Anonymous asked:
I am a girl and I am a christian. But I am still struggling with masturbation and lust. It started when I was 8 years old when my cousin kissed me. I really feel dirty and I really hate myself. I think God hates me. And I could not grasp the fact that I am His princess because I am not.  [edited for length and content]

Jed Brewer replied:

Hi Anon,

You know, when you talk to old-fashioned Christians, and people coming out of addiction recovery, you’ll hear them say something really strange: that self-loathing is just another form of pride.

Now, at first, that sounds wrong.  Because, right, isn’t pride having this high opinion of yourself, and isn’t self-loathing about having this low opinion of yourself?  I mean, that’s what most people think. 

But, the truth is, pride isn’t about thinking you’re awesome.  It’s about the belief that you know better. 

I don’t often quote “famous Christian writers”, but this is something worth reading.  It’s from a man named Thomas Merton:

“Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that he is above us.”

What dude is saying is that despair comes from an insistence that you know better.  God is saying, “I can love you, I can accept you, I can bless you”, and we say no. Because we know better.  And so we despair.

Now what does all this have to do with you?  The sin that is killing you, beloved, is not lust or masturbation.  It’s despair, which is to say, pride.

God can handle your lust.  He can handle your masturbation.  He can handle and bring healing to any confusion you have over your experiences with your cousin.  But he’s not going to force anything on you.

You say that you can’t accept yourself as his princess because you are not that.  If you’ll forgive me…who the heck are you?!  God knit you together in your mother’s womb, designed you by hand, knew every day of your life before you had lived one, has a full catalog of every tear you have ever shed and every sin you have ever committed, knows you fully and completely, and what’s his stance?  He’s ready to embrace you, right this very moment.  But you, with your twenty or twenty five years of life on this planet, are ready to overrule his pronouncements?  Beloved, that is a vicious and absurd pride, and it’s killing you.

I understand that you hate yourself.  (I have been there.)  And I’m not asking you to stop that, at least not this minute.  But I’m saying that, for you to move forward, you’ll have to make the decision to stop speaking for God.  He does not agree with you.  You need to allow God to have his own opinion of you.  I think you owe him that much.

If you will allow God to love you and see himself as your Father (which, again, is his right), then you’re in a place to have an actual conversation with God.  It’s no problem to go to God and say, “I know you love me, but I don’t love me.  And now I will tell you all the reasons I don’t love myself.”  That’s a conversation He’d love to have with you.  And it will actually go somewhere.

But deciding that God has to hate you because you hate you simply won’t go anywhere.  You can’t have a conversation with God because you have muzzled him.

I know you want to move forward, beloved.  Step one is letting God speak for himself.  He’s not afraid of arguing with you.  But you do have to let him disagree.