Dear R,

I started this project at your suggestion. I needed to think about the Gospel, and how it affected my daily life. Along the way, I’ve lost that. Not just in this art project blog thing, but in my daily life. It is easy to look at the circumstances of life and miss what they add up to: a deep need for the redeeming love of Christ.

I have that deep need. It is deeper than any woman’s love can fill. It’s meant to be that way. If a woman’s love were able to satisfy, I would not seek God. And God wants me to seek him, so he makes spaces in me that are impossible to fill but for His love.

And He can and does fill us with his love, when we seek him. It is fleeting and imperfect; I can’t stare at the sun very long. But it is such a grace that I even know to look to the sun.

I pray that I remember that I didn’t choose myself. I was chosen. And even though I don’t know where I’m going, He does; and I will follow, for he loves me. Deep and wide.

In Christ,

Dear C-

While I never felt compelled to dress the part (when have I ever been compelled to dress any part?), you’ve seen me have a long and laborious affair with the emo mentality. Emo is the idolization of emotions. This idol worship, while terrible, is unfortunately not the fullest extent of my mental duress. Piggybacking on to the emo mentality is the “tortured artist” sentiment: the celebration of sadness, because that sadness inspires passionate creative output. Not only do I worship emotions, I mostly worship negative ones.

You know all this. I’m saying this mostly because I just figured it out. That’s what good teaching is, right? Listening to someone say they’ve discovered something that you’ve been saying to them all along.

I could spend a whole post explaining the complex and fascinating ways I rationalize this idol worship (and that would probably be an edifying post for here or there), but the point of this essay is to give worship to God, not feed the very thing I’m confessing.

These two affectations make it seem when I am calm that I can only produce good art in an uncalm state. The part of me that admires Jesse Lacey, Elliot Smith and William Cowper tempts me to despair, as it tells me that I can only produce good art on the peaks or in the valleys of the emotional roller coaster. These temptations, which I so often give in to, are merely that: temptations. They are not of God; they are of the devil.

For the affectations claim that I, created by God as an artist, am only at my best as an artist when I am worshiping my emotions. My emotions did not create me; if they were able to rise up of their own accord, they would more likely uncreate me than create me. My God made me. How could I be at my best worshiping something other than He designed me to be an artist?

Not only did he design me to be an artist, he designed me to glorify himself. One of the great ways I glorify him is through my art. If his greatest interest is his glory (as any perfect being’s main interest must be, but that is yet again a different post, but not for your sake, as you taught me that), then he would want to set us up while glorifying him to make the best possible art. For me to make my best possible art while not glorifying him steals something from him. It makes him not sovereign over my best art, if my best art can only be done outside of worshiping God. And this cannot be the case, for he is perfect and sovereign over everything. Because if he is not sovereign over everything, how can we be sure he is sovereign over anything? He must be sovereign over my best art.

Which means that no matter how much I am tempted to feel that I can only make my best art when I am totally focused on self, emotions, and how I feeeeeel, it must be wrong. For God is not honored when I worship things other than him, and he would not allow my best art (which he designed to glorify him) to be spent on myself. Even if the best art I ever make is selfish, it is not the best art I could have made.

I know you’re nodding at this point. We have talked about this several times, but now it’s all starting to move from my head to my heart.

And yesterday, on a day that I spent glorifying God for his goodness and faithfulness to me, I was struck with one of the best ideas for fiction that I’ve had in months. Because I haven’t been sitting around, parsing my emotions and sucking the words out of them, my brain was free to wander about, poke into words, and discover stories in them. I was blown away by how much I like this story I’m writing. As you know (or a writer you know well can most likely tell you), we often write things because they come to us; we don’t necessarily love everything we write. But this? I love this story. And it has everything to do with where I was (Gen. 50:20), but doesn’t dwell on it like I had been. It instead turns it into a story with God as the meaning behind it all.

Because God is always the meaning behind it all. All our heartaches point us to him. All our joys call us to glory in him. All our boredom calls us to cling to him. All our loves call us to thank him. Everything, everything, everything is God’s. There is a theology of everything, because God is sovereign over everything (literally, everything).

