Tracing a line to the desert

On July 1 of last year, my mom's old friend Aletha Knopp invited me to a lecture on a Christian view of sexuality and gender by Matt Zrust. I arrived late, just as the Q&A was beginning, in which Matt mentioned the book Paul and the Person by Susan Grove Eastman. I bought the book, and found that Eastman cites The Mind of the Spirit by Craig Keener. I bought that book too. Keener cites Emotion and Peace of Mind by Richard Sorabji. (You know what I did then.) I jumped from book to footnote to book to footnote like a frog on a flyscraping mission. 

Meanwhile, by someone on the internet, I was advised to check out Jared Moore's writings on concupiscence as related to the Celibate Gay Christian movement. I skimmed through Moore's dissertation and his book The Lust of the Flesh, enjoyed some of his online articles, listened to some of his podcast interviews and those of his friends Jeff Wright and Ben Woodring (Backwoods Belief), and for a couple months I became constantly angry following his Twitter feed before finally swearing off Twitter altogether.

Moore was bashing Sam Allberry, Preston Sprinkle, and anyone else who takes a gentler approach to the issue mentioned above, and teamed up with Rosaria Butterfield (I thought she was a friend in her former books), who had her own harsh words to say about Sprinkle. 

Moore's dissertation camped on Augustine's use of the idea of concupiscence against Pelagius and Julian of Eclanum, attempting to prove that any latent tendency toward sin, such as same-sex attraction, should be considered morally culpable sin, even if not mentally surrendered to or acted on. From there Moore traced Augustine's influence on the Reformers and their heirs. Not liking his conclusion or his harshness, I purposed to find something before Augustine to hang my hat on. After all, at the end of his dissertation (p.238), Moore recommends that future researchers investigate what Jerome and other church fathers had to say on the topic. 

In a debate with James White, Greg Coles mentioned the possibility of a pre-lust condition that could be morally blameless. I researched this idea and found the Greek concept of propatheia (pre-passion), which originated with Seneca and other Stoics, and then was carried forward by the Christian thinker Origen and his followers, such as Didymus the Blind, Evagrius of Pontus, and even Jerome. 

Sorabji chides Augustine for mangling the concept, but Peter Brown in an article reviewing Sorabji's book says that Sorabji missed a parallel concept that was core to moral philosophy in Judaism and early Christianity, namely single-mindedness (or single-souledness), as opposed to double-mindedness or double-souledness (dipsychia), similar to the Stoic idea of apatheia, but rebranded by John Cassian in biblical language as purity of heart (which, as Kierkegaard tells us, is "to will one thing"). Brown goes on to say that John Cassian's Conferences were always read alongside Augustine's writings in medieval monastic circles to temper their extremes. 

Also while reeling from Moore's Twitter onslaughts, I took refuge in Matthew Lee Anderson's lengthy blog defenses of Side B and the Revoice conference (1, 2, 3, 4), as well that of Philip Cary. This led me to Anderson's Substack, which led me to Myles Werntz's Substack -- both Anderson and Werntz are Christian ethicists -- and in one of Werntz's blog posts, he says he's reading John Cassian's Conferences, and that just sealed the deal for me. (The story Werntz cited is a beautiful analogy attributed to Abba Moses, where our thoughts are an ever-flowing river, our minds are a grist mill on that river, and the grain to grind if we so choose is the Scripture passages we put into our minds.)

So now I'm halfway through Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo, on a vow not to buy any more books until this one is complete, and with the intention to read John Cassian as soon as I finish. 

It seems all roads lead to the desert (the desert fathers and mothers, that is, of the early monastic movement whom Evagrius led and John Cassian interviewed in the late 300s). Thank you, Mrs. Knopp, Matt Zrust, and everyone else on this merry chain, even dear Jared Moore. I started to realize that his Twitter vituperance was an evil mask for a kinder soul when I watched his New Year sermon, where he encouraged the singles in his Crossville, Tennessee congregation to glorify God in their singleness (43:36-46:14), rather than implying, as he did to the poor singles on Twitter, that "therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife" (Genesis 2:24) is not just an explanation but a command for everyone who possibly can get married to a permissible person, to get married unless they have a biblical reason not to, via a special gift of singleness. Now I know better, and I value you, my friends in real life, even more for your patience in our conversations over tea and over the phone as I learn these things with you through this hard experiment called life. 

