daily renewing of our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. By seeing that all of us are broken in some way and in need of healing, we can approach those who struggle with the compassion and kindness that comes from the very heart of God. For one who feels utterly alone with his secret sin, this may be the lifeline that leads to lasting recovery.

To learn more about the great services Rob offers and to read more helpful articles, visit his site at: http://overcomesexaddiction.com/

________________

Copyright © 2013, Daniel Weiss. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

For many, sexuality is a means of getting  something from others, be it pleasure, power, domination, humiliation, comfort, relief of boredom, closeness. The desire may even be good in its own right, such as intimacy and union. Yet, because the intention is to take from another, the sexual interaction functions more like a transaction and people become objects to be manipulated for personal reward. In extreme cases, such as prostitution and human trafficking, people are seen as sexual objects to be bought, sold, used and discarded.

The Christian vision understands ”God’s design for healthy sexuality” as a means by which people serve one another by making themselves a gift for another. Sex is not something they merely take from another but something they offer to and receive from another in pure self-gift. The example of Christ and the whole counsel of Scripture shows that the love of God is one of divine giving, a self-pouring out that enriches, enlivens and creates new life.

One helpful formulation describes four qualities of divine love — free, total, faithful and fruitful. Empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit, we can begin to model our intimate relationships on this divine love.

Another key distinction between the Christian vision and pornographic sexuality that dominates much of the western world is understanding our connection with the divine. Many of the sex-crazed media stars would have us believe that we are gods and we are most holy in the moment of sexual climax.

This worship at the altar of sex is not new, however. Sex cults were present before the Israelites left Egypt. God specifically warned them against worshiping these gods. The Christian vision understands that we are not gods, nor is sex a thing to be worshiped. Rather, marital sexual intimacy is an icon of a much deeper, soul-satisfying love awaiting us in heaven. Through our imperfect earthly unions, God has given us a glimpse of the perfect eternal union of love that exists from all time between Father, Son and Spirit and which we will experience when we are raised into the newness of life eternal.

C.S Lewis speaks of this heavenly longing in Mere Christianity:

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.”

Lewis reminds us that sexuality and spirituality are intimately linked. We cannot be sexually mature without being spiritually mature.

Copyright © 2013, Daniel Weiss. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Myth 1: Nothing can be done.

Truth: More can be done than we can possibly imagine if we let God lead and follow where He goes.

Myth 2: We must be loud, vocal, and visible.

Truth: If we truly want people to hear us, we must be humble, personable, and subtle.

Myth 3: Getting angry is the path to success.

Truth: People are only going to join a hopeful cause that emphasizes positive engagement with the world.

Myth 4: We must fight the darkness.

Truth: We must increase the light by presenting the good, true and beautiful story that changes lives.

Myth 5: Success comes from the top down.

Truth: Lasting change begins at the personal level and grows as others encounter transformed individuals.

Myth 6: We must change others.

Truth: Only by first changing ourselves will we have something to say that’s worth hearing.

Copyright © 2013, Daniel Weiss. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Marriage at Cana by Frans II Francken, 1630s

Theology of the Body is the popular name given to a series of talks delivered by the late Pope John Paul II between 1979 and 1984. These talks delved deeply into age-old questions of what it means to be human and how we are to live our lives according to God’s design.

Basing his reflections on Matthew 19, John Paul goes with Jesus back to the beginning, the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2. Arguing that we were originally created to live in accord with the divine life of the Trinity, the Pope also maintained that Jesus Christ actively redeems sexual desire and can restore in increasing measure that which we were made for in the beginning.

Ultimately our sexuality and the intimacy of the marital embrace is not meant to complete us, but to point us to our destination: a life of perfect love with our Creator God in heaven.

Theology of the Body is one of the most complete and compelling Christian teachings about what it means to be human. Although it came out of the Roman Catholic tradition, the teaching is accessible to all Christians and has the capacity to bridge many denominational divisions and to be a powerful tool for evangelizing a sexually destructive culture.

For a longer introduction, see Fr. Roger Landry’s exploration of the main themes of Theology of the Body in outline form.

Or, visit our resources section to find books that will take you deeper into this compelling vision.

Copyright © 2013, Daniel Weiss. All rights reserved. Used with permission.