My pastor friend Chris asked me to come to his church last Sunday and share “My Story…” with his congregation. God mercifully moved and ministered some profound healing to His hurting saints. There was also plenty of encouragement for the remnant who have endured great hardship and have survived to tell their own grace stories.
It was a wonderful time with some beautiful brothers and sisters, so I wanted to share the experience with you in this week’s podcast.
You’ll probably want to have 2 Corinthians 4 handy as you listen. I promise you, God will say something to you through these scriptures if you have ears to hear.
And, beloved, if your heart needs healing, this is for you.
Joseph named his older son Manasseh, for he said, “God has made me forget all my troubles and everyone in my father’s family.” Joseph named his second son Ephraim, for he said, “God has made me fruitful in this land of my grief.”
First off, let’s recognize the great white whale in the room.
Life is unfairly hard.
{Agreed.}
Yet God is deliberately good and kind.
There’s a well-known story in the Written Word that goes like this: a younger son is lost in a far country and father dutifully waits for his return. At long last when the day of reunion comes, father falls on his long-lost son’s neck and weeps for joy after which a grand family party ensues.
You know the tune.
Or at least you think you do.
This particular plot is found in the Old Testament not the New. It’s about Joseph, who, by character and demeanor, is a far cry from that other young son who actually chose the far country.
Let’s briefly recap Joseph’s story in the light of that famous chestnut ‘bad things happen to good people’ as it easily applies here.
Young Joseph has a quality his sibling brothers do not share and their father recognizes it and dresses him in a special robe. The Hebrew doesn’t have to mean multi-colored, it can mean long-sleeved. At any rate, it was fit for a prince among tribesmen, and the brothers hated him for it; that, and those self-serving made-up dreams.
They concoct a scheme to kill him off, but Judah steps in and, ostensibly out of some measure of mercy for the lad, edits the storyline to look like a killing when, in actuality, they sell off their brother to a migratory tribe. The final nail involved dipping the blasted coat in animal blood and – Oscar-worthily – presenting it most forlornly to their inconsolable father.
Meanwhile, Joseph, after being sold yet again, lands on his feet by the sheer grace of God. He gets a gig managing the household of the head-dude of Pharaoh’s security detail!
Now, if I’m writing the story, I’m going to exact poetic justice right away. I’m going to have Joseph quickly rising through the ranks and becoming da man in Egypt. His brothers would be sorry, especially when Emperor Joe sent an insertion team into Canaan-land to extract his siblings and throw them at the foot of his throne of justice.
But that’s just me.
We know that God holds the pen, however, and He’s got some things to redeem out of Joseph before He can move on with His ultimate plan.
God doesn’t want Joseph to even toy with the ideas of retribution and payback. He can’t have His man gloating or dismissive. He needs him to be His savior even to the very ones who despised him!
That’s how God writes it.
Joseph’s very cush world gets upended when the boss’s wife cries “rape!” after her repeated (re: daily) attempts to seduce the teenage boy go unrequited, and he suddenly becomes the target of the adage hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Hello hell-hole prison.
Forthirteen long, dark, harrowing years.
Forsaken? Forgotten? For what?
▶️ The good son.
▶️ The trusted employee.
▶️ The innocent charge.
You’d think he’d emerge from prison poisoned by bitterness with bloodlustful payback on his mind. Or, at the very least, go to his grave with unyielding unforgiveness brewing his tempest in a teapot. And you’d guess wrong.
Case in point (and I’m skipping over a lot of really cool poetic justice here): Joseph, sentence miraculously commuted, settles into life, settles down with a beautiful bride, and starts a family. Life’s good.
He is given two sons, and the very naming of them speaks volumes of his understanding how life is supposed to work when trust trumps blame and compliance bests complaint.
Joseph insists his firstborn be called “folly forgotten” and his second, “fruitful hardship”. Imagine! James M. Boice points out the order had to be thus for
“no one can really be fruitful until the past is forgotten in the proper sense. If we are living in the past, whether that is the past of unconfessed sin, hurts, suffering, or even old blessings, we will never be completely fruitful in the present. We must let the past be the past, forgetting it, and go on with God.”
It’s the name of the second-born (Ephraim) I’d like to comment on because it’s so my own story.
In each decade since my early 20’s I’ve faced death in one way or another. Some decades brought me to the brink more than once.
Most recently I was spirited from my home in the middle of the night by EMT’s who couldn’t find vital signs. I was septic, dehydrated, losing vision, and barely responsive. Later I’d be told I got to the ER in barely enough time or we’d be looking at a far different outcome. I didn’t ask what that meant but I have a good idea.
I’m in my mid-fifties and this is the third time in this half-decade God’s miraculously preserved my life, I can only presume, for more ‘preservation of life.’1 There are still some assignments ahead for me.
As a 21-year old I prayed, “Lord, put me in a fire and don’t ever let up.” As such, suffering has been the mark of my life – AND I WOULDNT CHANGE A THING. Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I’ve found a depth of intimacy with Christ I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Like Joseph, I want the product of my life to tell the story that I’m doubly blessed and fruitful from all my afflictions, and God has been doubly kind to allow me the privilege of suffering for His glory and name.