*I wrote about this search a few months ago in a post about metaphors in recovery, but after some maturing of my thought and some encouraging back and forth with Laurie Krieg and Marshall Kramer, I decided to trace the lines again as far as they've been drawn up to "today tonight", as they say in Rawang. 

Multiple Metaphors in Sexual Recovery

On February 21, 2015, I attended a men’s workshop in Chiang Mai, Thailand led by Christian counselors Chad Loftis and Sørin Joensen called “Sex, Women and Manning Up”. The thing I remember most was a discussion on metaphors for describing our sexuality. After showing us a clip of military reenactments from Pure Desire’s Conquer Series, they asked us what we thought of the idea that our struggle against lust is a constant battle. We decided that the battle metaphor helps us take sin seriously and to connect to one aspect of our male identity as warriors, but it also tends to evoke stress, fear, and anger, and could wear us down in the long run. Then they asked us to consider our sexuality and life as a garden. The garden metaphor can give us a more peaceful and long-term outlook, and is also connected to our male identity, as Adam, the first man, was given the mission of tending the garden of Eden as his corner of the world. By viewing our sexuality as both a battle to win and a garden to cultivate and weed, we got a more complete and life-giving picture.

Let’s consider how the multi-perspective idea is expressed in books of the last ten years. Mike Wilkerson in his book Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry (Crossway 2011) says that recovery is a combination of dealing with sin, rooted in idolatry, and suffering, which is often trauma caused by others. Jay Stringer relates sin with addiction as two concepts that "dovetail beautifully" in his book Unwanted (NavPress 2018), saying "the more I understand what the Bible says about sin, the more I understand the nature of addiction, and the more I understand what science reveals about addiction, the more I understand the nature of sin." Joe Rigney, in More Than a Battle: How to Experience Victory, Freedom, and Healing from Lust (B&H 2021), puts all three themes together as complementary lenses. In his analysis, lust and sexual brokenness can be viewed simultaneously as sin to be conquered, addiction to get freedom from, and brokenness to be healed. His preferred theme is the first, but he says all three are needed in order to get a complete picture.

Recent debates on concupiscence (latent sinful desire or pre-desire) in relation to same-sex attraction have got me thinking about metaphors again. Authors such as Denny Burk and Heath Lambert (Transforming Homosexuality), Matthew P. W. Roberts (Pride), Rosaria Butterfield (Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age), and Jared Moore (A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction and The Lust of the Flesh), have argued stridently that homosexual attraction patterns are sin to be repented from. Moore, in particular, in chapter 2 of his dissertation, points back to Augustine's controversy with the Pelagian apologist Julian of Eclanum, in order to support the position that latent desires for sinful things, even if not consented to, are morally culpable sin because they come from original sin.

Meanwhile, I was also reading Craig Keener’s book The Mind of the Spirit, which I found cited in Susan Grove Eastman’s Paul and the Person, which was mentioned in a talk on sexuality at a friend’s church! (I’m a sucker for book recommendations and footnotes.)

Anyway, Keener (pp.22-23), citing historian Richard Sorabji’s book Emotion and Peace of Mind, explains how Stoic thinkers such as Seneca attempted to master their emotions through mental processes similar to modern-day mindfulness or cognitive behavioral therapy. 

Keener says these exercises were helpful, but the Stoics underestimated the power of latent emotions and how they are intimately connected with rationality. However, Seneca did recognize ways in which the body started to become aroused as an emotion was arising, such as nostrils flaring and cheeks getting hot when we’re starting to get angry, or when the face becomes pale as we start to become afraid, or when the male organ becomes erect during the beginnings of sexual arousal. Seneca taught that we can recognize these signs in our body (called propatheia or pre-passions) and redirect our emotions through rational thinking in order to become calm again (a state of apatheia). (This line of thinking is picked up by modern neuroscience in books like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and the idea of the lizard brain vs the rational brain.)

