Hopefully this will be the first in a series.
Situation: You and your buddy are doing something together which holds the rest of the world at a distance. He turns to you and mentions he suffers from a peculiar problem: pedophilia.
Do you:
1. Run screaming away, telling everyone to hide the children and dogs from this evil man.
2. Secretly dial 911 on your cellphone hoping they’ll capture and record this confession.
3. Make plans to consult someone with an apparent position of social responsibility for a referral, expecting your friend will be steered or forced into treatment.
4. Knowing that, except for the grace of God, that could be you, listen and ask intelligent questions to make sure you understand and pray for guidance in helping him live with this awful temptation.
Notes: Not a one of us is free from weaknesses, but we all tend to think ours are less threatening than those of others. That’s a natural reflex, but utterly mistaken. We are all broken, fallen, fully capable of horrendous evil. If we have not spent sufficient time examining our own hearts, we will carry around a load of ticking time bombs just waiting for the right jostle to explode. Only if we are consciously aware of them can be begin the work of disarming them.
If you trust the avowed professionals of this world to have any useful answers, you are already so deeply compromised as to make you a serious threat to everyone around you. That’s because all of them are founded on the intellectual assumptions of Western Civilization, which I’ve often pointed out is a massive collapse waiting to happen. You’d be safer building your house out of wet sand. While these professionals and experts might know a thing or two, the entire foundation on which they operate is contrary to God’s Word. At the most fundamental level of thought process, they assume things contrary to what God has revealed.
I don’t even trust the most well-intentioned pastoral professionals, because they all suffer the same basic errors. At least, I don’t trust them with things like the foregoing test situation. God’s path to fighting sin is not through coercive surrender to some external controlling force. The hair-brained civil government which holds pastors accountable for passing on information of vaguely possible criminal intent, while at the same time funding and promoting the likes of Kinsey and his cadre of child molesters, is not a reliable guide to how we ought to act.
Nor do I trust myself to know all there is to know about such things. What I need to know is the number one priority is not justice on human terms, but justice on divine terms. My buddy suffers from an all too common evil desire, and he is the only one who can stop himself from acting on it. Hysterical fears of massive damage to some child has nothing to do with it. If we act on fears, we will surely do more damage to our kids than some pervert.
The path to freedom, safety and God’s justice is where your buddy started, by telling someone he trusts. It doesn’t require knowing too awful much about sexual perversions academically (though I do). It requires knowing and understanding the divine principles of deliverance from the power of sin — all sin. It requires you understand we are all shot through with many painful weaknesses, appetites which can be met righteously, but which have been twisted into raging monsters demanding satisfaction in ways God will not permit.
The path to freedom is dismissing the whole mess, by aiming to flee all of it. You don’t fix sin by picking at individual weaknesses, just because society is okay with profligate sexual exploitation, just not with kids. No, in the wisdom of our modern Western society, we spend a fortune hotting up little girls like prostitutes and training them to act like tarts, but you aren’t allowed to want some of that action unless you are a kid, too. It’s a trap, and it should be obvious social convention is under the rule of Satan. Reject all of it.
Surrender yourself to eternal longings, a focus on escaping this world. This isn’t mind over matter, nor some mighty moral battle, but the miracle power of God doing things for you which you utterly cannot even want. On a human level, yes, laws and fears are the path. But if that’s all you have, what do you do when the enforcing authority goes wrong? If you can’t want what’s right from inside, if there is no power of God turning your desire toward Him, there is no hope.
The correct answer to this test should be obvious.
