Danny Jensen

Warning!!!

This book has several graphic images. Occasionally, words are not enough to fully convey something. A picture is worth a thousand words. Where necessary, I’ve included pictures to illustrate or cement certain topics. A few of them are graphic. I haven’t used them willy nilly. I’ve kept them to the absolute minimum that still conveys the entirety of the message. Please be prepared and continue reading at your own risk and reward.

Warning!!!

This book speaks about sexuality and adult topics frequently. I’ve tried to keep the details to a minimum, but if you’re a parent, you may want to read this book before you decide whether your child is ready for it. I hope you’ll choose to let them read it. A vacuum will always be filled; if you don’t speak to your kids about these things, someone or something else will.

Dedicated to:

Judith, for your unknowing encouragement

T, for being the person who finally taught me about real love

THE BIGGEST THANKS to Bolu Book (https://www.fiverr.com/bolu_book) for your patience, encouragement, and for taking a word document and turning it into something beautiful

Special thank you to:

Owen and Olga for the art help
Monick, for your editing!
Rob F for your supernatural generosity that led me to life
Jane, for your help!

Contents

Introduction

How to Read This Book

Foundations: Part 1

Foundations: Part 2

Foundations: Part 3

Foundations: Part 4

Foundations: Part 5

Foundations: Part 6

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Lesson 7

Lesson 8

Lesson 9

Lesson 10

Lesson 11

Lesson 12

Lesson 13

Lesson 14

Lesson 15

Lesson 16

Lesson 17

Lesson 18

Lesson 19

Lesson 20

Lesson 21

Lesson 22

Lesson 23

Lesson 24

Lesson 25

Lesson 26

Lesson 27

Lesson 28

Lesson 29

Lesson 30

Lesson 31

Lesson 32a:

Lesson 32b

Lesson 33

Lesson 34

Lesson 35

Lesson 36

Lesson 37

Lesson 38

Lesson 39

Lesson 40

Resources

About the Author

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

Jeremiah 17:9 (ESV)

Introduction

For a lot of my life, I lived in an echo chamber without knowing it. I grew up only watching and hearing news from US sources. Conservative outlets covered certain stories from one angle, while liberal outlets covered those same stories from theirs. I truly thought I was getting a well-rounded perspective because I was watching news from sources with different biases.

It wasn’t until I was in the Marines, stationed on a base in Fallujah, Iraq, that I started to understand. Being overseas, our chow hall had easier access to international news sources like BBC and Al Jazeera. This was my first exposure to them, and they covered really important news that wasn’t even being mentioned in the US. When the US news did address a story, Al Jazeera and BBC often had a completely different perspective and frequently highlighted critical details that weren’t making it onto the news back home. I had no clue how much more was happening in the world until then.

A lot of us voters had another rude awakening from our echo chambers in 2016. I was living in DC at the time and had been there for the entire Obama administration. Virtually everyone I encountered in the city and surrounding area was liberal. As we watched the 2016 election cycle unfold, we were SO amused by Donald Trump’s deluded idea that he could become president. The idea that he could even make it past the primaries was so ludicrous that it was hilarious to us all! The news and shows we watched, like the Daily Show, confirmed to us how deluded he was for even trying.

It wasn’t until I happened to take a 10-hour drive away from DC that I noticed there were a lot of Trump signs. A lot more than there should be for someone who didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. This was when I began to realize that we in DC lived in a bubble of economic prosperity, while the rest of the country was really struggling and growing more and more frustrated.
Because of these experiences, I always try to get my information from multiple sources, both within and outside the US. I also never delete old friends on social media who I disagree with, because I need to know how other people are seeing the world.

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For most of my young adulthood, I made the mistake of completely dismissing people because of a single disagreement I had with them. They could say 99 true, helpful things, but if they said one thing I didn’t agree with, for some reason I would assume that everything else they’d said must also be wrong. I’d label them in some way and then use the label I’d given them as a reason to discount everything they had to say. This was to my detriment. I ignored a lot of helpful facts, principles and advice people had to offer because of minor errors I perceived in their worldview.

There’s an old idiom that says, “eat the fish, spit out the bones,” and I’d like to ask you to approach this book with that in mind. This book may be totally different than the way you and the people in your life see the world. I can virtually guarantee you that you will read something in this book that sounds nuts or irritates you on first glance. That’s not my goal, but with the subject matter in here, it’s likely to happen. I’d ask you to keep reading a little longer anyway. Almost everything I’ve written has been borne out of personal, painful experience. The more you can learn, the more perspective you’ll have and the less pain you’re likely to encounter in your own life.

I’d also ask you to bear with any minor repetition that you find as you go through this book. In a lot of ways, I’m writing this to my younger self who often needed to hear things more than once before I’d get it. Hopefully you’ll pick up the ideas quicker than I did. Marketers say that people typically need about seven exposures to a concept before they take action. I used a similar principle when I was a personal trainer. Once a client mastered a squat, they didn’t just stop squatting. I continued to layer it into their routines, even when moving on to other exercises. Learning improves with occasional review.

How to Read This Book

This book is divided into two parts: “Foundations” and “Lessons.” The difference between the two is that the Lessons are fairly linear, while the Foundations are not. For the Foundations, I’m giving you a body of information that will help you when you get to the Lessons. You can think of each part of the Foundations as the informational equivalent of the elephant in this picture. It doesn’t matter if you discover the tail, the legs, the trunk, or the tusks first; you simply need to know about all of them to form a complete picture of what the elephant is like. Each Foundation does have some connection to the others, but don’t worry if that connection isn’t immediately obvious. If you don’t see how one thing relates to the next in the Foundations, it both does, and doesn’t. For now, just take it in as data.

Foundations

Part 1

When I was a kid, my parents enrolled me in Cub Scouts. At one point I earned a compass as a prize for doing something I don’t remember now. The problem was, it was poorly manufactured, and the needle almost never rested on true north. I could be pointing myself and the compass at true north, but the needle would flutter all over the place. Sometimes it would hit north for a few seconds, but it wouldn’t stay there. If I’d followed that needle through the woods, I’d have ended up on a craaaazy path!

Our hearts are exactly like that compass. Occasionally they lead us to what we truly need, that will make our lives truly better. But just as frequently they lead us in many other directions to places we never would have wanted to find ourselves in.

I’m sure you know someone with a poor sense of direction. Going on a road trip with a poor sense of direction is a challenge, but it can be made worse if the person is stubborn and can’t admit how bad their sense of direction really is. I live on the East Coast, with mountains and winding roads that start going in one direction but rarely continue that way for long. I’ve experienced hours of wasted travel in the wrong direction because I “knew” I was heading the right way, so I didn’t need to check my GPS. In the same way, relying only on our feelings and emotions to navigate the twists and challenges of love and dating will set us up for heartache and wasted years. The good news is that just like roads have maps, signs, and GPS systems; we have access to similar help in the romance department.