Keener, again citing Sorabji, says that Seneca’s observations about the body and preliminary mental disturbances were misunderstood by early church thinkers Origen and later Augustine, so that the Stoic language about pre-passions was eventually reappropriated from a term for blameless proto-feelings that can be redirected, into a doctrine focused on different degrees of sin in its latent desire form, leading poor tempted medieval monks and their mentors to ask questions like "Did you put yourself in the way of it?", “Did you enjoy it?” or “Did you let it linger?” Keener says that these kinds of questions can help us practice self-control, but also tend to make us obsessed with sin in an unhealthy way “that Romans 7 parodies.”

Additionally, Augustine's most extreme statements on concupiscence were made in the heat of controversy with Julian of Eclanum, a young follower of Pelagius who antagonized Augustine just as the latter had earlier antagonized Jerome -- Augustine died with his massive point-by-point refutation of Julian still unfinished.

So was Augustine wrong? And did countless doctrinal statements in church history, which recycled his conclusions, simply pass on his error? Maybe, but there’s more to it than that.

Continuing my hunt, I got a copy of Sorabji’s book – I read only a few pages, then got distracted by a book review by historian Peter Brown, who as a young man had read through Augustine's works in the original Latin, created the field of late antiquity studies, and become a history professor at Berkeley and Princeton on the strength of his Augustine biography without ever getting a PhD! 

Brown (pp.188-191) says that Sorabji partly misses the point which Origen and Augustine were getting at. They did misunderstand and re-appropriate the language of the Stoics, but in this reappropriation, they were drawing from a Hebrew tradition that focused on the heart. 

According to Brown, the Stoics lived in the upper strata of Roman society as advisors to powerful leaders who needed to recognize and defuse their anger and other strong emotions before they made rash decisions and killed innocent people. 

Early Christians, on the other hand, lived in small, tight-knit communities at the margins of Roman society, and they were concerned about group unity – they would test their own hearts, trying to see if there were any hidden motives of self-will "like a snake hidden in the dung" (John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent 15:79) that might grow up to make them antisocial and so disrupt the group, interfering with love for God and neighbor. Early monks and their mentors, meditating on Psalm 139:13 ("you have possessed my inward parts") and Acts 4:32 ("the multitude of believers had one heart and one soul, and none of them said that anything that he possessed was his own, but all things were common to them"), strived for integrity and selflessness even in their dreams and fantasies at night. (For more on this theme, see Brown's book The Body and Society chapters 2 and 11, where he traces singleness of heart vs double-souledness from the Old Testament to the Desert Fathers.)

Brown encapsulates the two views with two metaphors: "Stoic therapy was like the brisk defusing of a ticking bomb. The therapy favoured by the Desert Fathers, by contrast, was concerned to measure the force of a coiled spring—the power of self-will in the depths of the heart." (p.191.)

On November 9, 2023, I heard Andy Robinson speak on a LivingOut webinar called “Theological, Pastoral, and Cultural Reflections on Concupiscence”. He said two insightful things: first, that same-sex attraction and other kinds of disordered desires are signs of a heart problem, and second, that we mustn’t emphasize that Jesus’ temptations were different from ours due to our original, indwelling sin nature, because that goes counter to the whole thrust of the New Testament, which is to comfort us by showing that Jesus understands.

The admission of a “heart problem”, I think, is key. It is ambiguous enough that it doesn’t condemn someone who is struggling with internal temptation, but also acknowledges the wisdom of those who want us to take heart-level struggles seriously, including the wisdom of those early Christians. This lets us drink from many different streams...

1. Codependency, or believing we need certain specific people more than we need God, is related to idolatry. (See Ed Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small; David Powlison, Making All Things New; Kelly Needham, Friend-ish)
2. Gender dysphoria, a felt incongruence between one's biological sex and one's mind, could stem from or lead to envy of the opposite sex. (See Rosaria Butterfield, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age)
3. Desire for someone else’s spouse is related to envy of that married couple. 
4. Dissatisfaction with singleness is related to ungratefulness for the gift of one’s present status.
5. Forming our identity around our experience of same-sex attraction runs the risk of eclipsing our identity as God’s children. (See Andrew Bunt, Finding Your Best Identity)
6. Our particular pleasure palate might have been formed in part by the desire to relive or gain power over childhood trauma when we felt violated or powerless. (See Jay Stringer, Unwanted)
7. Fear of the opposite sex, desire for intimacy with the same sex, or desire to disidentify with our birth sex might be maladaptive coping mechanisms related to trauma or unhealthy childhood roles in our family of origin, although this is not the case for everyone.

