The Sins of My Youth
February 25, 2009 | 
Author Remember, O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old.
Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to
your love remember me, for you are good, O LORD.
Psalm 25:6-7
I have recently been painfully reminded of some of the sins of my youth. You see, my wife and I were not pure before marriage. Even years later, I am realizing that there are negative consequences in our relationship. Foundations that should have been laid and wrong expectations that should have been worked through during our dating and engagement are still shaky. We still have conflict around these issues. These problems are exacerbated by my own sexual escapades before becoming a Christian. They greatly skewed my perspective on sex and my mind is still in desperate need of renewal.
I came across this scripture passage today and received some of the comfort that my heart needs. God is merciful and loves us. In Christ, God the Father has forgotten the sins of our past. I need to be reminded of this from time-to-time so that I can walk in my new identity in Christ and not in shame from the sins of my youth.
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I can relate to this deeply. Although my sins in my youth are what created the ripe environment for my later addiction to porn. The impact on my family has been huge and the recovery from it has been slow. However, in my marriage the impact of recovery has improved our relationship as we simply had to let the old way of doing marriage "die" and ask God to create something new.
My recovery efforts have also made an enormous difference. I don't want to leave the impression from this post that things are just horrible. They aren't. I wrote it out of some current pain. My wife and I are closer than we have every been, in large part because of the work that the Holy Spirit has done in my heart through my recovery journey. Thanks for the comment, Kelly!
I think at times the consequences of our choices lag behind us sometimes by years. For example I have eaten poorly all through my 20's & 30's and now I have high cholesterol part of that is hereditary and part of that is my decisions. My mother told me 20 years ago that if I kept eating that bag of chips I would have problems later in life. I never experienced any immediate problems so I said to myself "who cares?"
Recovery is often like that. I'm being asked to say no to immediate pleasure for something better that sometimes I didn't even know what it will look like. My mentor said "give up masturbation & porn and you will get a better marriage & more joy in your life". At that time I didn't even know what that kind of joy looked like or what a "better marriage" was.
Now that I've tasted of that joy & seen my marriage improve it helps me to further surrender my lust when the "beast" starts stirring. I'm not implying, of course, that my marriage has "arrived" but it is a heck of a lot better than when I was buried in shame & guilt.
I was going through some recovery material last night that talked very succinctly about this. It put it this way…
God gives us a crisis of truth in our lives. That crisis comes in a couple of ways:
1. Crisis of conscience
2. Crisis of circumstance
A crisis of conscience can easily be ignored. However, a crisis of circumstance cannot. Where it gets confusion is in the time God allows us to repent after bringing the crisis of conscience. We are confronted with a truth and our conscience alerts us to its veracity. However, because the consequence is not immediate, we may choose to ignore that truth. What is actually happening is God is allowing us time to repent, a grace period, before he lifts his hand of protection and allows the crisis of circumstance to manifest.
An example might be as follows:
My conscience tells me that I should not use porn; that it will damage my marriage. However, because I can seemingly control the behavior and it isn't producing negative consequences I choose to ignore my conscience and continue in the behavior. In effect, I mistakenly interpreted the lack of consequences as permission to continue the behavior.
Eventually I become more ensnared by the behavior and one day look around and realize that my marriage and life is deteriorating. I am plainly no longer able to control the behavior and my marriage is suffering.
I thought this was really profound!