We can all think of something we did in the past that sticks with us to this day. It felt completely right in the moment, and we were sure we really wanted it, but now we’d do it differently. It might be a bad tattoo, dating someone we were sure was “the one,” or pursuing a career in a certain field only to realize too late that it wasn’t anything like we thought it would be. From this, over time, most of us learn that we should never make permanent decisions based on temporary feelings. That starts to become obvious. But what if we don’t know how permanent a decision will be?

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” Just because I don’t fully understand how the law of gravity works doesn’t mean that I’m going to be able to walk off a cliff and land without hurting myself. If I’m driving 90 MPH through a neighborhood and I get pulled over, the police officer probably isn’t going to cut me a lot of slack just because I didn’t see a speed limit sign or I “didn’t know” what the limit was. I could even justify my actions to myself as I raced through the neighborhood, telling myself that I didn’t see a speed limit sign. But that justification is going to fall apart when I come up against the real authority of the police officer in person and not the police officer in my mind.

Just like the physical world has physical laws like gravity, there are spiritual laws that are in place. When we break the laws and principles that govern how the universe functions, they break us. Ignoring or violating the law of gravity will lead to physical harm. Violating spiritual laws is even more costly because the impact reaches all aspects of our lives: emotional, mental, relational, and eventually even physical harm.

I spent the first 15 years of my adult life ignorantly breaking spiritual laws. Some laws I didn’t know existed, other laws I’d been told about but didn’t believe in. I thought that they were subjective. I thought that people could choose to believe in them, and if they did, that belief would make them a reality for those people. Likewise, I thought that if I chose not to believe in them, my belief in them not being real would keep them from impacting me. I was very mistaken. I hope you’ll let my hindsight become part of your foresight.

Foundations

Part 2

“Adulting is like looking both ways before you cross the street and getting hit by an airplane.”

“Adulting: 0/5 stars, would not recommend”

I’m going to tell you a few stories in this book. I’ll lead with a few here and then include others as we get to the relevant lesson. I’m slightly modifying a few of the details and all the names to protect people’s identities, but these are all TRUE stories. What these stories all have in common are various symptoms of one underlying problem. But before I address the problem, I want to bring some of the symptoms to your attention. Think of this part of the book like the opening montage of a movie. You’ll see scattered scenes that, on their own, don’t make complete sense. However, as you read further, the bigger picture will emerge, and by the end, you’ll have a complete understanding of what was happening in each of these stories.

“Annie” is a hippie girl. She works as a massage therapist and Pilates teacher, but her real joy in life is being outdoors. Any chance she gets, she’s outside hiking, biking, or rock climbing with her longtime boyfriend. Everyone who knows Annie knows two things about her: she’s sweet, and her life is a mess. The first time I met Annie, I was working at a gym. She was supposed to be teaching a Pilates class there, but she was late because of a flat tire. Over the years that I worked there, she was late a lot, and always because of an extraordinary reason. I don’t think she was lying or exaggerating; weird stuff just happened to her.

Then, Annie went on a long vacation to Costa Rica. It seemed like it really helped her. She came back home glowing! But as soon as she got back, she twisted her knee so badly that she could barely work. She was out for nearly 3 months and lost a ton of money because she couldn’t take clients.

Annie lived with her long-time boyfriend in a less-than-ideal apartment complex, with a lot of chaos at all hours. She just wanted peace in her life, and being alone in nature was her happy place. So, she and her boyfriend spent more money than they could really afford to buy a plot of land and ordered a tiny house. They got the house delivered and installed, only to find out that tiny houses are a violation of the code in that particular area. The last time I talked with her, they were still trying to figure out if they could ship the house back and get a refund or buy a different plot of land somewhere else. Annie started having to work any and every job she could get and even began having to ask her clients for money. This is Annie’s life.

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Caidan is in his early 30s. He was raised on a farm and taught the value of working hard. He was responsible with his money; when other people were going on amazing vacations and posting them on IG, he was saving everything he made. By the age of 29, he had saved enough to make a great down payment on a house in a very expensive housing market. He picked out a place he liked and closed on it. I worked with his mom, and she was so proud of him and how far ahead her son was in life compared to other people his age.

Caidan wanted someone to share his life with, but he had worked hard and been responsible and wasn’t going to settle for anything less than that. After a while of dating, he came to the conclusion that most of the women his age just weren’t on his level. He still hoped he’d eventually meet someone for the long haul, but in the meantime, he figured he’d have fun until the right woman finally showed up. He and his mom are very tight, and he always tells her about his dating life. One day, he even called her at work to tell her why she couldn’t get ahold of him last night. He’d been on a date. He told her he knew right away this girl wasn’t going to be in the picture long, but he was having fun “beating the brakes off her” in the meantime!

Caidan had about 6 good months in his new place before things started going wrong. In a booming economy, the company he was working for went out of business. I don’t know exactly what type of job he had, but he wasn’t easily able to find another one in the same line of work. So, he took a job house sitting for some rich people who were always traveling. They were eccentric but paid well and under the table. It was a pretty decent job while he looked for something more stable in his actual field. One day, the family came home early from a trip to Europe, got really mad, and told him to get out. They refused to pay him for his last job. To this day, he still can’t figure out what it was that made them flip the switch like they did!

While this was going on, Caidan got pulled over in another state by an angry cop with an authority complex. The cop accused Caidan of drinking and driving, even though his mom swears he doesn’t drink, period. Jobless, Caidan had to spend a lot of his time and money fighting this falsified DUI charge against him. Fortunately, after months of fighting, several out-of-state court appearances, and lots of legal fees paid, Caidan was finally able to get the charges dropped. But he was never able to recoup his time and money spent.

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My story: I spent my 20s and most of my 30s living in a big city, working as a personal trainer. I came across people from all walks of life. Working professionals, athletes, military members, etc., and one common theme for all of us was that adulting was hard. Unexpected problems happened to everyone I knew, no matter which circle they were in. The stories above are only a fraction of what I witnessed and experienced.

Right before the 2008 recession, I had slightly overextended myself financially. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. Financial advisors on the news downplayed the coming crisis that would later be known as the Great Recession, referring to it simply as a ‘slight gutter’ in the stock market. But as the recession really hit and people started restricting their spending, I didn’t quite have enough clients able to pay for my services to hit the financial numbers I needed. On top of that, I frequently had unexpected car problems or other unexpected expenses pop up that would wipe out a lot more of my savings than I’d planned for. So, I’d cut costs and work more. I’d skip doing fun things for a while, but eventually, I needed some vacations. Inevitably, the vacation would be a letdown, or I wouldn’t be able to get away long enough to really decompress, or I would fully decompress and get totally relaxed, only to have some work or relationship problem punch me in the face as soon as I got back. Life was getting worse and harder.