We are complex beings, and it would be obtuse and unkind to diagnose someone else with the above, especially without knowing them well. But I recognize myself in each of them. 

Laurie Krieg and Matt Krieg unpack some of these heart issues in their book Journey Well. I appreciate their diagram with the heart composed of concentric circles from triggers on the surface, down to behaviors, feelings, beliefs, and finally core needs related to past experiences and inborn sin nature. There is no guarantee that addressing these things will completely remove internal temptations; the more important goal is to write a new story that puts God at the center, opens us up to receive his love, and makes meaning out of these conflicts.

I think there’s a place for both the time bomb metaphor at the trigger level, and the coiled spring metaphor at the core need level. With the former, in times of temptation, it is comforting to realize that the Tempting Voice or "the thoughts" (logismoi in Evagrius's system) are not our true self, even if they feel like us.

• we can recognize "it's not me, it's just my brain" (Jeffrey Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding) 
• we can say with Paul that the tempting thought "is no longer I ... but [S]in living in me..." (Romans 7:20), but the new reality is that "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20)
• we can "say it, separate it, and stare at it", and "stop, challenge, choose" (Craig Blanchette, building on Wayne Scott Andersen's Habits of Health).
• we can "surf the urge", knowing that soon it will dissipate (Alan Marlatt), since "the world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever" (1 John 2:17)

This is the value of the Stoic model, and it's a first step toward ceasing to obey tempting thoughts. 

However, once the heat of temptation has passed, we can consider that coiled spring of errant self-will, and start to do the deep work of knowing our hearts and seeking the roots of our desires. Here we can take another helpful thread from Augustine, viewing all our desires as disordered loves which we can continually redirect back to God, our true joy and delight, with the help of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, and prayer. 

As we build habits of reordering our loves and our thoughts, eventually it may be possible to see another person's beauty and give thanks to God for this fellow image-bearer, without obsessing over them. (See John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent 15:60.) If we're not there yet and need to simply avert our eyes, walk away, and redirect our thoughts, it's good to realize our present limitations. (See The Shepherd of Hermas Vision 1, Ch.1 on opposite-sex attraction, and Barsanuphius's letter #258 to Dorotheos on same-sex attraction, also mentioned in The Body and Society p.234.)

For example, I might feel a desire to get the attention of someone I'm attracted to. If this person is married, or of the same sex, or an unbeliever, or just not right for me to focus on at this time, then trying extra-hard to get them to notice me might be unwise -- in Martin Buber's terminology, I am currently in I-It mode, rather than I-Thou mode. And yet there is at its root a God-given core need for being seen and known -- maybe just not by this particular person. So I have to take a breath and maybe write out my thoughts in my journal, or pray and ask God to show me that he sees and knows me. I can open my Bible and meditate on Psalm 139 or the story of Hagar, who said "I have now seen the one who sees me." Then I can ask for help from other believers who I'm not attracted to, and let God show me his care through a variety of spiritual sibling and parent relationships.

And at the same time, as Paul says, I must “put to death” whatever belongs to my earthly nature. So when that fantasy of the perfect flirty conversation with the wrong person starts to rear its head, I can push pause, and tell myself, "The Tempting Voice wants that, but that's not for me. God has something better in store for me." And then try to realize that I'm not the most important thing in that person's world, and that's as it should be, because I have other good things to focus on today.

Put to death, redirect, nurture, cultivate, focus our vision, walk in the Spirit… all of these are metaphors for different aspects of our “journey” and “growth process” (which are themselves metaphors). Taking a multi-perspective view in this way is more helpful, in my opinion, than assuming that all of Scripture, or all of church history thought one way about sin. There are a million metaphors for sin, and a million metaphors for salvation. Let’s take the good from all of them and see which ones the Holy Spirit wants to use with us today.

