jordanabina
Feathers of the Phoenix | Copyright @jordanabina 2021
Have you ever seen hate before? Have you ever looked into the eyes of seething hate? I’m not sure I have, and I know I don’t want to. An image that comes to mind is a beast foaming at the mouth. Can you see it? Claws dug into the ground, four legs flexed and trembling with anticipation, moments from springing towards my throat. The picture brings fear to the surface of even the bravest people, and rightfully so. It’s hate, it’s anger, and it seeks to kill.
Nothing about the strategy of Satan has changed. Since the failure in the garden, from the very moment man and woman chose something besides the purposes of God, Satan has been applying the same tactics. He is using the same lies to trick humans over and over and over again. Also, his reason for doing so hasn’t changed either. He breathes out hate towards all that God has made; humans make his skin crawl. The depth of hate that Satan has for all of God’s creation is something we have slowly begun to forget. As I said before, nothing about the strategy of the enemy has changed, and it won’t anytime soon. Why is that? There’s an expression that comes to mind that fits the shape of the hole this question leaves, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
My aim in the words to come are not to say that sin itself is the feather of the phoenix that we would not like to grow back, although the desire should be that of every Christian. Instead, it is time for the Church and her people to begin to look again at the tools that God that Father has given us for protection and for going on the offense against sin. It is also a time to confess, a word I will use throughout this article. One of the things that make it hard to understand how God feels about sin is the reality that we as humans have gotten used to sin, and to sinning. It doesn’t bother us that much. I’ll speak for myself, less I cast the first stone.
I have grown accustomed to the sins that I deem to be way out on the perimeter of morality or are hidden in the shadows of my mind. What I mean by the shadows of my mind is that no one else sees what goes on there, no one but Jesus. Somehow, as the serpent spoke with Adam and Eve, he somehow distracted them enough or deceived them in such a way that they completely forgot that God could see them. Temptation does that, it lies to us about many things, and one of the most cunning strategies the devil uses is he convinces us that God isn’t present while we sin. But make no doubt about it, God sees, and God is present during our choice to succumb to temptation.
In the year 2020, the Christian world lost one of its best Bible teachers and defenders of the faith in Ravi Zacharias. Zacharias was an Indian man with both Canadian and United States citizenship. He died at the age of 74. I have personally read many books by Zacharias, some more than once, and have emptied highlighter ink into the many pages. I’ve watched hours of talks and sermons through the online ministry of the RZIM (Ravi Zacharias International Ministry) and have grown as a Christian because of them. When I heard the news of his cancer, I was devastated. This was someone who needed to live as long as possible because of the work he was doing around the world for the cause of Christ. Zacharias was someone who had shaped a generation of Christian thinkers. He died May 19th, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Shortly after his death, his name was in the news again, but this time for reasons even more devastating than his death. Zacharias had been accused of “exaggerating his academic qualifications” and even worse had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. It seems in 2017, Zacharias was texting back and forth with another woman who sent him nude photos of herself. Zacharias claimed this was not what it seemed and shouldn’t have been texting in the first place. But now, four months after his death, Zacharias was being accused of being involved in explicit sexual misconduct with employees at an Atlanta massage parlor that he co-owned.
This is a quote from Christianity Today.
Zacharias masturbated in front of one of the women more than 50 times, according to her recollection. He told her he was burdened by the demands of the ministry, and he needed this “therapy.” He also asked her to have sex with him twice, she said, and requested explicit photos of her.
I remember standing in front of my bookshelf staring at some of the books I’d read by Zacharias thinking about what to do with them. I must tell you, I was sick over this, for more reasons than one. First, I hated him for it. I felt betrayed and lied to. I felt an extreme sense of disappointment and abandonment. I had told myself before, these people you love are not Jesus, they will fail you, but this just hurt. I had grown so much from his ministry, I had learned so much, and because of Zacharias, I pursued Jesus even more. Now what?
The same guy who was on stage debating Muslims about Jesus was also a co-owner at a massage parlor and coercing the employees there into sexual acts?
What a joke! Is there anyone out there we can trust? How can you abuse women and violate them as some common scumbag? How could you do this to these women, who are made in God’s image, and leave them to the shame of it all? And now, the Church is left with the mess. Now, in the eyes of the secular world, it’s just another log on the fire of Christians being hypocritical sexual perverts who don’t practice what they preach. I was filled with anger and sadness and I wasn’t sure what to do with it except pray.