It extends to creativity. And past it, to emotions. And past that, to all that he wants our emotions and creativity to be. It is a struggle to not worship emotions, as they often feel far more real than God (you’ve also heard me say that I want to feel God, so many times).  And sometimes God is gracious and lets me feel him. It is a joy to my soul. But now I can embrace it for the gift of God it is, and not just the pleasure it is. And there’s nothing that caused that but maturity.

Maturity which God worked through you and many others to help instill. Thanks.

Oh, the joys of being creative. How blessed are we to be able to partake in the work of God by creating. What a wonderful God we serve to let us invent little worlds and imagine we have control of them. I am sure he is quite amused at the shallowness of our thought. Okay, maybe he was a little impressed with Robert Jordan.

Ah, the joy that comes from addressing my worship to where it belongs! May I never forget. Hallelujah!

In Christ,

Stephen

Dear R,

I’m here to talk about masturbation. Now that you’re paying attention, some ground rules: this post is for mature audiences only. It has the ability to be offensive, because we’ve made this topic offensive in our culture. I’m not going to say “in my opinion” or “I think” in this essay. It breaks up the flow. Since you’re here at Gospelized, you have already purposefully submitted yourself to my opinion. I’m also going to not use euphemisms. A penis is a penis. Masturbation is masturbation. A vagina is a vagina. They are words with meanings, just like green and Massachusetts are words with meanings. There’s nothing wrong with them.

What is wrong, however, is masturbation. To those who would immediately assume this is a hypocritical diatribe, let me quell your fears: it is, insomuch as I am currently still struggling with this sin. I masturbated yesterday. I hope I don’t masturbate today. The former is not to my credit; the latter is to my shame that I can’t say with conviction that I will not.

But I cannot say with conviction that I will not, just as I cannot say with conviction that I will not lie today. I do not wish to do either act, but our sinful natures are truly depraved, and they cause us to do things we hate. Paul was intimately acquainted with this problem. Sexual sin is a horrible, terrible, soul-crushing problem. But it’s no more horrible, terrible and soul-crushing than any other sin that is allowed to run rampant in our lives. Our problem, then, must be that we allow sexual sin (and, particularly, masturbation) to occupy a place that we do not allow other sins to occupy.

Satan is a clever enemy, and he knows best how to perpetuate sin. For some sins, he normalizes the behavior (gossip, disrespect of parents, unholy anger); for others, the stigmatizes it (masturbation, homosexuality, self-destructiveness). He knows best how to make a sin go on longest in our mortal coil. Many people I know won’t even say the word masturbation in same-gender company, much less mixed company. This plays into the enemy’s hand. If we can’t even name what we fight, how can we esteem to beat it? Yes, it is incredibly uncomfortable to talk about it. So what? We gotta talk about it.

We have to talk about it. If we don’t, we’ll never get to the bottom of it. Because we don’t even talk about it, most people don’t understand why it’s bad; they just assume that because other people would be disdainful if they knew, that it must be bad. We have some inkling that it’s not the way things are supposed to be, but it’s really unclear for most people why it’s even disallowed in the first place. Malum prohibitum? Bad because it’s illegal? No. Not at all.

There are plenty of reasons that masturbation is sin. God intended sex for a particular purpose; anything outside that purpose is less than perfect. If God is perfect, and we do something that’s good but not perfect, it’s still not perfect. It’s not up to God’s standards. By that stick, it’s sin. Anything that we do that isn’t perfect as he is perfect is, by definition, sin.

The concept of a savior means a lot more to me when I think of my life and actions in that context. Have I ever done anything perfectly? The answer, of course, is no. Oh, hallelujah for a savior.

