Abuse. It happens in the church. Yet discover how the amazing power of God’s intervening grace brings healing and wholeness.

GYC 2011: Fill Me

<p>Abuse. It happens in the church. Yet discover how the amazing power of God’s intervening grace brings healing and wholeness.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2011 Seminar: Healing from Sexual Brokenness

Steve Nelson

Nicole Parker

The Broken Image, Part 1

This message was presented at the GYC 2011 conference.

For other resources like this, visit us online at gycweb.org.

Father in heaven, we are so blessed to be able to come into your presence again.

Lord, this morning we're talking about a tough issue, the sin issue, and how it enslaves us.

Lord, I pray that you will make your strength perfect in our weakness, especially myself, Lord.

I need so much the power that only you can give.

I pray that you will speak through me to every person who is listening to my voice today that each 1 may get what they need in order to draw closer to you and break free from the chains of sin.

This morning I am talking about breaking the chains, overcoming the cycle of sexual addiction.

We also titled this, The Broken Image, which you probably looked at in your booklet.

We chose those 2 titles as kind of, they both are a reflection of what we're talking about today.

The principles that I'm going to share with you today, we're applying to breaking free from sexual addiction.

But they actually apply to any kind of addiction.

And I know if any of you are in ministry, you're reaching out to other people, you're going to be dealing with people who are addicted because addiction is how sin works.

All sin is addiction, all addiction is sin in some ways because addiction is idolatry, putting someone or something else in the place of Christ.

So we want to talk about how do we break free from the chains of sin.

Now I just have to really say it's courageous of you to come here and be here for this presentation.

I know it's very difficult for some people to walk into something like this.

But I'm not assuming you're a sex addict just because you're sitting here in the audience.

I know many of you are struggling with things from other people in your family or your friends.

You want to know how to reach out to them, how to share the gospel, and that's exactly what we're here to talk about today.

We are here to talk about how the gospel applies to the brokenness that results from sin in our lives.

Now I find that, you know, I counsel with a lot of people who are struggling with addiction.

But particularly with sexual addiction, everything is just more intense.

As other addictions people face, they may go, oh, you know, I've been overeating and I feel really bad about it.

But sexual addiction, nobody just mentions that.

It's not like, you know, yeah, we were painting the boys' room green the other day, and by the way, I'm kind of struggling with a sexual addiction, you know?

So when somebody comes and talks to me about their sexual addiction, I know already they've been caught for a while in a cycle of depression.

You try so hard, you're sure you'll never do it again, and then you fall, and you feel awful, and you promise God you'll never do it again, and then it happens again.

And sometimes There may be a long break in between and you'll feel better.

You know, often when a guy comes and talks to me, this is a typical conversation, when the guy comes and talks to me about sexual addiction, they'll say, you know, I've been struggling with something, you know, it's better now.

First thing they say, you know, I've been doing better.

It's kind of down to only once a week now, or once every 2 months, or once a day, whatever it is that is better.

You know, but they just thought they'd throw it out there, see if I had any suggestions.

For women, it's very different than that.

Usually when a woman is going to talk to me about their sexual addiction, I know like from the first sentence, before they even open their mouth sometimes, there's this tortured look, you know, this kind of a, well, I don't know where to start.

And sometimes that's when the tears start right then.

And then they say, I haven't told my mother, I haven't told anybody, or, you know, nobody knows this, I just feel like I would die if someone found out or my dad found this on my computer and I just feel so terrible.

For women, there's an intense sense of shame that comes along with sexual addiction.

A feeling like God will never give me a good spouse now.

Not that guys don't feel that too, but guys can just cycle through it more.

Guys will feel terrible, and then often they'll kind of go back to, well, you know, but all guys have this problem.

There's a very different feeling from 1 person's experience of sexual addiction to another person's experience of sexual addiction.

So what I'm going to talk about today are general principles, but I know for you, your experience may be unique and it may not feel like this.

You know, many girls kind of fall into the guy category, well, you know, I kind of, I'm getting better about this.

And many guys will be the, I just feel like killing myself.

I remember 1 guy who emailed me who made up a fake email address actually so that he could disguise his identity and write to me.

And I wish I could say that's the only person who's done that, but I've actually had quite a few people make up fake email addresses in order to write to me, because they don't want to tell me who they really are.