I was really stressed and didn’t like the version of me that all this stress was turning me into. I decided that if this rat race was “adult life” and I was going to have to work alllllll the time, I wanted to have enough income to have a little bit of a life too. I decided to live with roommates so I could pocket a tiny bit of cash. I naively envisioned it being something like the show “Friends.” Financially, the best place for me to rent was with some people who were about my age and, thankfully, really cool and chill. I liked them, and they liked me. They cut me a great deal, but I found out after I’d already moved in that they had a yappy dog. So, after I’d do a long, full day of work, I’d come home to a dog barking at squirrels and falling leaves. Anything would set him off, and as soon as I’d get to sleep, the next thing would get him barking and waking me back up. My roommates didn’t even seem to hear him, though! Instead of getting the minimum 7 hours of sleep I really needed, I might get 5. My rent deal was so good, though, that I couldn’t really put my foot down with my landlords about their dog. I needed them more than they needed me. My random financial problems kept happening, and soon, I got to the point where I wasn’t saving money; I was just trying to climb out of the hole that was getting bigger.

You get the idea. I was getting more and more tired, and also more and more broke even though I was working more. Similar problems were happening to most people I came across. It might not be financial; it might be something else like relationship problems or health issues, but we were all getting squeezed somewhere, and most of it was unexpected. Almost everyone in my life was from a different background, but we were all dealing with hard stuff; I just figured that adulting sucks. I figured the best we could do was enjoy the good times when they appeared and try to use our resources, intelligence, and circle of friends to navigate the problems when they came along.

For a long time, my problems didn’t appear to start with me, they seemed to come to me. So I blamed other things. I blamed bad drivers for making me late to work. I blamed the current administration for the current financial problems in the country. I blamed the military for my drinking problem. I blamed my bosses or work partners for unreasonable expectations. I blamed greedy landlords for making a place to live be so unaffordable, etc…

Eventually someone pointed out that the common denominator might be me. So, I tried to work on myself. I made great progress! But…

It seemed like the more effort I put into becoming good at my craft, the more self-improvement books I read and applied, and the more work certifications I got, the harder life got! This just got worse and worse. I was always tired, broke, and stressed out. I’d gone from having hope for a good future to settling for hope that I could have a fun weekend here and there. Eventually, even that hope died, and the best I could realistically look forward to was getting enough rest on the weekend to be able to get through the next week. I was a slave. My stress had turned me from a friendly, chill guy into someone who was always one bad interaction away from blowing up on an innocent bystander.

Then, in 2019, I discovered something that changed everything.

I’m hoping that my experiences can save you all the pain I went through in my ignorance. Knowledge is power, and “to be forewarned is to be forearmed.”

In part 6, I’ll tell you what all our stories had in common. Just a little more foundation before we get there.

Foundations

Part 3

Lost Knowledge

(This rock in Saudi Arabia seems to
have been cut with a laser over 4000 years ago!)

I was fortunate enough to be able to do a good bit of international traveling in my early 20s. One of the things that stood out to me was that almost every civilization had some kind of advanced technology or knowledge that was way ahead of its time. This knowledge would have made things much easier in some way. Some of the things societies once had but had lost were methods of cutting like we see in this rock. There are a few ancient cultures that had things like batteries and air-cooled refrigeration buildings. Some societies had medicines that had been lost to time. Other societies had incredible knowledge of the stars – there’s even been an ancient “star computer” found in a shipwreck that’s over 1000 years old!

Losing this knowledge would clearly lead to hardship. In the same way that societies have lost knowledge before, we’re losing it now in a different realm. What ancient, successful civilizations took for granted has become all but lost to us.

In 2019, I had an experience that changed my life, where I discovered “The Truth.” Once I had this framework, this filter for viewing the world, I was in shock for a long time. At first, I was in shock because the way I’d just discovered how life works was totally upside down and inside out compared to how I and everyone I knew were viewing things (actually, WE were the ones who were upside down). As that shock wore away, a new shock came: a shock and sadness that so much knowledge had been forgotten and that so many of us were stabbing ourselves through with needless loss, pain, futility, and sadness! I had to get the message out, but it was way too much to be able to do in a conversation. I didn’t know where to start. This book is my best attempt to pass along what I’ve learned.

Foundations

Part 4

(Bacillus Pestis Bacteria, AKA the Black Death)

Unseen Realities

Imagine you’ve time-traveled as an observer to Europe in 1348. The black plague is ravaging the continent. You see people trying to treat illnesses and plagues based on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of where the illnesses came from. You see sick people visited by physicians who would cut them with a scalpel to “let the bad blood out” or who would help “balance the patient’s four humors” with a generous application of…leeches.

Without understanding unseen microorganisms and how diseases are spread through rodents, fleas, mosquitos, and other pests, even the kindest of doctors would only be able to treat symptoms of the illness, never the underlying causes. A physician of the 1300s might tell you with complete confidence that your illness would be cured by a generous application of leeches. But confidence and kindness without the right knowledge can hurt a person just as badly as malevolence.

Worse than this, these physicians were paid for their services! People would save up their hard-earned resources to pay for these “healers” to come and prescribe things such as bleeding or being shut up in a room with absolutely no fresh air or sunlight.

Now, can you imagine how ridiculous and tedious our modern practices of cleanliness would seem to someone who didn’t know about bacteria? It would seem like splitting hairs to clean off your hands with running water vs. the bowl of water everyone in the house dipped their hands in last night. All of the times when you couldn’t touch X after you’d been in contact with Y would seem like pointless extra steps.

But during the time of the black plague, one group of people was practicing correct hygiene practices. Their practices protected them from getting ravaged by the black plague. In fact, this became so noticeable that their neighbors began blaming and persecuting them for starting and spreading the disease since they weren’t getting as harmed by it.

Who were these people? The Jewish population. Where did they get their hygienic practices? The “tedious” commands in their scriptures. Their scriptures didn’t explain bacteria or germs, but they did tell them to wash their hands in running water, avoid corpses, and avoid rodents, 3 of the biggest contributors to the spread of the black plague! Their scriptures also promised that people who followed the commands of the Hebrew God would be protected from the diseases of other nations. Now, in hindsight, we can see that these commands were given based on the principles of an unseen reality.

Not being able to see the plague virus didn’t make it any less deadly. Not seeing electricity doesn’t make a live wire any less dangerous. Bacteria, or the microscopic world, is not the only unseen reality that governs our world. This book aims to address the practices and principles that can help us navigate these other unseen realities that we encounter every day without realizing it.

Foundations

Part 5

A Disclaimer

Almost nothing that I’m going to tell you is my own idea. I’ve simply paid attention to much smarter people than myself. One of the main people I’ve studied was a man who might be the ancient equivalent of the business savvy of Elon Musk (or, if you don’t like Elon Musk, someone like Alex Hormozi), paired with the people savvy of Tony Robbins. He had insights and understandings that were miles ahead of anyone else of his time. He had an intense passion for accumulating an understanding of the inner workings, limitations, and motivations of people that we ourselves are often unaware of. He also made it a point to distill these profound insights into short sentences that would get the point across quickly, that would be easily remembered, and that would enable others to act in a helpful way on what he’d learned.

