How do you respond when the latest news story reveals that another Christian leader has fallen due to sexual sin? Many feel anger at the person or at the state of our church. Mixed in with the anger is often empathy for the victims and others close to the front lines. I remember what my response used to be:
      Abject terror.
      In those days, I lived in fear of the knock on the door or the phone ringing. I cleared my search history several times a day and kept my phone and computer closely guarded. When I heard of someone who had been exposed due to some sexual misconduct, my chest would tighten; my stomach would turn over. My ever-diminishing conscience would faintly whisper to me, “That could be you.”
      Between 2008 and 2018, my life was on a downward trajectory. Entering college and getting my first smartphone fostered a porn habit that quickly got out of control. Every day I was viewing it more, always craving some new, more depraved image to behold. Naturally, my relationship with a girlfriend at the time quickly became physical. After college, I was introduced to websites where I could engage with both women and men anonymously and gave myself to dozens of such encounters, all while becoming engaged to my girlfriend.
      I was a mess inside.
      One day in 2013 when the conviction became too much, I confessed it all to my fiancé. Her response? “I don’t love you enough to work through this.” 3 months away from our wedding, it was over. The next day I felt so beaten up I couldn’t get out of bed and had no desire to eat. Logically this should have brought me to my knees before God and reset my moral trajectory.  
      Not in the slightest.
      I spent half my time feeling sorry for myself and the other half hoping my reputation would stay intact, that no one would find out the truth about my secret life. In no time I was back to my old ways. With no relationship to hold me back, I felt the freedom to promiscuously pursue as much sex as I could get.
      For 5 years two Patricks coexisted. There was the nice, fun-loving musician everyone knew and liked. Then there was the sex addict who chased girls, dabbled in homosexuality and fantasized about things he wouldn’t dare let anyone know of.
      If I had had it my way, no one would ever know the real me. But God had a different plan. He knew I was on the fast track to a worthless future, possibly jail time, and a day when I would hear Him say, “Depart from me for I never knew you.”
      So, He doubled down on the conviction.

Conviction and Suppression

‍
      Zoom out with me for a moment. What do you imagine goes through the mind of someone hiding unconfessed sin? It’s easy to picture them happy and content until their blissful façade is blown apart. But that is just not how sin works. God has given us all a conscience which can distinguish between right and wrong.
      That’s why many men like me describe a strange mix of feelings when they catch their first view of erotic material. On the one hand it’s exhilarating. But inside, something is making them feel dirty and shameful. That’s the conscience at work bringing about conviction.
      However, our conscience is not made of steel. It’s easily molded by our response to its influence. If we allow ourselves to be checked by its warnings, our conscience will grow more sensitive. If we stifle its voice in favor of carnal and sensual influences, it will weaken. And if we continuously indulge in sin, we will decimate it!
      As I continually chose to indulge my lustful appetites, my conscience began to get weaker and weaker. In His mercy, God tried to get my attention another way. He allowed the painful consequences of sin to ravage my internal life. Depression, fear and anger took control of me. David’s words in Psalm 32:3-4 say it best, “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”
      Not recognizing that these consequences were God’s hand of mercy trying to bring me to repentance, I kept stubbornly pursuing what I wanted.
      But there were those knocks on the door, those phone rings, those news stories. Those occasions would remind me of the truth: You’re in sin. Your life isn’t right.
      So nowadays when I see the latest story break, and hear the culprit trying to downplay his sin, I know that some level of deception has been at work for a long, long time. Either he is simply doing his utmost to stifle conviction and is purposely lying to protect himself, or he has been on the path of self-deception for so long that he can’t see what’s real anymore.
      In my case, I was able to suppress conviction for five years. But by 2018 I couldn’t take it anymore. So I confessed my secrets once again, this time to my pastor. Thankfully, he had the courage to demand change in my life. That’s when I began to come into reality that I was not the good person I thought I was. And thankfully, my pastor knew what to do with me, which is how I ended up at the Pure Life Residential Program in Kentucky.

{{blog-si="/blog-ads-storage"}}

A Complicated Question

      There is a long list of exceptional gospel communicators over the past forty years who maintained secret lives of sin. Paul gave the explanation for this seeming contradiction when he told the Romans that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). It seems that when God calls and equips a man to minister to others, He will continue to use his ministry even if he is living a raunchy, secret life. This does not mean the leader is living the holy life which pleases God. Yet his successful ministry can be enough to deceive him into thinking he is a good man.
      I wasn’t running a powerful ministry when my secret life was first exposed, but I still found ways to deceive myself into thinking I was “a good person.” I made a partial confession of what was really going on in my life in 2013, but because it was only half-hearted, it took five more years of living a double life before I began to take things seriously.
      I was still very self-deceived when I arrived at Pure Life Ministries in 2018. I was convinced I was mostly good with just a small problem. Through the godly counsel and powerful exposure to spiritual truth I received there, I eventually had to acknowledge that I was sinful through and through.
      David experienced a similar wakeup call when Nathan confronted him about his sin. The conviction of the Holy Spirit landed on good soil in his case. He cried out to the Lord, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” The key there is that his eyes were fixed on the Lord.
      If you ask the question, “Am I a good person,” with your eyes on yourself, it’s easy to answer, “yes.” However, a true revelation of God’s perfect character makes that conclusion impossible and will leave you broken and undone. That is the first step towards real and lasting change.
      Many men who come to us for help struggle with this crucial step for a long time. It takes courage to face who you truly are. The process can be long and is undeniably painful. Every deed, whether good or bad, must be taken to God with an honest and open heart, asking Him to reveal the truth about how He views them.
      Practically speaking, this requires examining our lives in light of Scripture, with a prayerful spirit, and without any preconceived idea of where it will lead. To assist, a godly man or woman must be there to help facilitate this process because a man in this state usually cannot distinguish the truth on his own. He’s been lying to himself for a long time and needs an objective third party to keep the truth in front of him. The kind of brokenness that can come from being confronted with the truth is the path into real change. Godly sorrow always leads to peaceful fruits of righteousness.
      Nine months of this process in the Pure Life Residential Program brought me into tremendous freedom and joy inside which was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Today I don’t live in fear, but in peace with a conviction that my life is right before God. It’s my heart that every man would experience this same joy and freedom, no matter what it costs them.

The Right Response

‍
      If your life is filled with dirty secrets, it’s time to bring them out into the open. It’s time to evaluate your life honestly and admit the real you is not the person you present to others.
      Some reading this may object to my turning the tables like this, but the statistics on sexual sin in the church suggest I am not off here. Sexual sin is rampant in the pews. It is germinating in every church. Millions of men and women are hiding something. It is not only inhibiting their own walks with God; it is fostering the culture that is allowing Christian leadership roles to be filled by men and women who are spiritually unqualified.
      My encouragement to anyone hiding sin, even if it seems like something small, is to show the courage to get help before it gets worse.
      Trust me, it will.