Your Journey to Integrity Will Hurt

Are you tired of the chains of sexual sin and yearning for wholeness? 

It’s time to step off the beaten path and confront the pain and suffering that often accompany the pursuit of sexual integrity. Drawing inspiration from the teachings of Bishop Robert Barron, we engage in a poignant conversation about the realities of life in a fallen world. It's not easy, but as followers of Christ, we are reminded that enduring suffering is part of our journey. This is not about dwelling in pain, but about attaining integrity, wholeness, and ultimately, freedom.

As we delve deeper, we begin to understand the impact of our past wounds on our current struggles. Our childhood experiences and the messages we received during that time often shape our behaviors and influence our journey towards sexual integrity. 
But it's not all bleak - there's hope and healing. We open up about our personal experiences and the challenges of breaking free from sexual addiction. 

We encourage you to not shy away from the pain, but to lean into it and allow God to heal and guide you. Remember, you are made for more than your past hardships. 
Join us for this honest, enlightening, and ultimately hopeful discussion.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:18

Hey everybody. So recently I heard Bishop Robert Barron, who is a Catholic bishop that I think is really astute. He's an incredible mind, philosopher, historian, and I heard him saying recently that we should not expect a life that is free of pain, that, as Christ followers, we should not expect a life that is just comfortable and easy and pain-free. He said that the sign of our faith, this, our Savior pinned to a cross, is the way he put it. Jesus pinned to a cross shows us that to follow him will include pain and suffering. Now, that doesn't mean that we are masochistic or that we go out seeking pain. Of course not. It does not mean that, because pain is an indicator that there's something wrong. But we should expect pain because the reality is that we live in a fallen world and there is something wrong. So if pain is an indicator that there is something wrong, then we should expect, in a fallen world, to experience pain. And that is certainly true, certainly true as we try to move away from sexual sin, whatever our compulsive sexual habits are, even our sexual temptations, and move toward sexual integrity. The journey towards sexual integrity is a journey that will include suffering to some degree or another. Now the goal of our endurance. Our goal of this journey is not suffering. Our goal is integrity, our goal is wholeness. Our goal is less pain.

Speaker 1: 2:04

But there is pain in the journey and I want to highlight several elements of that for you, just so you won't be surprised along the way. The first several are focused kind of on looking backwards and the reality that our journey towards sexual integrity necessarily includes looking back, and I'll explain why. And then the last few points of pain are really about living a healthy life, moving forward. So let me just start Looking back. First of all, we will experience pain in the journey towards sexual integrity because of past pain. We have childhood wounds that came when we were most innocent and vulnerable, and those childhood wounds and all of us have them can still trouble us today. These wounds are rarely just able to be left in the past. Now, certainly there are some wounds from our past that can just be left in the past, but most of us have wounds from our childhood because we grew up in a fallen world, with fallen parents, with fallen kids around us, with fallen brothers and sisters, and we were wounded by them, and that hurts For most of us, who have developed some type of compulsive, dissociative behavior.

Speaker 1: 3:23

As adults and in this, for you listeners, most of you it would be some area of sexual integrity, sexual struggle we learn to dissociate from pain, to escape pain, to pursue relief from pain by running to the pleasure of some type of sexual titillation. And there's a lot more to it than that, because we can get into the specifics of the kind of sexual behavior that we pursue and find that we were seeking relief not just from whatever the momentary pain was, but some deep, deep-seated messages of pain and shame that we carry inside of us. So in order for us to become people of sexual integrity, we have to learn to unplug from those dissociative behaviors, from those sexual sin behaviors, and start to plug into and pay attention to, and attune to the real pain that we experience in our lives, including the real pain that we experienced when we were young. So, was it a parent's divorce? Was it a parent who was not attentive to you, a mother or father who was abusive or harsh? Was it teasing by other kids at school? Was it something that you experienced in the hands of an older brother or sister? What are the sources of pain? Now, one interesting exercise I've recommended this year before and I've done this exercise myself. But you might even track in your life like what were the remarkable kind of formative places where you really experienced a lot of suffering when you were growing up.

Speaker 1: 4:48

And even if you don't remember the suffering, you're like, yeah, but that was a big deal, you know that was a big deal. So my parents, for instance, split when I was about two. They divorced somewhere between two and three. I don't remember that at all. I hardly have any memories. I only have very faint kind of shadowy memories of my parents being together. So I don't remember their divorce one iota, but I can certainly guarantee that when my father left the house and did not come back, that that caused some type of pain, that there was some type of hurt that I experienced there and I certainly can remember the pain of visiting him and then leaving and missing him. I remember walking down the airplane what's it called the gate when you kind of are boarding the plane walking down that and turning to look and see my dad standing there waving and turning and looking and seeing him waving until I couldn't see him anymore and then hoping that the seat that I had in the plane had a window facing the terminal that I might see him in the window, and I remember crying in those situations. So whether you can remember the specific pain or not of a specific moment, you know, you, I hope you know, and if you don't you know.