In his day, this man was so renowned for his insight that royalty would travel weeks to meet with him and spend time around him to learn how he saw the world. He was young when he came on the scene, but his incredible insights quickly made him the wealthiest man in existence at the time. This wealth flowed into his nation, and his whole country became the most prosperous land in the world during his lifetime. This prosperity also led to security. He brought in a golden age for his land.

One of the stories of this Elon Musk/Alex Hormozi/Tony Robbins forerunner comes from when he was judging over an argument between two prostitutes. Imagine an ancient “Judge Judy” but with harsher penalties. These women lived together and had both gotten pregnant and given birth around the same time. But one of the mothers had accidentally killed her son in the middle of the night by rolling on top of him. She wanted a baby so badly that she swapped her dead son with the other woman’s living son and really thought she could get away with it! Of course, the mother of the living baby was furious, and the case eventually made it to this man’s court.

In those days, judges had immense power, and their verdicts would be law. There were no appeals. As he presided over the case and listened to their arguing, he acted like he’d had enough and was getting bored of the case. He called one of his bodyguards and said, “Let’s end this right now. There’s no way to tell who’s telling the truth. Cut the baby in half and give a half to each woman.” As the guard drew his sword and walked towards the baby, the fake mother agreed with the decision, but the real mother screamed and threw herself between the guard and her son. She begged the judge, “No, my lord! Please, give the baby to this other woman. She can have him, but please don’t kill him!” In this way, the judge got to the heart of the matter and figured out who was telling him the truth. This is just one of many stories that survive to this day about how brilliant he was.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the person I’m talking about was Solomon the Wise. Solomon was the wealthiest and most powerful king of his period. His kingdom absolutely flourished under his guidance, and the Bible says that gold and silver became as common as stones in his kingdom during his reign. His wisdom was legendary and, more importantly for us, timeless. What he wrote down still has 100% application today. I’m using other sources as well, but he’s a big one. By learning what he learned, we can escape so much pain and get to the root of our problems almost as quickly as he got to the root of the dispute between mothers. I’ll leave you with one of his most relevant quotes for this book:

“Whoever trusts in their own heart is a fool, but the person who walks in wisdom will escape.”

-Proverbs 28:26 (LSB)

Foundations

Part 6

Stay Skeptical

If I was reading this book, I wouldn’t believe a lot of what it says. I don’t blame you if you’re HIGHLY skeptical. I don’t blame you if you read through this and think it’s too crazy to be true. I would think the exact same thing, except that I’ve lived out EVERYTHING I’m going to tell you about. Now that I know what to look for, I see it playing out again and again in so many other people’s lives, and it breaks my heart. That’s why I’ve written this book. Even having gone through it, sometimes it STILL seems too crazy to be true. So, remain skeptical, but please keep your heart and mind open to the possibility that what you’re reading is the way life really works. I think you’ll be glad you gave this book a chance.

… Back to my story. What I didn’t know about life until much later was that even though myself and everyone in my life all seemed to have a lot of differences, we were all living in violation of spiritual laws and suffering the consequences. What were we violating? We were all violating the laws that God has set in place for relationships and sexuality. The people in the stories from earlier, and the stories we’ll get to later all violated the same spiritual laws. You might be able to see the violation right away, or you might need to re-read the stories after you’ve finished this book. However, the violations are less important to focus on right now than the random, crazy consequences that they bring, that seem to come “from out of nowhere.” My goal is to help illuminate the cause-and-effect behind these unpredictable problems.

This book assumes the existence of God. It’s okay if you don’t believe in God right now, I didn’t either for a long time. But as I look back on my life and the way it kept getting worse and worse, falling apart and getting harder each year, in hindsight, I can see that it’s because I was smashing myself into the brick wall of God’s spiritual laws. So were all the people in my social circle. We were doing the spiritual equivalent of playing with live wires without realizing it.

Since this book is going to reference what God says in the Bible, and you might skeptical right now, let’s address the elephant in the room by talking about all the problems and “contradictions” that the Bible has.

When I initially read the Bible, I discarded it because of the contradictions I read. I felt like there might be some truth and wisdom in the book, but the “contradictions” were so glaring that I just gave up on reading. It wasn’t until years later that I received the answers.

One of God’s most unique traits is the ability to have two seemingly mutually exclusive things be true about Him at the same time. For those that don’t know, “mutually exclusive” means that if one thing is true, it rules out the other. For example, if a coin lands as heads, it can’t also be showing tails at the same time. And yet, this doesn’t work with God.

We see this throughout the Bible: two concepts or spiritual laws that are diametrically opposed and yet both true. For a long time, this seemed to indicate to me that the Bible was untrue because it was full of contradictions and things that on the surface can’t seem to be reconciled. For example, the Bible claims that God made each of us, but almost all of us were born with desires that God says are wrong… the God found in the Bible claims to be immensely kind, but we see suffering everywhere…. God in the Bible says He’s abounding in mercy, but the Bible also records instances of God’s severe justice, justice that often seems like swatting a fly with a hammer…. God claims to be compassionate, and yet He ordered genocides… and the thing that really made me discard the Bible for a long time were Jesus’s own words. In one place He’d claim He was X, and then in another place He’d say He wasn’t X!

We’re going to address some of these issues in this book. But in general, I’d like to offer you a different way of approaching God’s words. Instead of viewing these “contradictions” as problems, try viewing them as comparable to the properties of light. When scientists began trying to study light, they eventually were compelled to describe it as a “particle wave.” During certain tests, it showed qualities that were like a particle, but in other tests, the qualities were like a wave. They seemed mutually exclusive, and yet they both existed together. This was the first time we discovered that something can be both a particle and a wave. The Bible describes God as being “pure light, with no darkness at all.” So it shouldn’t be surprising that He exhibits, speaks, and does things that shouldn’t possibly work together or apply to the same situation, yet somehow they do.

You might also look at the fluctuations in your own personality to illustrate this. In some circumstances, or with some people, you’re probably super friendly and kind right off the bat. But with other people, or in other circumstances, a totally different side of you comes out. You’re not one-dimensional, and neither is God. God has a personality, a big one!

Another illustration that’s helpful for understanding these “contradictions” is that many spiritual truths/laws/principles have two sides to the same coin. There are times when one side applies and times when the other side applies. Wisdom and meditation on the principles are what help us get better and know when each side is applicable.

Here’s a helpful example: In the book of Proverbs, there are two proverbs back-to-back that are contradictory. The first says: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.” The very next proverb says, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.” - Proverbs 26:4 & 5 (LSB)

What can we learn from these two proverbs? They’re both right and mutually exclusive, right? I think the lesson can be summed up in the words of the brilliant engineer Fletcher Armstrong: “It means God wants us to use our brains.”

The Bible makes it clear that sometimes God even presents things that look like contradictions to weed out the people who don’t really want to be there or are there for the wrong reasons.

