Welcome back friends and shalom! In my first blog, I discussed how you cannot pursue holiness without first addressing the need of forgiveness of sin (aka salvation). I did not address my personal story then as I wanted to give the next blog that attention. Grab your coffee or tea and get cozy!
Even though my parents divorced when I was three years old, as far back as I can remember, my mom always had us in church. I remember a regular routine of going every Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday evening. In my junior high days, I recall not being excited going to Wednesday night youth services because even there it felt clique-ish like it was in school. I remember really feeling like I did not fit in one specific group of kids. I was not preppy enough to hang with popular kids. I was not smart enough to hang with the AP (advanced placement) kids. I was not athletic enough to hang with the sports kids. I was not punk enough to hang with the cool kids at the local music venues on the weekends and I was too responsible to hang out with the troublemakers. I never felt like I fit in anywhere.
Although I struggled to find a place in school, I did not struggle with the existence of God. I do not recall ever doubting anything I heard in church about Him. I just accepted the Bible was true. I also do not remember spending too much time reading the Bible on my own, but I always had a Bible, and I remember going to the local Bible bookstore many times with my mom to browse. I guess whatever faith I had as a youth was mostly attached to my mom’s faith.
As I entered high school, I entered a season where I let the “lust of my flesh” rule. Oh, was I mess. At that time, I did not have the best relationship with my dad primarily because my mom had moved my siblings and I to another state years earlier after the death of her second husband. Therefore, I had no real male authority figure in my life. I remember trying to find value in relationships and being naive to the sin I entertained. I knew it was sin to have sex outside of marriage, but I did not understand why. Nor do I ever recall it being taught in church.
By Christmas break of my senior year, I was engaged to my first husband- a Marine who was two years older than me. As I was graduating high school, I was also getting married as he was about to deploy for nine months. I was genuinely excited for our future but before the summer ended, I received an email from him where he explained how one thing had led to another, and adultery had been committed. I was crushed. I remember not wanting to be another divorced statistic when on one of the following Sunday services, the pastor spoke on forgiveness. I remember asking the Lord, even though I did not have a personal relationship with Him at that time, to heal my heart and to never again feel the sting of betrayal. I remember that He healed my heart rather quickly and I was prepared to continue with the marriage. But before he arrived that Christmas time from deployment, many accusations had been made at me and I began to unravel. During that fall I had met another man who I began to share what I had been through. The talking led to texting which led to my own sin of committing adultery. By the following Christmas, after a year and a half of marriage, we divorced. I remember feeling like a death had just occurred in my soul. My heart was broken. A sense of failure consumed me.
The next summer I had an opportunity to move back to Texas and I took it without hesitation. After weeks of being in Texas, a new friend from work invited me to attend a young adults service at her church. I agreed to go. It had been a while since I had been to church, but my view of God had never changed. I still believed there was a God and that the Bible I rarely read was true. I just knew it was.
By the following Spring of 2012, I met another man, and he professed to be a Christian. We were both very upfront with our pasts and decided to move forward with a relationship. We were okay with being obedient to the Bible in not being intimate until marriage. And we succeeded in just that a few months later. We had been attending church and I even went forward for an altar call to receive salvation because I knew I did not have a genuine relationship with the Lord despite my upbringing. It seemed like I was on the right path. But it had only been a couple of months of matrimony when he relapsed in his drug usage and my world came crashing down. There had been no signs that it would happen. I was under the impression that his past was long behind him; however, the demons were not. My life had become unstable yet again. He would leave and I would have no idea where he went. Then rent money would be gone because it had been spent on drugs. Desperate to not face another divorce so young, I remember going to church with my mom and being told by a pastor that there was grace for my situation and divorce was not wrong to pursue but I wanted to avoid another divorce. I was determined to fight until one night he had secretly left the city. I was not sure if he was ever going to come back. It seemed I was fighting a losing battle.