He emailed me several times and I was just so struck by the desperation in his emails.

I was afraid he was going to commit suicide.

But eventually I didn't hear from him anymore.

But I hope that maybe he's out there and he'll listen to this presentation and find victory.

I know he was really battling to find freedom, and he was so tortured by the fact that he was in ministry and yet couldn't stop himself from this.

Yesterday we talked about sexual brokenness that happens because of other people's sins against us, being sexually abused.

And many people who struggle with sexual addiction also have been sexually abused.

It's 1 of the primary factors that causes a person to fall into a cycle of sexual addiction.

And those who have been abused sometimes just hate it even worse because they felt so defiled and Their whole experience of sexuality has been poisoned by that initial abuse.

So they easily detach themselves emotionally from the sexual experience and find a way to express that craving for God that they have.

In a craving for intimacy, a craving for somebody to satisfy them, somebody love me, somebody please make me feel like I have some kind of control over my life.

So for guys, there's often a strong tendency to need for control.

For girls, there's often a stronger drive, a craving for somebody to love me.

So you know, many girls would not consider themselves to be sexually addicted who are addicted to say romance novels or romantic movies or fantasizing.

They're warping of what God intended sex to be.

And they put you on the track to falling into other things like masturbation and pornography.

So When a woman gets to the point where she's into pornography, often she's been cultivating the seeds of a porn addiction for a long time.

You know, little girls love to talk about marriage.

My daughter was 2 years old when she first said, I wanna get married.

We'd just gone to a wedding and to her marriage meant walking around in a beautiful dress while everybody takes pictures of you and eating cake.

But she's been consistent in this desire to get married.

She wanted to marry daddy, then she wanted to marry somebody exactly like daddy, then she wanted daddy to pick her husband.

Right now we're at the, we'll let daddy help me pick my husband phase.

She wants so much and I'm so glad that she looks at our marriage and says, that's something I want.

But at the same time, I fear for her because I know that so many of the kids that are around her are already cultivating things that are leading to them getting sexually addicted.

How many of these young men who are growing up her age now are going to be rapists by the time she's 18?

And for me, the most terrifying part of it all probably is that my children are going to have the internet right at their fingertips all the time.

Sometimes we've just typed in something innocuous on YouTube like American Girl and up pop a whole bunch of things that I just go, oh my goodness, what if my daughter had accidentally clicked on that?

It's terrifying because I know how deep-rooted a problem can begin just by 1 initial viewing of porn.

I remember a girl that I talked with who felt so devastated because she had seen porn when she was about 7 or 8 years old, and 1 of her friends introduced it to her.

She just watched it, wow, that's really interesting, you know.

And for a few years, she and her friend would off and on watch pornography online.

The Broken Image, Part 2

Lord Jesus, nothing we can do apart from you is worth anything.

I pray that in this seminar you will speak through me, that you will help each person who listens to this to see how they can connect deeply with you and get rid of the things that hold them back from surrender to you.

Alright we just finished talking about several steps to how to overcome And many of those are common knowledge and many of you kind of may feel like, well, that's a ladder I've read through a lot of times.

You've got to do this, you know, claim responsibility, tell the truth, find accountability, all those things.

You know, People are used to hearing some of those suggestions, but 1 of those is what this entire presentation is about, getting to the root of the issues.

This is something a lot of people don't do, and that's why their addiction keeps coming back and coming back and coming back.

So I want to start out by talking about dandelions.

You know, in everything in life, God gives us lessons in nature and in his word that help us to understand the principles of spiritual things.

Yesterday we talked about how physical healing and emotional healing are mirror image.

And if you can't figure out why you don't have emotional healing, maybe it's something that you can look to the process of physical healing and understand.

If infection is a sin, then what happens, you know, infection represents sin in our minds and understanding how to break free from those things will help us to find emotional healing.

I want to use now the illustration of a dandelion.

How many of you have ever tried to pull up a dandelion?

Dandelions are very easy to remove from your yard if all you want to do is remove the visible evidence thereof, right?

You just grab them, rip, there go the leaves and the flowers and you're done, right?

Except that tomorrow there'll be another dandelion there, right?

This is the problem with the approach that many people take to overcoming sexual addiction.