Now, that’s not to say you should ever take anything on blind faith! The Bible, as far as I can tell, never asks for blind faith. It asks for reasoned faith based on the evidence or based on God’s proven track record. Paul was one of God’s most prolific speakers and authors of the Bible. When Paul presented his case for Jesus to a new group of people who lived in a place called Berea, we’re told that they were more “noble-minded” because they listened to him, but also did the research to see if what He said was true. If this doesn’t shoot down blind faith and hold up reasoning and searching the evidence, I don’t know what does. God gave us a brain, and He wants us to use it.

If you’re like me and you can’t swallow a pill like the Bible until you get some satisfactory answers to some of the hard problems with it that I listed earlier, I’d highly recommend you make use of the website www.Gotquestions.org. When I was initially considering God, I had experienced some absolutely life changing miracles and supernatural “coincidences” that couldn’t be explained. But I also had a list of about 100 questions that I needed answers to before it would be possible for me to really believe. So, I started researching. But here’s the important part: I researched with an attitude that was open to accepting whatever the evidence would point to. Over a 6-month period, I was able to find satisfactory answers to about 95% of my questions. And I was also experiencing more and more of the Bible’s promises coming true for me, almost on a daily basis. This track record eventually persuaded me that the Bible, and the God described in it, can be trusted. There are still a very small number of questions that I don’t have answers to, but that’s become less and less of a problem for me because there were some real stumpers that actually turned out to not be so tricky at all, and I’ve had HUNDREDS of prayers answered and HUNDREDS of the Bible’s promises come true for me.

Not having all the answers is ok. In fact, it’s a part of life everywhere we look. If you take pretty much any field or discipline out there, and you interview the very foremost expert in that field, you’ll quickly realize that they have tons of unanswered questions. The more Einstein learned and discovered about math, the more questions he was left with. Did that make math untrue? Of course not. The more that doctors learn about the human body, especially our brains, the more questions this knowledge reveals. It’s good to have legitimate questions about the Bible, questions that require satisfactory answers before you can accept it. But I can also tell you that you will never have all the answers to all your questions, and at some point you’ll need to decide you’ve got enough answers to be able to make a decision.

So, when you read hard parts, don’t let them weed you out. Press on to find the answers. They’re there, and they’re worth the quest, and you’ll be rewarded for it!

Lesson 1

“Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.” – John Stonestreet

You’ve probably heard of Tony Robbins, a New York Times #1 bestselling author and massively successful life and business coach. His mentor, Jim Rohn gave highly sought-after advice about becoming happy and wealthy. Jim Rohn was born in the 1930s and became a millionaire at the age of 30. He later went bankrupt, lost everything, and then became a millionaire again. I think it’s safe to say he’d figured out “the formula.”

Jim Rohn explained that “our minds are like factories.” The ingredients that the factory uses to produce the economic, social, and financial fabric of our lives are what someone allows into the mind through books, television, social media, music, family, and acquaintances. He followed this with a coffee analogy: “If someone drops sugar into my coffee and I drink it, what happens? I’ll be fine. What happens if someone drops strychnine (poison) into my coffee? I’ll be dead! Now, what if my worst enemy drops sugar in my coffee? I’ll still be fine! What if my best friend accidentally drops strychnine into my coffee? I’ll still be dead! You’ve got to stand guard at the door of your minds!”

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I’m not great at math, but one thing I appreciate about it is that it’s TRUE. If you’re trying to calculate sending a rocket to the moon, or how to build a skyscraper that won’t collapse under its own weight, your math needs to be right. In other words, your calculations need to match reality. There’s only one set of calculations for getting a rocket to the moon, if launched from a specific spot with a specific weight. There’s no “your math” and “my math.” There’s only one math, and it’s universal.

If you’re launching a rocket or building a skyscraper and the math is really wrong, there will be almost instantaneous disaster. Really bad ideas are usually obvious. But if you’re sending that rocket to the moon and your navigational calculations are off by even 1%, that’s still going to mean the rocket will be off target by hundreds of miles. All that time and fuel will be wasted, and it will probably only become obvious too late.

Some math is easier for a novice like me to understand than others. Almost all of us can understand that 2+2=4, while calculating the surface of a triangle is something less of us know how to do. But in both cases, there is an objective truth. If you want to get a total of 4, you can’t add 2+1.

The entire universe is founded on math, calculations that always work. Math is an illustration that knows no language boundaries, that there are objective truths that govern our universe. We need to discover and apply these truths in order to calculate the trajectory of our lives or we’ll end up badly off course, with years wasted in futility. If we try to build our life on the wrong foundation of bad ideas and assumptions, it will collapse under its own weight, or when times get challenging.

My goal is to help you avoid not just the obvious bad ideas, but more importantly, the quiet, subtle ones that don’t show their problems until much later.

Lesson 2

Spiritual laws are for OUR GOOD. They’re to PROTECT US and HELP US.

At the time of writing this book, I’m in my early 40s. So is my significant other, T. But we both still have strong “rebellious teenagers” inside of us. The quickest way to get a reflexive “mental middle finger” type of response from either of us is if we think you’re telling us what to do or trying to control us. It’s not great, but life has conditioned us to be this way. By nature, I’m suspicious of laws and rules. I think I’m justified. So many of the rules and restrictions that have been put into place are there all because one person did something dumb at some point and now they’ve ruined it for everyone else. The experience that solidified this for me was a hike I took on a trail with 2 entrances, one at each end. My entrance had no signs. I hiked the entire thing, and it was fine. When I finished the hike I found that the other entrance had been closed off and had warning signs about how dangerous it was. I had just finished it, and I can assure you, the dangers it listed were very exaggerated. So many laws and restrictions in America are in place simply to cover someone else’s butt from getting sued! This has gotten reinforced even more every time I’ve been told, “no!” or “off limits!” by people who didn’t know my abilities or intentions. These rules are set by people, and people don’t always get it right.

T spent her young adulthood trapped in an abusive relationship. I spent 4 years in the military (which has its pros and cons but is basically an abusive relationship with the government). We were both told what to do, where to go, how to think, and what was off limits by people on power trips whose goal was most definitely not for us to thrive. It’s been painfully ingrained into us that rules and commands are not for our good, or they’re for morons with zero common sense.

But we have to discard that way of thinking when we come to spiritual laws. Spiritual laws are for our good, and they apply to everyone equally. They are 100% relevant to all of us, all the time.

Imagine a fence at a zoo, and behind the fence is a tiger. What is the fence’s purpose? To restrict the tiger? Well, yes, but the primary reason the fence is there is to PROTECT the people at the zoo from the tiger. Now imagine a much bigger area for that tiger. Say, a 5-acre cage. If you walked up to that cage, chances are you wouldn’t see the tiger. You’d just see some bars and some warning signs. If you ignored them and hopped the fence into the cage, you might even get a few minutes of enjoying the area while the hidden tiger stalked you. If someone else happened by and saw you enjoying life in that period, taking selfies in the cage, etc., they might be fooled into thinking the fence was dumb and out of date. But rest assured, the tiger is on its way. Spiritual laws can be the same way.

