WE REMAIN IN ISOLATION!
How many people know about your secret struggle? You feel you absolutely cannot tell anyone because you might lose your job, your friendships, your wife, and your family. People will drop dead in shock because everyone thinks you have it all together and so that pressure keeps the truth buried deep in your darkest places. You feel trapped because you are in a prison of your making and shame hangs over you like a dark storm cloud.
I know this from experience. I was a pastor for 26 years and struggled with a sexual addiction for eight long years. I hated myself. I failed for years with sexual sins, and there was no way I could just say to my wife and my board, “By the way … I am addicted to sex.” without serious life-altering repercussions. However, God in His mercy revealed my secret life and my recovery began in September 2005. Talk about a train wreck and painfully injuring my wife and our four adult kids.
Remaining in isolation is why it seems impossible to stop. Recovery demands confession, disclosure, coming clean and genuine repentance. If I had been a better and braver man, I would have stepped forward and asked for help. But I lived in denial and minimized my actions by telling myself I knew enough to be able to stop.
We have a saying in our ministry called 180 Ministries. (www.180recover.com) That is …
A LONE SHEEP IS A DEAD SHEEP
If you remain in isolation, you are a dead man. Satan prowls around seeking whom he may devour, and you are his blue plate special. The sin that so easily entangles you has it’s hooks in deep and you will need a team of people to help pull them out. Your daily choices allow sin to be your master and the father of lies has you dancing like a puppet on a string. You might think you can do it on your own, but you are like a soldier wandering around the battlefield sipping his coffee in his pajamas thinking everything is just fine. Easy prey.
If you are going to be able to make it through a withdrawal period, of about 90 days, you are going to need people available to you on a constant basis, and you are going to have to learn to reach out to them when the whole temptation process begins. We like to say Reach Out before You Reach In.
Reach OUT to your Team before you reach INTO your Pants.
The opposite of isolation is community. Scripture has a lot to say about community, and our ministry was founded on this passage in 1 John 1…
“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him, there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”
Fellowship is community. It is being daily connected to other men to help you fight the battle. How many armies send their troops out to fight the enemy alone? None. Stupid question. So why are you trying to fight it alone? Lone sheep … dead sheep.
This is exactly why over a year ago we started doing Online Support Teams. Today, there are 9 teams with about 80 men meeting on different days and times and if I have to, I will start more. In fact, I am planning right now to start an Online Support Team for teenagers!!! Still working on the details but if you have a teen who is struggling email me, and I will go over the details with you.