The marital ideal is life-long monogamy: to be married once and forever. Monogamy means much more than just sexual fidelity, but that is the aspect I am focusing on now. If we affirm that the marital ideal is one partner forever, then why do we affirm that only after marriage? That’s the reason pre-marital sex is prohibited; it’s pre-emptively being extramarital, especially if you believe in the concept of “the one.” But we can and should apply the same logic to masturbation. If we affirm that we should only derive sexual pleasure from one other person ever (as in the marital ideal), then why do we feel we have the right to usurp that with ourselves? We are stealing from our spouses. The sexual pleasure that is meant to be derived only from intimacy with a spouse is being stolen by us. We are cheating on our wives with ourselves.

That may sound foolish to you, but the problem is real. The vague, unspecified guilt I felt got a lot more concrete when I understood that. I remind you from the beginning of the letter; this is not something I have conquered. I am not sitting up on a high place looking down, nor am I at the finish line. I am in the pack with the worst of them.

Thankfully, the gospel of Christ is that “the worst of them” can be the best of them by simply believing on the Lord. We don’t have to win. We associate with the one who has won. There’s nothing we can do to win. There’s nothing we can do to stop ourselves from masturbating. We are hopelessly screwed. Our depravity is total. But God, rich in mercy, loved us so much that he came and took all of our sins and bore them on himself. We are safe.

Jesus never masturbated, based on Hebrews 4 logic. But he was sure tempted. So he knows what we are going through. He understands the immense pull. He knows the appeal. But he chose God, the cross, horrible death, and a glorious resurrection instead. All we have to do is fall at his feet and believe that he did that for us. That’s all we have, and that’s all we need.

Masturbation; totally a sin. Totally shouldn’t be a taboo, though. It’s bad, but alcoholism and drug use have much worse effects on the body, spirit and emotions; masturbation doesn’t even make your hands hairy like they said it would. It needs to be dealt with out in the open. If we can joke about it on Saturday Night Live, we need to be able to discuss it in an open forum. If we can know it exists, we need to be able to talk about it in real and meaningful ways.

There’s a theology for everything, and that includes masturbation. If we left it out because it was uncomfortable, then what have we gained? No understanding of God from that particular problem. To me, that’s a waste of a thing, and God didn’t make anything to waste it. He is big enough to redeem even our corruptions of his good things. Isn’t that the gospel? That he redeemed corrupted things by redeeming humans? Why then, can he not teach us things through our open and real handling of the problem of masturbation? I see no reason why he would not do that.

So let us be open with our struggles. If not on the Internet for the world to see, then at least with a solid Christian brother or sister.

Am I worried about how people will look at me after this? Kinda. It’s not every day that someone posts on the web, “hey, I masturbated yesterday.” It’s even more rare to see it in a serious context. But in my honest and thorough exploration of the gospels as they pertains to me (which is one of the stated goals of Gospelized), this came up. I am not ashamed, for there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Do I hope to quit masturbating? Yes. But I am not in my own power to do it. Saying “I will quit” is equal to saying “I will save myself”; the magnitude of the problem (for it is the same problem on both sides, former and latter) is so great that it is utterly incomprehensible. We are toast.

But God is good. And he will deliver us from masturbation just as he delivered us from the bonds of sin. Sanctification is a powerful, powerful word for a powerful, powerful force in the world. We are being made more like Christ, and that’s the goal of life, as odd as it seems much of the time. He will deliver us; until then, we must take the precautions we can, pray and have faith.

Love,

stephen.

Dear R,

The new blog, which God worked through you to inspire, is called gospelized.com. Gospelize is an archaic word that means “to bring the gospel to someone.” It’s only found in unabridged dictionaries. Nevertheless, it is awesome. So it’s the new name of my blog, in which I will daily talk about the gospel and God and Jesus.

It’s amazing that I’m able to make things at all; the great generosity of God was such that he allowed us to make things. It could have been that we were put in a world where everything was already made. Instead of giving us a world full of things to build with, he could have given us a world full of already-constructed toys. In his generosity, he gave the ability to create to all his creations. In his mercy, he allowed those who believe in him to create good things that will work for his glory. That is the gospel; we bring broken things and God glorifies them. We present ourselves, and he uses it. We can do nothing to earn it; he freely gives it, if we are willing. Hallelujah.