And I did pray. I really did. In some ways, I took out all my anger on the Lord, not that He was responsible, but I just needed to be honest with God about it. I let out my disappointment and frustration, I used language that I may not have used around my grandmother, and I got really honest about it with my Father. A few things happened.
The first realization I had was that God was upset too. This wasn’t something my Father agreed with and hadn’t been fighting for behind the scenes for years. Second, I realized I was afraid, which I didn’t see going into this prayer time. But it’s true, I had to come to terms with the idea that I was afraid of making this same mistake. Maybe not what Zacharias specifically did, but my own version of temptation, sin, and hiding. And the last revelation I felt like the Lord began to unpack in me was the truth of God’s word and how He has given us the means to combat the enemy and His lethal weapon against us.
If you’re a Christian, or you spend a decent amount of time in church, you probably know what sin is. I’m not going to take time in this chapter to explain that to you, in fact, I think most people can guess what it is even if they don’t believe in God. But, how do you fight back against temptation and sin? That question may be harder for us to answer. And if it is harder for us to answer, then we’re most likely going to struggle when temptation comes.
There is a biblical principle that I believe needs to grow back in the lives of believers. It is more powerful than a W.W.J.D. bracelet, more powerful than an accountability software, and scares the hell into the devil more than anything we can manufacture. The weapon I’m talking about is proof that God doesn’t abandon us after sin but makes a way to come back into His presence.
We must remember the practice of confession.
I was surprised to read so many different perspectives on this word confession. Many theologians have differing views on what it means and how it should be used. All would agree that confessing your sins to Jesus is of utmost importance and listed throughout the Biblical text. Without confessing our sins to Jesus there can be no true repentance and forgiveness. We must confess our sins to Jesus and allow Him to begin the work of restoration in our hearts.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
1 John 1:9
But, if I could guess, I would venture to say that Zacharias did this at some point in his life. Do you think it’s so farfetched to believe that Zacharias wept over these acts of sexual misconduct and prayed to God for forgiveness? I bet he did. I bet he felt like scum sometimes after leaving the stage to preach or teach knowing where he had been 24 hours earlier or knowing that the state of his heart was poisoned. I cannot prove this, but I can look to myself, I have felt this in my life. There have been times where I walked around like a God-fearing believer but was deep in sin, struggling to keep my head above water. Have you been there? It’s a very real place to be. Here’s something they never taught us in Sunday school:
You may love Jesus and still be entrenched in sin.
Argue about that all you want, but the text will show you. Do you think David wasn’t building up to the moment with Bathsheba? You think, poof, and that just happened? You don’t think the faith of Moses was slipping little by little before he eventually landed in bed with Hagar? Or maybe Noah just drank on the weekends? Don’t you think there was a part of Judas that genuinely loved Jesus? I do.
There is a gift, a weapon, that God has given us that we have put away and forgotten somewhere in our lives, and its confession. Confession begins, most importantly, with Jesus. Confessing our sins to Christ is essential for salvation and essential in our ongoing lives with Christ. But confession does not end there. Listen to James.
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.
James 5:16
As the church rises again from the ashes of this cleansing season, it must allow confession to become an active part of the life of everyday believers. We must confess our sins to one another and destroy the grip of the enemy who hates us. I think in many ways, confessing our sins to someone we love in our everyday life is harder to do than confessing our sins to Jesus. This is because we often treat confession with God the Father like a barf bucket, it’s more just getting it off our chest and moving on. We say a prayer and don’t ask God for anything else, just take this sin. That isn’t confession, that’s a weird form of legalism, and I’ve done it. Maybe when we think of confession, we think of sitting in a wooden box with a Catholic priest on the other side and revealing the last seven days of moral misconduct, but that isn’t what I see in James 5.
We need to have people to confess our sin to. These people need to be believers who are pursuing Jesus more than a friendship with us. Meaning, they aren’t the people who will keep our secret, they are the people who will do whatever it takes to help us find healing and victory in our life. We don’t need friends to keep our secrets, we need Anamchara, soul friends, who will partner with us in prayer, accountability, and battle. We must recapture the Biblical command to confess our sins to one another so that we may be healed.
The truth is, there is a part of your healing that Jesus has designed to be fleshed out amongst the body of believers. We keep saying sorry in our prayers but never telling anyone about the battle we’re in. After every single failure, we have been led to believe that this time will be different, and it won’t. Jesus wants to bring us victory, but He will do it in a way that uses the power He has spread out throughout the people of God.