Speaker 1: 6:01

Just try to be sensitive to the little you and what the kinds of experience you experience when you're younger, and just map those out on a timeline of your life and you might be surprised to find some of the correlations between those things and the onset or the genesis of your own sexual behaviors. So past pain, that's thing number one, or past wounds is the place where you experience some pain. Also faulty messages, and this goes right along with number one, but the lies that have accompanied past wounds, and so you know the example I just gave my dad leaving when I was two. There were messages, very subtle messages, that came with that, and I don't mean they came from my dad explicitly, but we have an enemy and he is called the father of lies and the accuser of the brethren and he does not fight fair. He doesn't care if you're two or 22 or 72. If you experience a deep, significant wound, a relational wound in your life, he will be there and he will try to interpret it for you and tell you what it means about you and about your parents and about God. So those faulty messages also come with pain.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Now, next is our present sin. As we're trying to move from our sexual sin to integrity, we will have slip-ups and stumbles along the way and as we're beginning to take deeper account and face this stuff and treat it more significantly, our sins will grieve us. It'll hurt. It'll hurt to discover that our willpower is weak. It'll hurt to discover that we fell again. It will hurt to experience that over and over again. One of the most tremendous forms of compassion I've ever received was after falling to sexual sin again and going to a mentor's house and knocking on his door. He was in the middle of cleaning his apartment. He had those rubber yellow gloves on his hands and I said can I talk to you for a minute? And he opened the door and I came in and I said I just did it again and he just hugged me and held me In the pain I experienced because of what I did. He offered me comfort.

Speaker 1: 8:09

Our present sin, the sins we're trying to get rid of, cause us pain. The fallout from the sin we're trying to leave behind. They cause us pain. They cause other people around us pain too, and when we cause other people pain because of our sin, that hurts too. It hurts to hurt people, doesn't it? When we pay attention. Part of the reason we don't want to confess our sin to somebody else is because it hurts them, and when they hurt, we hurt. That's hard. It is so hard to look into the face of someone you love and tell them the truth about what you did, when you know it's going to hurt them to hear. It's brutal, and I'm not trying to say that the pain you experienced then matters more than the pain you caused them. But it is fair to acknowledge that the path towards sexual integrity includes this type of pain too. Next, others sin, so now this is beginning to move into healthier living today. So if we're leaving sexual sin behind, we want to walk in sexual integrity today.

Speaker 1: 9:10

It matters that we begin to address and face and attune to when other people slight us, when other people sin against us, when other people do or say things that aren't sinful but just hurt. These not only hurt, but they can also tap into the wound from the past and they can come again with faulty messages from the enemy about our worth. So, for example, I'm recording this and on a Friday I got some free time. Tonight I just texted a group of guys and said, hey, anybody want to get together? I've got a window of time from this time to this time and so far I've heard back from most of them saying can't do it. That doesn't hurt a ton, but it hurts a little bit. I wish that somebody were available Again. That's a light example, but if you've experienced that over and over and over again in your life, then that kind of a no from somebody can hurt. So recognize that that's beginning to attune to that as important, so that you don't begin to turn that little bit of pain or that hurt into something where you're trying to dissociate from your pain and run back to your sexual sin.

Speaker 1: 10:15

And then, finally, learning abstinence hurts. What I mean by that? What I mean in any way that you're wearing some kind of chastity belt or you're treating yourself violently to try to be sexually pure? Not at all, but learning abstinence is a new skill. When you go to the gym for the first time, or for the first time in a long time, you leave sore, or at least you wake up the next day sore. If you go for a run and you haven't run for a long time, you're going to be sore the next day. You might have blisters in places that you didn't before, because learning anything new is difficult and we've been learning recently about this phenomenon that social scientists recognize, where it's called the J-curve. When you begin any new skill, you might start off and be like, yeah, I'm doing great, and then pretty soon you're going to dip and you might even feel like you're worse at what you started to do than when you started.

Speaker 1: 11:04

So learning abstinence is difficult. It's new to us, and so abstaining is something that's difficult. It's something that's going to come with challenges and some kind of pain. We've depended on these sins for a long, long time and so to learn to live life. So if you depended on this sin In and out, you know, every season of the year for 10 years, 20 years, learning to live life, to go through those seasons, to go through the ups and downs of a Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday, sunday, without that crutch, without turning back to that sin, you're going to experience some withdrawal and you're going to experience just some wobbliness on your own feet because you're going to learn. You're trying to learn to live upright and to walk upright and whole, and that will be challenging for you. Even saying no to the tiny temptations because they lead to greater ones can feel challenging. So acknowledge that Now.

Speaker 1: 11:58

The point in all of this, again, is not to just focus in on the hardship, certainly not to lick our wounds and feel bad for ourselves. It's just to soberly assess the reality that if you are on a journey towards sexual integrity it's going to include hardship, but to learn to take that hardship instead of disconnecting from it and running back to the old sin or developing some new dissociative habit. Instead of doing that, you want to learn to begin to press that pain into the wounds of Jesus. You want to begin learning to open up, to turn those things inside out before Jesus, to let his eyes look on your pain.

Speaker 1: 12:35

You know one of the things I've been trying to do recently the Lord's been opening up for me, even years and years out from breaking free from my own sexual addiction. He's been opening up for me areas where I still have tended towards closing up my heart toward him when it comes to areas of anxiety and fear and shame. And so I've been trying to develop a new habit of just turning toward him and, in my own way, just trying to kind of open my chest to him. That's where I feel those things shame and anxiety especially. I feel kind of right behind my sternum Just trying to open those places to him and just saying, lord, look on these places, letting myself experience and feel the pain and just letting him be with me there, and it's actually pretty amazing what a difference that makes. It doesn't make everything all better all at once, but it does move me to a greater place of health than turning back to those old behaviors.

Speaker 1: 13:30

So, brothers and sisters, this journey may be hard, it will be painful, but you are made for more than where you've been. So don't be afraid of leaving the Egypt of your comfort and your sexual sin behind moving through the desert, even though it may feel dry and weary sometimes, because Jesus does want to lead you to a promised land where you are more and more free. Lord, we ask this. We ask that you would do this for us. Help us learn to endure the hardships, these hardships, rather than continuing to go back to the pain of slavery that we've been in for so long, and we ask it in your name, jesus Amen.