Donald Miller, Joshua Harris, and the vow at Summit

 Joshua Harris and Donald Miller both served on staff at Summit Ministries in Colorado for a summer in their late teens. At the end of that summer, they made a vow along with five other guys to follow a list of moral standards for a year. They didn't keep the vow for very long, but their friendship continued, and they eventually wrote books and Facebook posts where they recounted different aspects of the same experience, but for different purposes. 

Read the excerpts below and ask yourself: how will I view today's struggles and friendships ten or twenty or thirty years from now? What have I learned from my struggles and friendships of the past? And how can I continue being a faithful, encouraging friend even when our perspectives have changed?

Donald Miller: On the discouragement of breaking self-imposed standards

Donald Miller (2003). Blue Like Jazz, pp.79-81

[Note: this memoir became an inspiration to the emerging church folks, young people searching for spiritual authenticity outside of the evangelical church they were familiar with. Miller has since stepped away from active church attendance.]

I was a fundamentalist Christian once. It lasted a summer. I was in that same phase of trying to discipline myself to "behave" as if I loved light and not "behave" as if I loved darkness. I used to get really ticked about preachers who talked too much about grace, because they tempted me to not be disciplined. I figured what people needed was a kick in the butt, and if I failed at godliness it was because those around me weren't trying hard enough. I believed if word got out about grace, the whole church was going to turn into a brothel. I was a real jerk, I think.

I hit my self-righteous apex while working at a fundamentalist Christian camp in Colorado. I was living in a cabin in the Rockies with about seven other guys, and the whole lot of us fell into this militant Christianity that says you should live like a Navy SEAL for Jesus. I am absolutely ashamed to admit this now.

We would fast all the time, pray together twice each day, memorize Scripture, pat each other on the back and that sort of thing. Summer was coming to a close, and we were getting pretty proud of ourselves because we had read a great deal of Scripture and hadn't gotten anybody pregnant. We were concerned, however, about what to do after we split up, thinking that if we didn't have each other we'd fall apart and start selling drugs to children. One of us, and it was probably me, decided to create a contract that listed things we wouldn't do for an entire year, like watch television or smoke pipes or listen to music. It was the constitution of our self-righteous individualism. The contract stated we would read the Bible every day, pray, and memorize certain long passages of Scripture. We sat around one night with pen and paper and offered sacrifices, each of us trying to outman the other with bigger and brighter lambs for the slaughter. We were the direct opposite of a frat house; instead of funneling our testosterone into binge drinking and rowdy parties, we were manning up to Jesus, bumping Him chest to chest as it were, like Bible salesmen on steroids.

I hitched a ride to Oregon and got an apartment in the suburbs where I didn't know anybody and nobody knew me. I had this necklace on my neck, this string of beads, each bead representing one of the guys in the contract, and a cross in the center, a reminder that we had all gone in on this thing, that we were going to be monks for a year. At first it was easy, living in a new place and all, a new city, but after a while that necklace started to choke me.

The first of the exploits to go was the Bible. It wasn't that I didn't want to read it or didn't agree with it, I would just forget. It sat on the floor next to my bed beneath a pile of dirty clothes. Out of sight, out of mind. I'd forget about it for a month until I cleaned my room, and then I'd lift up a pile of dirty clothes and there would be my Bible, staring up at me like a dead pet.

One evening I was walking around Pioneer Square in downtown Portland when I noticed a pipe and tobacco store across the street. I decided I'd step inside and take a look-see. I came out with a new pipe that I swore I wouldn't smoke till the year was up. It was a good deal, you know, about fifteen dollars or something. I couldn't pass up the sale on tobacco, either, even though it would go bad before the contract expired. I sat down in Pioneer Square with the skateboarders and musicians, chess players and coffee drinkers. I decided to pack my pipe, just to get a feel for it. I stuck it in my mouth to bring back that sensation, the feel of the stem between my teeth. Then I lit it. Then I smoked it.