They don't realize what a deep-rooted issue it is because a dandelion has this taproot that goes way down deep.

All kinds of addiction, not just sexual addiction, but sexual addiction has a very deep root because it goes right down to the heart of who we are.

So suppose that I were to send my daughter, she's 8 years old and so beautiful, she'll be here this afternoon.

If I were to send my daughter out into the yard and say, now I want you to get rid of all the dandelions, what would she do?

As a good eight-year-old, she would probably start picking them.

And if my yard looked like this, that might be an indication to you that maybe this problem has been going on for some time, right?

But could she still get rid of all those dandelions by picking them?

Yeah, you give her an hour or 2, she can pull all the dandelions off, right?

Now, if I told her, get the roots out, it's going to be a lot more difficult, isn't it?

You know, as a little 8 year old, she doesn't have the strength, never mind the perseverance, to dig, to get the root out of every single 1 of that whole field of dandelions.

And so she is not going to be able to do it.

And the next thing that's going to happen is my yard is going to look like this.

Millions of dandelions out there spreading their millions of seeds.

Next year my whole yard is going to be a solid wall of dandelions, right?

Now this is not meant to be a discouragement to any of you.

Some of you, your hearts may already feel to you like they are that whole field of dandelions or maybe the whole field of dandelions going to seed.

We try and we try to overcome the addiction that we just find, I just can't over and over, I've got this problem.

Every time I think I've gotten it beaten, then it's back again.

And when a person has struggled with sexual sin for a long time, they really have a strong temptation to unbelief, saying, maybe God isn't going to help me.

I've tried, and I've tried, and I've tried.

That experience of battling and failing again and again is so deadening spiritually that you know many times especially for a Man, you know, he hates to not be in control and find that he is so weak So he'll just kind of go well, you know, that's the way we all are.

The Word of God says that you can overcome, not by your own strength, but by Christ working in you.

When you fall into that temptation though, that feeling of whatever, I'll never be able to overcome this anyway.

The best I can do is try to keep mowing the yard, keep the dandelions down, right?

And really when we go out there and we try to overcome the sexual addiction, the problems, we end up sometimes kind of more like playing with it.

You know, just, oh well, I might as well just enjoy it for a little while, right?

This is what happens with the cycle of evil, of sexual addiction.

And then even if they do get 1 root out, then they find, oh man, there are all these other ones.

And the more they think about it, you know, they try to get rid of all those CDs and then they think, well, let me just listen to it 1 last time before I throw it away, or let me look through the magazine 1 last time.

Will you just start playing with the dandelions and we don't ever actually get to the root of dealing with them all.

A person often gets distracted from the process of overcoming evil.

And I know those words ring true for a lot of people who have battled with this kind of addiction.

You get so tired of fighting, you just want to relax and slide.

The problem is we haven't built a deep enough love relationship with Jesus Christ to give us the motivation to get up and keep fighting because He got up and kept fighting.

When you're tempted to give up, rather than saying, no, I got to keep going, got to keep climbing this terrible mountain that I can never break free from.

Think about what he went through to set you free.

That will give you the power you need to keep getting up and keep going.

It's true that sexual addiction is a deep-rooted sin issue, and the devil will tell you it's so deep that you yourself personally will never be able to break free from it.

If there was no hope to set you free, Jesus wouldn't have bothered to come and die for you.

When you wonder whether he really loves you after all that you've done, think about the cross.

He went to the cross knowing how much it was going to hurt and saying, but when I think about Nicole, when I think about him and I think about her, I would rather go down there and suffer like they do and die in their place than let them go through it alone.

When you don't know if you're lovable anymore, when you don't know if you're worth anything more, look to the cross.

That body that you have, including those sexual organs, He created you in his image for a specific reason, because he loves you with an everlasting love.

And he loves you, you with all of your problems and all of your weaknesses and all of your acne and all of your weak, you know, weak-willed problems and everything.

Call It Anything But Love, Part 1

I'm going to try to share with you both of our stories.

How we got to the place of having this ministry that we have here today.

And I'm going to just try to, as best I can, share with you what brought her to the place that she's at today.

You know, we talk about abuse, and sometimes we get a little bit uncomfortable with this, Because it gets a little personal sometimes.

