DEAR BOUNDLESS ANSWERS

I'm a guy in my mid 20s, and a few months ago I resigned from my work as director of a local evangelistic ministry because I just can't get over my struggle with pornography. I've been "clean" for weeks and sometimes months, but it seems that inevitably I fall again.

I really want to break this cycle of sin and live a life of sexual purity, both inwardly and outwardly. To do that I am seeking the Lord in His Word and through prayer (though not as consistently as I should). I have people who keep me accountable. I meet weekly with a few older men for a study on sexual purity.

At the same time, I want to serve the Lord in any way He wants me to serve.

But there is some confusion. I've been presented with many opportunities to serve God (leading worship, camp counselor, teaching Bible study, and doing part-time youth ministry at a local church), but I don't know if I should serve in these ways being that I haven't been able to break free of this sin.

So my questions: Which sins disqualify me from Christian service and/or leadership? And for which roles would those sins disqualify me? Thank you for your help.

REPLY

I commend you for voluntarily stepping down, recognizing your need to address this area of your life. I hope I can enourage you and so many sincere believers who feel a mixture of shame, condemnation, paralyzation, and even self-hatred because of past and present sin, and have no idea where to go from here.

At one level, all believers would be disqualified from service or leadership positions if sinlessness were required. I know what you're getting at, but simply as a reminder, the only way we can stand before God as "qualified" for anything is because of Christ's sinlessness, not our own.

But to your question, yes, there are high standards for Christian leadership and ministry, and habitual, unrepentant sin would certainly be grounds for removal from leadership. Those standards are no higher, though, than what Jesus commands of every believer.

But let's not try to match a list of acceptable sins for certain "levels" of Christian service. With habitual sin, leadership is the least of your problems.

Forget leadership titles for a moment. The fact that you want to live before the Lord with hunger for Him and minister with a heart-throbbing vibrancy for Jesus is enough to go after your sin with violence, because sin disconnects that vibrancy.

Leadership and ministry are not titles; they are the outflow of going somewhere yourself. Habitual sin does its own work to keep us from leading, whether or not we keep or lose a title.

So you could accept these other roles, but where would you be taking people? The solution is not to lower your sights in terms of leadership, somehow making peace with your sin, but to root out all that would diminish an intimate walk with Christ.

Now, a bit about disqualification and restoration.

When it comes to sin, the Holy Spirit is about conviction, repentance, restoration and transformation. Satan is about shame, condemnation, self-hatred and paralyzation. If Satan can keep us trapped in shame and condemnation, causing us to feel dirty (which typically serves to keep us acting dirty) he can steal our ecstatic joy of knowing and loving Christ and can effectively shut us down from advancing the Kingdom of God.

I think Satan had hoped he could accomplish this with Peter. I think Peter must have thought he was disqualified at some level for having denied Christ, a tragic sin — and Peter knew it.

I've often wondered if Peter's decision to "go fishing" after all he'd seen and experienced was in some way a resignation of sorts from the position and calling he had as an apostle. "I denied the Lord. I'm sure I'm of no use to Him now. I guess I'll go back to the family business."

Peter had been so confident in his love for Jesus, but his failure brought everything into question, at least in his own mind. Jesus restores Peter in a powerful scene on the shoreline by asking him three times (the same number of times Peter had denied Jesus), "Do you love me?" Note that God does not ask questions because He does not know the answer. Jesus knew Peter loved Him. It was Peter who had doubts about his own love for Christ. It's as if Jesus is saying, "You see, Peter, you really do love me, so stop doubting and start feeding my sheep!"

Add to Peter Moses, David, Paul and a host of murderers, theives, extortionists, prostitutes, liars, gossipers (and the list goes on and on), down throughout the centuries who repented and discovered the power of God to lift them out of shame and restore them to wholeness time after time. When necessary, the Lord would pull them aside for some determined amount of time, be it hours, days or years, to discipline, train, equip and restore to vibrancy.

I was so impressed that leader-extraordiare John Piper recently started a self-imposed sabbatical to address heart issues that he recognized as yellow flags. It was both an offensive move and a defensive move — an effort to uproot junk and revitalize the heart. I hope other leaders will follow his lead.

That kind of "removal" is not a purgatory of punishment, but a pit-stop for a thorough tune-up so that the engine doesn't blow. The point is not to be in a holding pattern of shame, but to get the needed tune-up so that the engine doesn't eventually blow.

I'll leave it to you to ponder on these thoughts a while, and in part two of my answer I'm going to challenge you to a pit-stop, an experiment to get violent with the sin of pornography, which, by the way, is much more than a red flag; it's gulping poison.

Blessings,
JOHN THOMAS

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