I live near the country, and a lot of my neighbors have chickens. At night, the chickens are put into a cage. Is the primary purpose of the cage to restrict the chickens’ freedom? No! The purpose of the cage is to protect the chickens from predators. Spiritual laws are for our protection.

I had this illustrated to me one day as I drove to work. I passed a large, fenced yard with a dog. It had plenty of room to run and exercise, but it did have some restrictions. There were places outside the fence it would have liked to go, but it couldn’t. Then, a few miles later, I saw a dog running right up the middle of a busy road, happy as it could be. No leash, no collar, no restrictions. It was totally free! But which of the dogs had an owner who really loved and cared about them? An owner who doesn’t place restrictions on a dog who lives by a busy highway doesn’t care about their dog. Just like the dog on the road is blind to the future and the realities of a car coming over the hill at 60 mph, we’re blind to our future and the realities of living outside of the safe parameters of spiritual laws.

As young adults, a lot of us fell into or will fall into the trap of thinking we know more than we do. Our minds are usually firing at top speed, we frequently know where an older person is going with something even before they’ve finished talking, and that can easily lead to a false sense of knowledge. Even the best and brightest people alive in the 1300s didn’t figure out what was causing the Black Plague. We need outside guidance from someone who sees the full picture. We can either believe we’re smart enough to figure things out or accept what God says about us. The Bible repeatedly refers to us as “children” and “sheep.”

Children’s brains are not fully developed, don’t have complete knowledge, and don’t have a big enough view of time. Our brains are not fully developed until the age of 25! Sheep are profoundly stupid, will keep doing the same thing and getting into the same trouble again and again, and are defenseless against predators unless they’re near the shepherd or in his “cage.” Having the right understanding of what we are is critical to avoiding destruction.

King David, one of the most prolific writers in the Bible, who was very close to God, said many times that he “loved” and “longed” for God’s rules. He asked God for more of His laws! He said that God’s laws were more valuable to him than gold, and in keeping them, there is a great reward! That’s because he had a correct view of them. They’re not to keep us from good things; they’re to keep us from things that look like they’re good but will hurt us.

Pastor Barrett Marshall illustrates this point another way: The “restrictions” God places on us are like the restrictions a rock climber experiences from the anchors his or her safety rope are attached to as they’re scaling a 1000-foot cliff. These restrictions aren’t there to arbitrarily limit us, they’re there to anchor us to our only source of safety - God! I’ve done enough rock climbing to know one thing: Everyone makes a mistake and falls eventually. The more points of contact you and the rope have to the rock, the less catastrophic a fall is, and the easier it is to pick back up where you left off.

Think of it this way: If you were going shark diving in a cage, how many bars would you want on that cage? Would you want the bars to be made of plastic or something more reliable, like steel? In the same way, God’s laws are tested and proven. They never fail. The more we know about them and practice them, the better.

Not only do God’s laws keep us safe, they instruct us so that our time and effort aren’t wasted. Working with God’s laws and principles instead of against them also sets us up for wonderful opportunities. Here’s a personal example. There’s a proverb that says, “Choose a good reputation over great riches” – Proverbs 22:1 (NLT). One day I read this and decided to take it to heart and start applying it. At work, I chose not to make extra money by charging people for something they didn’t really need; I started helping them save money. If I had the chance to name my price for a service or leave the price in the other person’s hands, I’d leave it with them and let them pay me whatever they thought it was worth.

Initially, I probably lost a little money, but over time, my reputation as being honest and not driven by profits opened up doors with very wealthy people who could have smelled a greedy person from a mile away. These wealthy people paid and tipped me more than I could have ever made on my own. Even better than that was just getting to spend time around wise, successful people and learn how they think, and how they saw the world. They gave me amazing stock and investing advice that would have cost me lots of money if I’d gone looking for it on my own. This all came from following a single-sentence spiritual principle!

Lesson 3

Before we move on to some of the spiritual laws that people frequently violate, we need to get one thing straight up front. God is GOOD.

God approves of and even likes good sex. God designed sex! He could have made another way for a man and woman to be intimate and reproduce, but He chose to make it something that’s absolutely magical.

The book of Proverbs was written by King Solomon, who was by far the wisest and wealthiest person of his time. Solomon had incredible insights and could understand things that almost no one else could. In the book of Proverbs, he listed 4 things that were so amazing, magical, and wonderful that he couldn’t fully understand. The last one, the most wonderful, is “How a man loves a woman” – Proverbs 30:19 (NLT)

There’s even an entire book of the Bible written about a man and woman romancing and being intimate with each other (Song of Songs). God approves of sex! If you still don’t believe me, hopefully, this quote from the Bible will convince you: “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.” - Proverbs 5:18 & 19 (ESV)

God loves to give His children good gifts. One of the very first things God says in the Bible is that “it is not good for the man to be alone” – Genesis 2:18 (NLT). God promises that He will not “withhold any good thing from those who walk with integrity” – Psalm 84:11 (NASB2020)

Please, if you’ve imagined an angry, harsh God with impossibly high rules, try to suspend that for now while you read this book. I think you’ll see a completely different God than you might have grown up knowing about.

Lesson 4

Spiritual laws are the highest laws.

Spiritual laws have characteristics of a “law” like gravity, a “law” like a speed limit sign, a “law” like mathematics, and also a principle (like you shouldn’t have all of your investments in the same stock). Violating them has real consequences. Sometimes, the consequence is immediate and severe, like walking off a cliff or being hit by a car. Other times, the visible consequences are almost imperceptible. Let’s refer to an earlier example. Imagine you’re doing the math to get a rocket to the moon but get a basic calculation off by 1%. Nothing visible would happen right away, but by the time the rocket should have been to the moon, it would be hundreds of miles off target. Calculating our lives with 99% truth is devastating because it can work for a while. It can take us years to realize just how off-course we are.

Finally, just like a speed limit sign has someone enforcing the law, so do spiritual laws. God sees what we do, and He knows how much we know. A violation of a spiritual law is called “sin.” You could also swap out the word “sin” with “wrongdoing.” Just like in a court of law, any violation of God’s law comes with penalties imposed by the judge, and intentional or pre-meditated violations come with more severe penalties. I’ll use speeding as an example, because I have plenty of experience with speeding tickets. All speeding is against the law, but someone who unknowingly violated the speed limit is usually going to receive a much lighter penalty than someone who passed a 65 mph sign and then blatantly gunned it up to 90. A first time, accidental offender is usually going to receive a very light fine, or possibly just a warning, while a repeat, flagrant offender is eventually going to get hammered. I can tell you from experience that this is exactly how God has worked in my own life.

Lesson 5

The Law of Reaping and Sowing: We reap what we sow. We reap more than we sow. We reap in a different season than we sow.

Spiritual laws almost always have a time delay. What we do or don’t do doesn’t always have an immediate, obvious effect. It’s like a seed that gets planted. Whatever good or bad we do will grow and will come back to us. But because we don’t see the impact right away, it’s very hard to analyze our mistakes and learn from them. I can look back and see now that a lot of the pain and futility I went through was from seeds that I’d sown 3-5 years earlier. Unfortunately, 3-5 years gives you a really long time to build a bad habit, incorrect coping pattern, or an addiction. Undoing 3-5 years isn’t so easy.

