“…knowing…evil…”

“For God knows that in the day that you eat from it our eyes will be opened, and you will b like God, knowing good and evil.”

So it was that Satan tempted Eve and Adam.

“…knowing…evil.”

I perceive myself to be one living by grace with my faith in reality.

I have great hope for individuals with unwanted same-gender attractions. I support them with every resource that God has given me to assist them in achieving their prayerful goals. Many whom God has directed to us, do, by God’s grace, achieve those goals. Some, do not. Some individuals let not seeing all those prayed-for goals realized keep them from achieving seemingly any of their goals and they live, often, in bitterness and defeat. Others have unrealistic expectations, losing sight of the truth that we live in a fallen world.

Many of these men and women seeking purity and wholeness have come out of years of “gay” relationships. Numerous homosexual encounters have conditioned and reinforced homosexual desires and a gay identity construct.

Most state that they long to never have a homosexual temptation again. They want it, and pray for it, to be all gone.

I encourage them to pursue passionately what they desire, but to do so realizing that God has a plan for their lives that may be beyond their understanding. I encourage them to seek His will above their own, and to look only to Jesus for the strength to accomplish any goal.

And—I remind them that in Adam they have “bitten the apple” in numerous ways.

Just as Adam and Eve bit the apple and became knowledgeable of evil, something that they were never meant to know, something that they could never return to not knowing…just as all their descendants (all mankind) inherit their proud, sinful, spiritually dead nature and are born in bondage to sin…so, too, when an individual “bites” into homosexuality they become knowledgeable of still another form of evil that they were never meant to know. And they can never return to not having tasted homosexuality.

Just as Adam and Eve could not go back to the way it was—hot having knowledge of evil and a nature inclined to evil—so, too, we who have tasted the “apple” of homosexuality cannot in our own power go back to not knowing homosexuality.

Does that sound hopeless? By no means! There is hope. Those who have trusted Christ as their Lord and Savior live in a new reality.

God says that He has given us everything that we need for life and Godliness (II Peter 1:3). So, the option of never being tempted again and for it “all to be gone” may not be realistic. But in Christ and by the power of His Spirit, we have everything that we need to conquer temptations when they come and to live victorious, joyful lives.

Realistically we are living after and in the fall of Adam and Eve. That’s reality. But in Christ Jesus we are living with our faith in our journey through life, empowered by the indwelling Spirit. The option of perfection was lost with Adam and Eve. But the option of perfection can now be obtained in a new and different way through God’s grace expressed in and through Christ.

There is much to be gained in recovery from homosexuality. Recovery: the process of returning to the state of our original and Divine design and intent. Living in reality. We have bitten apples that have caused us to become knowledgeable of things and inclined toward things that we were never meant to know. Through Jesus we can make great progress toward our original design and intent during this lifetime and can be assured by God’s Word that he will bring us to perfection in the life to come.

And, miracles of miracles, even when we slip back momentarily in our journey with Him into our old evil ways, God the Father looks at us in repentance and sees what? Not our failings and imperfections. But the perfect righteousness of Christ—because by grace through faith alone we are in Him and He is in us!

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