When I lived without God, I seemed to experience a weekly crisis or drama that would make me doubt if I was living in the right away. I would try to improve my life program but then a new crop of problems would arise. Today, as I aim to live according to God’s will, life is hard but smooth, without the upsetting tensions, doubts, or anxieties of the past. It turns out that the more I serve God, the less I need Him to bail me out of problems or worries that are the result of my own doing.
If you pursue women for fornication, your anxieties will be endless. Are you attractive enough? Is your style fashionable? Do your biceps look big? Is the Tinder algorithm only showing you ugly women? Do you know what to say to an attractive woman? Did you build enough chemistry for her to desire seeing you again? Why is it taking so long for her to text back? Why did she disappear after sex? Did your body not satisfy her in bed? What is the itchy rash around your groin?
When you pursue sin, and that sin could be fornication, greed, or pride in the form of status, your life will become more about mitigating the problems that come from those pursuits than experiencing any sort of happiness you envisioned from the initial fantasy of being sexually successful, rich, or high status. If you think about how many books and online resources exist that teach men how to pickup girls (I wrote many), it’s clear that a goal of fornication is anything but “natural” if it’s defined as something that is inborn to our spirit and doesn’t require hundreds or thousands of failed attempts to get right. The same goes with money: many people are spending their entire lives mastering the art of getting dollar bills to reproduce, but they remain far from reproducing themselves.
To a person without faith, my current life is boring. There is no excitement. I wake up, pray, read, and sit in front of the computer for my daily toil. I eat two meals a day, make a few political tweets, watch some basic entertainment at night, and then go to bed, yet I don’t have any problems that stem from this life. I may seem alone to you, but with God in my life, I’m less alone than even when I was with a sexually exciting woman. I may seem to receive no pleasure, but watching a cardinal bathe in a stream on a warm day gives me more joy than when I attended a packed nightclub while under the influence of lust and alcohol. My senses are not titillated, and while it’s possible I eat too many sweets, I train myself not to seek things of this world to give me pleasure. God will not let me suffer needlessly, and as long as I’m patient, He will give me harmless pleasures that exceed those I sought from my own will.
The biggest crisis I’ve experienced in the past year is signing a rental lease for a house that was previously used as a crack house. I had to leave because it was not properly decontaminated, but even that experience had fruits, for I gained enough information to know exactly what type of rural home I want to live in. Though I have nothing the world would covet, and I’m not exactly swimming in material wealth while living in my mother’s apartment, I don’t suffer from problems that come from my own doing because I now make decisions that are based on my desire to serve God instead of my own passions and lusts. Most of the problems I do face are external to me, coming from other people or powers, or from the limitations of my own flesh, but not through my own secular choices. Life is hard enough on its own when you walk with Christ, so imagine how much more difficult you make things when you decide to walk by your own feeble and stupid will.
If you’re down and feel that nothing seems to go your way, or you feel that things are grossly “unfair” in spite of having food, shelter, and relatively good health, it’s because you are making decisions that are disconnected from God. We will always be faced with difficulties, tribulations, and illnesses, but if you embark on a certain goal and feel stymied every step of the way, and you have not sought the blessing of God for that endeavor, you may have received the blessing of Satan instead.
My will was so strong and my desire for sex so high that I fought to overcome innumerable obstacles to achieving a career of fornication, but it all came to an ignoble end anyway. We’ll see what God has in store for me from this point on, but at least now I know that any obstacle I face on my walk with Christ is righteous and worth overcoming, instead of being a method of my own destruction like it was before.
Read Next: 8 Personal Defects That Allowed Me To Worship Fornication For 18 Years
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