Making things even more confusing is that often, the immediate effect is opposite to what the long-term effect will be. For example, if I’m a salesman and I lie to a customer, often the immediate effect is that they buy my product, and my paycheck is bigger. So, unless I know about the reaping and sowing principle, lying gets reinforced since the immediate effect is desirable. Similarly, doing good or showing kindness often comes with a negative effect upfront. It costs us time and money. The people we’re trying to help aren’t grateful or don’t take our advice. Take for example, the people who initially fought against slavery. Most of them were initially really hated and abused and suffered death threats. Today we applaud them for doing the right thing, even though it was hard.

So, if the immediate effect of our action isn’t obvious or is the opposite of its long-term effect, it’s next to impossible to learn from our mistakes on our own. We need a map and an instruction manual.

“Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of men is fully set to do evil.” – Ecclesiastes 8:11 (ESV)

Lesson 6

The spiritual reward or consequence of action is often not in the same sphere as the action.

Before you read any further, you should really watch this short, mind-blowing video produced by NASA about the intricate connections between water currents and temperatures, and air currents and temperatures. It’s SO worth the 5 and a half minutes!

Or Click Here

Amazing, isn’t it? The Bible says that God built the universe by wisdom, and His design of the seas gives us a glimpse into that wisdom. It’s in our best interest to obtain as much wisdom and understanding as we can. Imagine you had the ability to tweak any 1 variable in the system you saw in that video, but not the understanding of how the system worked as whole. You’d be left with some significant, seemingly “random,” possibly even catastrophic problems downstream of the variable you changed. What I hope to convey in this book is the understanding that many things in our lives are just as interconnected as ocean temperature is to air currents. The choices we make in one area of our lives will definitely have impacts in others.

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My friend Tony was shot point-blank in the chest. When he told me the story later, he said he didn’t even think he’d been shot. He thought the gun jammed or fired a blank because he didn’t feel anything. It was only later, when he felt a pain in his lower back, that he realized it hadn’t been a misfire. The bullet had entered his chest, bounced around off his ribs, leaving a path of damage, and finally exited out his back, destroying his kidney in the process. But Tony never felt where the damage began, only the wetness of the exit wound. I think this can be a helpful illustration of how something lethal to us can enter our lives unnoticed, leave a trail of destruction, and the only thing we feel is the final effect in a completely different area than where the trouble began. The only difference is that we’re usually the ones pulling the trigger.

Here’s an example from my personal life. I worked at a gym where the owner constantly took advantage of the clients, lied to them about contracts, and then wouldn’t let them out of membership even when their contract had expired, and he was legally bound to do so. He’d tell potential employees that they had to complete a “shadowing period” where they’d basically watch other trainers and do menial tasks for free until he decided they were ready. But he’d be as slow as possible in deciding they were ready and string them along into providing free work for months!

I stood up for these trainer prospects and these clients. I’d secretly tell them what was going on so they’d know how to call him out and force him to treat them fairly. I didn’t have any other work prospects at the time, so I spent almost 7 years defending these people. Eventually, these clients got so fed up with my boss that they asked me to open my own gym. One of these people was a young client of mine who owned some real estate and had a lot of cash. He became my principal investor. Our agreement was that I’d be the head trainer and programmer while he handled the business/paperwork side of things.

I couldn’t possibly manage a gym all on my own, so we identified a new trainer who wasn’t established but seemed to be a genuine, good guy. He became the junior trainer. I was so excited about the prospects of working for myself that I poured all my savings into the project and took a pay cut so that we could offer services to lower-income people. Because of my watching out for members of my greedy, dishonest boss’s gym, we had a ton of members just chomping at the bit for us to get the gym open so they could switch over. My investment in relationships was paying off!

Things went great for a year. But then it started unraveling. My investor, who was very young and didn’t know the first thing about the way training worked, was constantly trying to tell me how to do my job. The junior trainer thought I was a slacker because I’d show up to teach my classes, do my admin work, and then leave, while he’d hang out there all day long. I thought I’d already paid my dues; they thought I was slacking. Of course, there’s a lot more to the story, and I was as much to blame as they were. Long story short, they eventually forced me out of the business. I had worked for years and years building relationships with the people who had been our starting client base, and I had sacrificed everything financially, and in the end, I was pushed out and left with nothing! I had no savings and was absolutely humiliated within the fitness community.

I couldn’t understand what had happened until years later when I read this verse: “…if you do, you will lose your honor and will lose to merciless people all you have achieved. Strangers will consume your wealth, and someone else will enjoy the fruit of your labor” - Proverbs 5:9 & 10 (NLT).

What was the cause of all this? What was the warning right before the consequences that were listed? The warning was to stay far away from “the forbidden woman” (more on this topic later.) What had I been doing? I’d been sleeping with another trainer who was still married. She’d initially told me she was separating, but as the months became years, she never did, and I didn’t care. Her husband sounded like a good guy, and he worked a lot of long hours to provide for his family. But he wasn’t around much, and he’d let himself go. I thought if her husband couldn’t appreciate what he had and satisfy her, that was his loss, and I’d be happy to give her what she was missing.

I wasn’t naïve. I realized what I was doing was risky because I might have to deal with an angry husband at some point. So we took a lot of precautions to avoid that, and he never found out. I thought I had played the perfect game. I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought God wasn’t real because “nothing was happening.” But God had seen everything. The punishment was exactly how the Bible described it. The loss of everything I’d worked so hard for professionally was my “exit wound.”

Proverbs 22:14 (LSB), “The mouth of strange women is a deep pit; He who is cursed of Yahweh will fall into it.”

Proverbs 5: 8-10 (NLT), “Stay away from her! Don’t go near the door of her house! If you do, you will lose your honor, and will lose to merciless people all you have achieved. Strangers will consume your wealth, and someone else will enjoy the fruit of your labor.”

Psalm 94:7 (NLT) says, “‘The Lord isn’t looking,’ they say.” (speaking of fools)

Lesson 7

We have to use the right words

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that specific words will really add clarity or muddy the waters. Using one word to describe something can make it sound a lot worse than it is, while another word for the same thing can make it seem a lot less serious than it is. I’m sure you’ve heard this happen in a political debate at some point.

A non-political example is “pickleball.” The name makes it sound like a fun, innocuous, completely safe sport. But as a trainer, I’ve seen more pickleball injuries than I have ever seen happen with golf, rock climbing, or even CrossFit! I think the name has a lot to do with the number of injuries. Because the name is so fun and innocent, no one takes it seriously and warms up enough before they start. How could something as cute sounding as “pickleball” possibly be dangerous?