What do you do when you have been abandoned? It should not have been a surprise that in my brokenness that I turned to sin for comfort. I had committed adultery again but that time I did not even feel guilty. Barely six months married for the second time and my world was falling apart again. One night soon after, I cried out the Lord telling Him I knew that I had played a clear role in my own pain. I blamed nothing on Him. All I genuinely wanted was a godly marriage, but I had no clue what that looked like. I repented. I told Him I wanted to do life His way because I was clearly screwing up my life faster than I knew was possible. On the outside, I looked like I had it altogether but, in the inside, I was clearly still struggling. I saw my sinful nature in a repetitive cycle that desperately needed to be broken but my own flesh was powerless.
Shortly after, even though I had no idea where my husband was, I was determined to continue with life but knew I needed to find a divorce attorney. During that time, I began a new job as my soon-to-be ex-husband’s behavior had gotten me fired from my previous job. About a few weeks into my new job at a car dealership, I was closing the dealership with one other male co-worker. We began to chat, and he invited me out that weekend to hear his roommate DJ at a local upscale bar. I did not think too much of it and decided to go. After I had arrived, some other girls that my co-worker knew showed up and started to cause a scene. Clearly, I was the source of one of the two girls’ discontentment. I roll my eyes every time I remember this part of the night. I was in the middle of my own drama and wanted nothing to do with anyone else’s. I did what any stable-minded young female would do- I boldly gave him an ultimatum that he needed to choose right then, her or me. Without hesitation his choice was me. Now mind you, no relationship status had been confirmed nor did I have any intention for a relationship as I was not interested considering my own circumstances which I had briefly mentioned to him earlier that evening. Despite this, we undeniably had a genuine connection.
Even though I had repented and was hopeful that I would one day have a godly marriage, I did not imagine that I would experience that anytime soon, but it was evident that there was a potential relationship with my co-worker, Dustin. We had found out that we both attended the same church and began to attend together. Within a few weeks, we had “the talk” where I completely told him how I screwed up my life up until that point. He knew I was in the middle of a divorce and if he had not been previously divorced himself, I probably would have scared him off. In full transparency, I fully expected Dustin to walk away, and I would not have blamed him. Instead, he fully embraced me regardless of my brokenness.
I would love to tell you that I was actively reading my Bible and that Dustin, and I were attending a small group at church, but I honestly did not even know that was a thing. I had been used to betrayal in all areas of relationships: family, friends and spouses. I was still very much basing decisions on feelings instead of the word of God.
By the middle of summer, just a year after getting married to my second husband, we were divorced. Again, I wish I could say I did everything according to God’s holy standard after that divorce, but my flesh and my spirit were in conflict. Dustin and I were actively going to church but were living in sin. You are probably thinking, “Wow, why is Lucy in another relationship so soon after her ‘winning’ track record?” Please hear me, it was not my goal to do that. This was the only healthy relationship I had experienced where nothing fell apart after two to three months in it, and I felt safe. I had not felt that before.
Fast forward to the New Year, we were married in February. We continued to attend church together and slowly but surely the brokenness I came in with was being healed. Some point during the first couple of years of our marriage I was hearing teachings on marriage and divorce and why sexual intimacy is a blessing inside the boundary of marriage only. I came to understand the lies I believed in my past. I repented not once, not twice but many times since then. It’s not because I did not believe God heard me repent the first time, I was just so grieved it was all I could do. I wanted God to know I understood the seriousness of my sins and I had genuinely changed my mind on how I was supposed to be living my Christian life. As I shared in my first post, when I genuinely understood the depth of my sin, it broke my heart to know God’s redemption had been made available and I had not sought it for so long. How can anyone reject a love so grand, so infinite, so unfathomable?
This year we celebrated ten years of marriage! We both love the Lord and serve at our church. We have three beautiful girls, and I am on a mission to make sure they know the love of Jesus so deep that they are never entangled by the lies of Satan. I walk in victory, experiencing the blessings of covenant marriage. It is not something I earned; it is not something I deserve. It is only by the grace of God that I live in this blessing.