After the Bible and the pipe thing fell apart, I decided to yield a bit on the television aspect of the contract. There was this indie pizza place down the street from my apartment, Escape from New York Pizza or something like that, and they had a big-screen television. I'd go down and watch Monday night football, which was a double sin because on Mondays we were supposed to be fasting. I figured none of the guys would mind if I switched the fasting day to Wednesday, just to shuffle things around. I shuffled so many fasting days around that after three months I was supposed to go twelve days without eating. I think I fasted twice that year. Maybe.

I hated the entire year. Hated it. I felt like a failure every morning. I hated looking in the mirror because I was a flop. I got ticked at all the people who were having fun with their lives.

I'd walk home from the pizza place feeling criminal for my mischief, feeling as though I were not cut out to be a Christian, wondering what my punishment would be for disobeying God. Everything was failing. I'd get letters from the other guys, too, some of them doing quite well. I wouldn't answer them. Not only was I failing God, I was failing my fundamentalist brothers!

Joshua Harris: On the discouragement of breaking self-imposed standards

Joshua Harris (2003). Not Even a Hint, pp.15-18, 21-22

[Note: at the time of writing Not Even a Hint, I think Harris was assistant to C.J. Mahaney, and the year after publishing he took over the pastorate of Covenant Life Church (Gaithersburg, MD) from Mahaney. Soon after, the book was sold at the booktable at Household of Faith Community Church (Gresham, OR), where his father pastored and where I attended. I listened to the audiobook in Thailand around 2015.]

Seven of us were gathered in the dimly lit living room. A single sheet of notebook paper passed slowly between each person. Finally, it came to me. I scanned the numbered list then solemnly signed my name at the bottom of the page.

The "contract," as we had come to call it, was a strict code of conduct, a list of promises that each of us was vowing to follow for the coming year.

We would read our Bibles every day.

Go to church every Sunday.

Memorize a passage of Scripture every week.

Fast every Tuesday.

Share our faith with one person each week.

We wouldn't watch any movies.

We wouldn't kiss a girl.

We wouldn't drink alcohol.

And we wouldn't masturbate.

Actually, I don't remember all the promises on the list. I think there were nearly fifteen. But I distinctly remember that the vow to refrain from masturbating was number ten on the list. That promise held the particular attention of each of us.

...I was eighteen years old. The other six guys ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-four. That summer we were working as counselors at a Christian leadership camp in Colorado. Carlos, Clint, and I washed dishes. Don, Brook, Jon, and Scot shuttled students in the vans. We called ourselves "The Stallions"--named after a cabin several of the guys lived in.

I can't remember exactly where the idea for the contract came up. I guess we wanted rules. We wanted to know we were pleasing God. The whole process of becoming holy seemed complicated to us, so the idea of reducing our faith to a manageable list of promises and prohibitions was appealing.

So there we were in Jon's parents' living room signing our names. After we were done, Jon took the piece of paper, placed it on the floor in the center of the room, and knelt beside it. "C'mon, guys," he said. "Let's seal our vow with prayer."

The whole thing was very dramatic. All that was missing was a rising orchestral theme playing in the background. We got down on our knees, huddled in a circle, and extended our right hands onto the sheet of paper. We closed our eyes and bowed our heads, then pledged before God to obey every rule on the list.

It was official. The contract was ratified. I felt sure that the angels in heaven must be leaning down in amazement, watching our impressive display of godliness and the sheer strength of will in the room.

A few days later, we all left for home. I was still basking in the euphoria of our religious zeal. Every generation needs men of courage, men of conviction, men of strength--men of God. I was one of those men.

The illusion lasted about two weeks. That's when I broke rule number ten of the contract.

The year that followed was a very humbling lesson in how utterly incapable I was of being righteous in my own strength. And I wrote "number ten again" in my journal more times that year than I want to think about. All my great ambitions, all my vows, all my self-efforts were revealed to be worthless.

...I can laugh now as I look back on that year under the tyranny of "the contract," but it really taught me some important lessons about the limitations of human rules and regulations to bring about real change in a person's life--especially in the area of lust.

...My failure to uphold "the contract" was my first clue that my method for resisting lust was misguided. To begin with, it was based on my own standard of what it meant to obey God. I created a rule I thought I could follow: I wouldn't masturbate for a year.