I certainly don't know your stories, but I imagine there's people who have experienced abuse here in this audience today.

I think Abuse, especially spiritual abuse, is probably 1 of the hardest things to recover from.

But thankfully we have a God that promises to see us through this.

Samantha was raised in a non-Christian home.

When she was 3 years old, her mother and father divorced.

And her mother dated a few men and finally she remarried.

And Samantha's life seemed to be okay for, well for a while.

On the outside, everyone looking in would have thought this was just a nice little family.

Here was a good father caring for this young girl and this mother and everything seemed okay.

Except what often happens in abuse homes, homes that have abuse, the outside, what the world sees, is completely different what's going on inside.

When Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted, the serial killer who actually cannibalizes people.

I know it's a little gruesome, but the neighbor said, really?

Samantha's stepfather, and I can share this story a little more in detail because he has passed away since the time of this story, so there's more things that could be shared that may be helpful to you.

He started at a very young age to abuse Samantha.

At first, it was just a verbal abuse, like, you're so stupid, you know.

He would do things to kind of torture her, kind of in a mental sort of way, these little games like buy her new shoes and then tell her he's gonna take those new shoes and burn them.

What happens is your self-esteem starts to slowly become eroded.

You slowly start to feel like there's nothing that you can do that's right.

When she started going to school, then it was a matter of you couldn't get a perfect grade, if you didn't get an A+, what's the problem with that?

There was extra credit, why didn't you do this?

And so it was 1 step after another, slowly degrading her as a person that opened up her vulnerability to where she would later become abused further on.

As she grew up into a teenage life, her stepfather, the abuse became more physical.

It started with he would find a way just to pick an argument.

And after the argument he would have to discipline her and then he would take off his belt and he would beat her and he would say, you know, it's because you mouthed off to me and those kind of things.

And the abuse became physical in that regard.

What she did find out later on, as she started to reflect back in the past, it wasn't just the physical abuse in that regard, it became more physical in the wrong direction, abusive that way.

This opened up a door for her to try and excel and exceed.

Because if you can't control your life at home, It's out of control, you can never do what's right.

She could do 1 thing right, and she could control the fact of what she ate, when she ate, and how she ate.

In fact it was to the point where kids at school started to tease her.

And back then, there was a song that went around the country.

And it was a group of rock and roll singers got together and did the song as a way to raise money for the Ethiopian children.

And so the kids at school, they made a poster, they drew of her and called her the Ethiopian poster child.

And they taped little nickels on the poster and, you know, as a way to try and ridicule her.

And through all this, Samantha got straight A's.

But she knew how to excel and exceed where she needed to.

Can we go a little louder or just talk louder or what do I need to do?

So through all this, she knew how to maintain that scholastic excellence.

You see, when someone's been abused, they don't know how to say no.

No doesn't mean no to a person who's been abused.

If your stepfather's gonna beat you and you say no and he does it anyway, it doesn't work, right?

Your world gets turned upside down Yes is whatever and no is definitely not no when you don't want it to be no She's about 16 years old and she was invited to a party.

She was assured with her friends that there were going to be a lot of people there and she went with her friend to the party.

She gets out in the country, is dropped off at the party and she got there and she found that she was the only girl.

There were 3 football players there and she wasn't in a safe place.

Against her wishes, against her protests.

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Series

GYC 2011 Seminar: Healing from Sexual Brokenness

Call It Anything But Love, Part 2

Transcript

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Parent Series

Parent Conference

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GYC 2011 Seminar: Healing from Sexual Brokenness

The Broken Image, Part 2

39m

GYC 2011 Seminar: Healing from Sexual Brokenness

Call It Anything But Love, Part 1

51m

Keys to Growing a Powerful and Vibrant Prayer Ministry

1. From Contained Mediocrity to Contagious Christian: Gem’s Story

1h 3m

2-Applying the Faith

The Physiology of Worship

1h 33m

Evening Devotional

The Burden of Scripture

1h 29m

Healing From Bad Religion and Church Hurt

Case Studies and Q&A

1h 12m

A Man that Understands Depression

49m

Healing of a Broken Heart

57m

Revelation of Jesus Christ

1h 17m

Peace be Still

52m

Heal to Reveal

44m

Sexual Purity: Lost and Found

1h 19m

Sound Doctrine