It was important for me to share my salvation story and testimony in this second post so you can see why I feel strongly about walking in holiness and urge other Christians to see the beauty of holiness. God, through His son Jesus Christ, died so that I could be forgiven of my sins. Jesus paid the highest cost so that we could be free from sin and be given His Holy Spirit to enable us to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel.
However, it is not enough for me to end this post with the “happy ending.” I want to point out that there is a difference from being a believer in Jesus Christ and a disciple of Jesus Christ. The difference is that a disciple is a believer that has surrendered their whole life to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That means I do not just acknowledge Jesus on Sundays at a one-hour church service and then continue to ignore Him the rest of the week. As a disciple, I am to be in God’s word daily so that it shapes the way I live aligning with His holy standards. While I grew up with a full belief in Jesus being the son of God and Savior of the world, I did not fully surrender to Jesus having full authority in every area of my life. If I had been actively in the Bible and prayed early on in my youth, “Jesus, I want You to be Lord of my life, Holy Spirit lead me in the plans You have for me. Keep me from the temptations that can so easily entangle me.”, I am confident I would have avoided two divorces before the age of twenty-one. But praise God for being a redeeming God!
God is a gentleman, and He does not force His Son or His Holy Spirit on anyone. Instead, He says, “Behold, I stand at the door [of the church] and continually knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him (restore him), and he with Me” (Revelation 3:20, AMP). He waited for me to open the door first. He waited until I came to my senses, granted me “repentance to know the truth” so that I could “escape the Devil’s trap” (2 Timothy 2:25-26, HCSB) aka the repetitive sinful nature I mentioned earlier.
Friends, if you are reading this and you know there is an area of your life that you have not fully surrendered to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the answer is to repent. To repent means to start thinking differently about what you repented for. Forsake your own thoughts and find the truth of the matter from the Bible. Then ask the Lord to forgive you and ask Holy Spirit to show you how to walk in holiness, to walk set apart from the rest of the world’s standards by walking according to God’s standards. Holiness is not an overnight process, but a life-long journey of pursing what God has made available through the death of Jesus Christ. There is a life of holiness waiting for you to behold, pleasing to the Lord! Hebrews says, “Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness- without it no one will see the Lord” (12:14, HCSB). God takes us pursuing holiness seriously. It is not something that is far off and available for only a few saints. That is a lie that the enemy of our souls has flooded much of Christian thinking! Holiness is so tangible because Jesus died to make it available to anyone who calls on the name of the Lord. Colossians chapter one verse twenty-two says, “But now, He has reconciled you by His physical body through His death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before Him (God)” (HCSB). God is not hanging some proverbial holy carrot high in the sky seeing who is capable in their own strength to jump high enough and grab ahold of it. No; rather, He came down from His throne in Heaven, in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, to make holiness tangible through His death on the cross. Now I sense some of you asking, “But why was Jesus’ death on the cross necessary?” Hebrews plainly tells us: “and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness [neither release from sin and its guilt, nor cancellation of the merited punishment]” (9:22, AMP). Thus, this is why repenting of our sin is KEY because Colossians reminds us that we “were once alienated and hostile in mind because of our evil actions” (1:21, HCSB). Before salvation, we were hostile to God’s standards! Only in reading the Bible and learning what it says about the matters of life and Christian conduct will we no longer be hostile in our thinking. It is then we can “renew” our minds so that we “may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God” for our lives (Romans 12:2, HCSB). First Thessalonians says it clearly: “God’s will is for you to be holy” (4:3, NLT). The book of Second Timothy offers this promise to those who seek holiness: “Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from these things [which are dishonorable—disobedient, sinful], he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified [set apart for a special purpose and], useful to the Master, prepared for every good work” (2:21 AMP).
I will continue to delve into the topic of holiness in some form or fashion in all my posts as that is the purpose of this blog. My prayer is that as you read the Bible for yourself, you will be wooed by the Holy Spirit to walk in holiness, because Jesus died to make it possible for all who call upon His name.
Until next time, be holy.