The result was that I placed my hope in the wrong source of power to obey--my own willpower and strength. I wasn't putting my faith in God; I was putting my faith in Joshua Harris and his ability to resist temptation.

My motivation didn't help either. Though it wasn't completely wrong--part of me genuinely wanted to please God--a huge part of my motivation was to "feel" like a pure person. I wanted to be able to say I hadn't sinned. I wanted to show God how good I could be and how worthy I was.

But of course it all fell apart. After I sinned again, my motivation crumbled. I didn't feel pure or worthy of God's love. My guilt made me hesitant to pray. So I tried harder to muster the willpower to stop lusting. This only led to more discouragement and frustration. Even when I revised my standards--"I won't do it for the next nine months!"--the whole cycle repeated itself again.

Can you relate? Do you see how getting our standard, source of power, and motivation all wrong leads to ongoing failure?

I wrote this book because I've learned that I don't have to live on this treadmill. You don't have to either. God's Word shows us how to get on the path to freedom. It shows us that the key to escaping the cycle of defeat is to embrace God's standard for holiness, His source of power for change, and His motive for fighting sin. 

Joshua Harris: On the deepening of faith

Joshua Harris (2010). Dug Down Deep, pp.21-22

[Note: at this point, Harris had been senior pastor of Covenant Life Church for six years, and was feeling nostalgic, realizing that he was grateful for the formative experiences that had challenged and deepened his faith, even though they seemed intense at the time, and even though his writings in his early twenties had laid blame on some of his early religious environments.]

When I was seventeen, I went to a Christian leadership camp in Colorado Springs. The students there were different from other Christians I'd met. They were serious, focused. That might have been the first time I was with a group of Christians who weren't simply trying to "outfun" the world. These kids wanted to outthink and outwork and outlove the world. They wanted to apply their minds to studying Scripture and gaining a Christian worldview. Many had a hunger for God and his Word that stood in stark contrast to my life.

In one session the camp director asked students to stand and recite passages of Scripture they had memorized. I misunderstood the request and at one point stood with my Bible in hand and read the passage. When I realized my mistake, I felt really dumb. I slumped back into my chair red-faced and embarrassed as others stood, one after another, and recited portions from memory. Worse than my misunderstanding was the realization that I didn't have a passage of the Bible memorized. My conscience was pricked.

Around that same time my girlfriend and I ended our two-year relationship. It was a significant moment in my spiritual life. I didn't realize till we broke up just how much our relationship, with its ongoing temptation to compromise, had been draining my spiritual passion. With the distraction and guilt of that temptation over, I began to pursue God in a way I'd never done before.

Joshua Harris: On the encouragement of long-term friendship

Joshua Harris (17 Jan 2022). Facebook.com

[Note: at this point, Harris has stepped down from pastoring, gone to seminary, renounced his former books, left his marriage, left his faith, and started a business-coaching consultancy.]

I’ve been friends with @donaldmiller since I was 17. We met while we were both working at a Christian leadership youth camp in Colorado Springs (any Summit alumni out there?). He was a counselor, I was a dish washer. When he moved to my hometown of Portland, Oregon, after camp, our friendship continued. We ended up working alongside each other, traveling, and dreaming of being writers. 

Thirty years later Don is still my friend and there’s a long history of him inspiring me, teaching me, and supporting me. When I decided to stop being a pastor he reminded me of entrepreneurial roots and encouraged me to launch my own business. When my marriage ended he didn’t judge or berate me. On a weekly basis I draw from his StoryBrand framework in my creative agency and his Business Made Simple video curriculum in my coaching. 

Don just released a new book called Hero on a Mission that uses principles from story to help you set clear goals for your life and, instead of playing the role of victim or villain, choose to be a hero on a mission.

I interact with a lot of people who have gone through significants shifts in their beliefs. And consistently they ask, “Where do I find meaning? How do I rediscover a sense of purpose?” For anyone asking those kind of questions, I’d highly recommend Don’s book. It’s inspirational, but also extremely practical. It guides you in creating a life plan and encourages you not to let fate write your story. It teaches you to set big goals and then break that down to daily choices. 

Don’t let discouragement, distraction, or confusion steal your story.