This is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all my life long:
Praise God for loss.
Praise God for the fire.
Praise God for heart-brokenness.
Praise God for weakness.
Praise God for humility.
Praise God for the tough times.
Praise God for the sweetness of the fruit that grows from the soil of hardship.
If any of this sounds weird, it’s only because I’m trying to live up to my name. You can call me Ephraim.
Watercolor artwork by Dylan Pierce (another one of my young lions!)
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Over the past few years I’ve featured a “lion’s share” segment on my blog, providing a platform for the ‘young lions’ I’ve been privileged to mentor and father spiritually.
Today I share with you, my beloved readers, one of the great young men of his generation. Shawn Buck has been with me in the pride for a bit over a year and will soon be moving on from the den as God has called him away from us. Lord willing, Shawn will be leaving for Cape Town, South Africa for a two-year (or life-long?) commitment with the Ubuntu Football Academy.
I’m honored to serve on Shawn’s board but even more blessed to call him a son of the faith. This dude is as real as they come! In this post, Shawn bravely shares his greatest fight and offers hope in overcoming addiction to pornography. As the guys and I have discussed on numerous occasions, we don’t affix the slang “porn” too often because that has become a designation that makes it a culturally acceptable norm. To call it what it is – pornography – paints it in a more ‘graphic’ light, relegating it to it’s more insidious and self-destructive nature.
Thank you, Shawn, my son, for listening to Wisdom’s call and learning to pass by the “forbidden woman’s” house on the other side (Proverbs 7:4,5). I love you, courageous lion of God.
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When I was 13 years old, I came across pornography for the first time. It led me down a destructive road of getting deeper and deeper into the world of porn, of continuously lusting after girls and after self-gratification. It led to incredible shame, gut-wrenching guilt, and loss of self worth. It destroyed relationships and it built a dependence on something that doesn’t satisfy. It led me to lie constantly to cover my tracks. It consistently brought me into a world I never dreamt I would be a part of.
It changed my life.
Lust and porn is a cruel drug. That isn’t just some saying. It acts the same way as cocaine by releasing large amounts of dopamine into your brain. The fact that it is so easy to get can make it more dangerous than cocaine, because you can keep your brain doped up for hours (fightthenewdrug.org). It truly is one of the most dangerous things on this earth.
Have you ever heard of a healthy marriage where either the husband or wife wishes they would have slept with more people or watched more porn?
No.
Lust and porn are damaging to our future relationships. There will be images you can’t get out of your mind, unfair expectations you will put on your spouse and even damage done to your own confidence.
I pray that people realize just how destructive lust and porn are. This isn’t just some harmless thing that everybody does. One, it is so degrading to women. Women are amazing and deserve to be held up and shown so much more respect than porn. It truly does alter your view of them subconsciously and starts to paint them as objects in your mind. Two, it plays a large role in human trafficking. Chuck Norris actually wrote an incredible article about that here (http://www.wnd.com/2013/11/porns-part-in-sex-trafficking/). And three, it ultimately hurts you by making you think that that’s what it should be like: by bringing down your confidence, and by taking something so beautiful as sex and making it a cheap, non-committal and perverse action between two random people.
I say all of this not to judge you, be pessimistic or throw hatred on you, but to convince some of you that this is not some cute pet to keep around and play with. It is a dangerous destructive lion just waiting to destroy you completely.
I wish so badly that I could sit here today and tell you that it is something that I’m free of and have victory over, but it’s not. I still have a sexual addiction that I struggle with daily. I have seen significant, positive change in my life with this sexual addiction, though, and that is the only reason I am able to open up enough to write this blog and share my story with you.
I want you to know that you aren’t the only one dealing with this. You haven’t gone too far and or done something too awful. You aren’t defined by your addiction and you can see freedom from it. I have tried every cure/fix there is: accountability partners, Internet filters, multi-step programs, books, and everything else under the sun, and can I tell you the only thing that has made a lick of change in my life? Honestly, Jesus.
I know that is going to turn someone off and I hope you continue to read because I’m going to tell you the difference between all of the things I’ve tried and Him.
He knows you’re going to mess up. He doesn’t guarantee that everything will be fixed after 5 easy payments. He understands exactly, let me say again, exactly what you are going through. Don’t get me wrong, he isn’t happy you are failing like this, and yet he takes you back anyways. You will never go too far, mess up too much or be too unworthy of his acceptance. He loves you and delights when you realize that you can do nothing but lean on HIM. That’s called dependence, and when you start to depend on something that can truly satisfy instead of the false hope of pornography, that is when you will start to see change.
That is my story. Here it is for the world to see and know about. I hope that one day you can open up about your struggles and share your story with people.
If you don’t know whom you can tell, my email is scbuck27@gmail.com. I would love to listen and help in anyway I can.
Thank you so much for listening to my story!
H/T to Karlye – one of our lionesses! – over at flower roots.com. Her layout is way better than mine anyhow. And more pictures.