Confession enables others to enact grace, mercy, forgiveness, and to use their strength to help our weaknesses.
Confessing sin to someone you trust and who you know loves God more than you is incredibly difficult. But, and this is the most important thing, it can disarm the devil’s hold on your life. If it’s secret, it’s slavery. But when we confess our sins to Jesus and to one another, the devil can no longer make accusations and be our master. James says to confess together and pray together. Where there was one, now there are two. We are not meant to go through this life alone and we better start getting this through our minds or we will never stop seeing news like that of Zacharias.
It’s time we took this more seriously. The devil hates us and wants to erase us. Do you see that? Zacharias was being murdered even after his death. Look at this bit of information from Wikipedia.
“As a result, RZIM issued an apology and subsequently announced that it would undergo a name change and remove all material related to Zacharias.[11][12][13] In addition, the Christian and Missionary Alliance posthumously revoked his ordination after conducting their own investigation.[14] HarperCollins, which owns the Christian publishers Zondervan and Thomas Nelson, also confirmed that it would cease selling books written by Zacharias and remove him from other published works.[15]“
After all the years of study and ministry, Zacharias is being erased. All the good and wonderful things that came from RZIM are slipping into disqualification. Just because we take something to the grave doesn’t mean that the enemy is done with it. We must not allow the devil to hold the keys to our lives, we must confess our sins to one another, even at the cost of all we’ve gathered for ourselves. It is always better to confess than have to be caught. Some of the results may be the same, but we will reclaim what belongs to us, our identity. We belong to Jesus and therefore we must get comfortable with the idea of confessing our sins again because we cannot live in slavery to the devil and in service to Jesus at the same time. Find someone, confess, and pray together. Fight.
Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
1 Timothy 6:12
There are no secrets. What we do while no one is watching is being recorded by the enemy, and he is waiting to play it back on the big screen. He hates you. He hates those women who were abused. He hates Christians. He hates all that God made. But we’ve been given the armor of God and the power of fellowship, and we must overcome. I do not want to see any more of my brothers or sisters fall and be erased from history.
This will take a major effort by both sides, those of us confessing, and those of us being confessed to. As the listener, we must be ready to combat the enemy in prayer, we must be ready to stand with our brother and sister through a tough season of honesty, and we must be ready to enact radical forgiveness. If we’re to survive, we must show the world what it looks like to forgive as well as confess. As I said before, this isn’t merely lip service, this is a repentance that leads away from habitual sin, not back to it.
We must remember that Jesus is always present, even when we sin.
I think there is one example of someone who fully felt the weight of his sin, and that’s Judas. In my opinion, no one has ever experienced what Judas experienced. He looked Jesus straight in the eyes and handed him over to be killed. He kissed him. Beyond that, he had lived the last few years of his life with Jesus, saw the miracles, heard the teachings, shared in every moment available to him. And yet, fell to temptation.
I know we look at Judas as the villain, but he represents what all of us will go through and are going through. Will we keep secret what the devil has been whispering to us? Will we believe that we can go through life with both voices in our minds? The devil hates Jesus, and he hated Judas. Matthew 27 tells the heartbreaking account of the final moments of Judas life.
3 When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. 4 “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”
“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.”
5 So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.Matthew 27:3-5
Judas was seized with remorse. Remorse! He was so sorry. Can you see Judas running to the tree, crying and wailing, tying the noose as fast as he can? Judas knew he had made the worst mistake and his grief was too much. Really think about this, Judas was so broken over the sinful choice he had made that he took his own life. I know we are used to this part of the story, but it’s the absolute worst. Let it be a reminder that the devil hates you and me and he isn’t helping us, he’s leading us to our deaths. We cannot go through life believing that our secret sin will not come out someday to reveal who we really are. Better to let our reputation burn on earth than our soul in hell.
Find someone, today, confess and pray.
As we enter a new season, as the Church rises from its own ashes, we must become a confessing Church, an honest Church, and a broken and contrite Church. No more pretending. Sin is running rampant around us. No more secrets, we need help. May we begin to see that healing follows repentance, and restoration follows healing.
There is nothing more powerful than the love of God.
There is only one way to separate ourselves from Him, and that’s when we choose to.
We simply must confess.