We have a lot of words ingrained into our use that sound innocent and fun, that disguise the truth. “Spent the night,” “hooked up,” “made a new connection,” “testing the chemistry,” “indiscretion,” “affair,” “situationship,” etc. That’s how I talked. The language seemed fun, just like what I was doing. But God calls this something else, and He has very strong laws set in place against this. God calls all of this “sexual immorality.” God’s design for sexual activity is for one woman and one man in a lifetime commitment of marriage. Everything else falls under the umbrella of “sexual immorality.” Under that category we have a few other words. “Adultery.” You know what that is. “Fornication” sounds a lot more serious than “casual sex” or “spent the night,” doesn’t it? We’ll talk more about sexual immorality later in the book.

The truest thing we can know about anything is what God says about it. What I’ve come to learn is that when God takes something seriously, I’m only going to hurt myself if I take it less seriously than He does.

Lesson 8

Let’s get back to the topic
of breaking God’s laws.

“What we do in our corner
of the pool is just between us”

For a long time, I thought that if an activity was between two consenting adults and didn’t hurt anybody, there should be no rule against it. What I’ve come to realize too late is that sin always, always, ALWAYS hurts us and someone else, too. That’s why God sets laws against it. The laws are for our own good and safety. Just because we don’t see immediate consequences and can’t foresee all the ramifications of our sin doesn’t in any way make it less true that ALL SIN EVENTUALLY HURTS INNOCENT VICTIMS. Sometimes, it’s obvious and happens right away; sometimes, it happens off in the distance, beneath the surface. But if we’ve planted the seed of sin, we WILL reap its fruit. Like in my case, we may not even realize it. But it always happens. God tells us that “Sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death” – James 1:15 (ESV)

This death happens in a lot of different ways. At first, it could be metaphoric, like the death of a dream. The death of the respect that people have for us. The death of a good relationship with family or the death of a friendship. But if we keep continuing down the path of sin, it ultimately leads to actual death unless God intervenes.

My adultery led initially to the death of my business, the death of the respect I’d built in the fitness community, and the death of friendships. It led to the death of the family unit that my partner’s husband had worked so hard to provide for. It led to the death of my partner’s 11-year-old son’s childhood, as he saw his family disintegrate in divorce. It also led to the conception of a child. A child we couldn’t allow to be discovered. A child that had to die to cover up what we were doing.

What had started as an activity between two consenting adults eventually led to the actual death of an innocent person.

You may be thinking to yourself, “Well, you obviously got what you deserved. I’m not going to be doing anything nearly that bad. I’m just dipping my toe in the shallow end and staying put.” That’s what I thought, too. But sin has a few other qualities you need to know about.

Lesson 9

So, why do we sin?

Sin, when we boil it down always comes from believing one or more of the following lies: The first lie is that we cannot be satisfied living God’s way, that we need something else. The second lie is that a choice we’re going to make is good for us when it’s actually not. The third lie is that God is withholding something good from us.

Sin is almost always a healthy desire that’s been warped, chased the wrong way, chased outside of God’s design, or used unapproved methods to achieve it. Sex Is Good! Having a person to love is good! But if it’s not lined up with God’s design or timing, that good thing becomes bad and will hurt us and other people.

Lesson 10

God is INCREDIBLY loving, kind,
patient, and merciful.

Let’s take a break from sin in this lesson and talk more about God.

Here’s a personal story: Early on, when I was dating T, she came to my hometown for a visit and to meet my family for the first time. I’d just moved back into town, but right when I moved, the Covid-19 quarantine began, and I was living with my family during the lockdown. Even though both T and I were nearly 40, I had to honor their rules because I was living in my parent’s house. I was trying to prepare her for the difference she’d experienced from when we’d been living alone as adults versus living in their house. Some of the rules seemed really strict to T. I agreed, but the difference was that I knew my parents, and she didn’t.

Because she didn’t know them, all she really knew about them were the rules. I’d try to tell her things about how loving they were, how much they cared about me, etc., but she couldn’t get past the rules and decided my parents were really harsh. I begged her to come visit, but she kept delaying the trip because she had the wrong idea. Eventually, she came and begrudgingly met them, and after a week, she had to admit that she’d totally misjudged who she thought they were going to be. It was only after she’d met them that she could see their rules in the right light.

This is EXACTLY how most people view God when they haven’t experienced Him (more on this later). Viewing God’s rules without knowing the amazing, kind, compassionate, loving, but firm Father behind them will give anyone a totally distorted view of God. What’s worse, this distorted view of God will drive people away from Him and make them miss out on a love so deep and powerful it can’t even be described!

Before I met Jesus, for a long time, I viewed God as angry, harsh, cruel, and impossibly demanding. It wasn’t until I actually MET Jesus that I understood. God is the judge of the universe. He has to be completely just and fair, and that means that He has to punish wrongdoing. I’ve even heard a philosopher posit that if God WASN’T completely just and fair, He’d cease to be God at all!

But at the same time as that side of the coin exists, the other side is that God’s default disposition is kindness, love, and mercy. Just like a kind human parent, He doesn’t enjoy punishing. He rarely drops the hammer right away, especially if we don’t know what we’re doing. He gives us time and then even more time to learn from our mistakes and correct our ways.

The problem is that His kindness and patience are mistaken for weakness or non-existence. God distinguishes between sins of ignorance, where we legitimately didn’t know any better, versus deliberate sins. But His spiritual laws are still in place no matter what, and crossing the line repeatedly will eventually result in walking off the cliff. Isaiah 26:10 (ESV) tells us: “If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness.”

This is how God describes Himself to a nation that was flagrantly sinning that He warned. I can tell you from experience that it’s true:

“Don’t tear your clothing in your grief, but tear your hearts instead. Return to the Lord your God, for He is merciful and compassionate, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. He is EAGER to relent and not punish” - Joel 2:13(NLT)

God also says this about Himself: “All day long I held out my hands to a rebellious people, but they followed their own evil paths and their own crooked schemes” - Isaiah 65:2 (NLT)

In the book of Ezekiel, God is begging the same people and says to them, “Why should you die, O people of Israel? I don’t want you to die! Turn back and live!” - Ezekiel 18:31 & 32 (NLT)

So how does God reconcile His demand for Justice and fairness with His boundless love and compassion for us, His creation? Keep reading to find out.

Lesson 11

“Insanity is repeating the same thing
and expecting a different result.”

I learned about Jenny and Nick through a friend. They’re a couple who met in college. They were both living in dorms, but after they met, they decided to move in together. At first, they could only afford a small duplex. It wasn’t great, but they were having a good time together. Eventually, they saved up enough money and signed a lease for a bigger house that wasn’t attached to another unit. They called their friends, and everyone showed up to help them load up the trailer they’d rented. Once it was loaded, they started driving to the new place across town. On the drive there, a car veered into their lane. Nick reflexively avoided the car, but the motion, along with the momentum and weight of the trailer, caused them to lose control, go off the road, and into a ditch. Nick and Jenny were ok, but the trailer and about half their belongings were destroyed, and the truck was badly damaged. They only had the lowest level of car insurance, and the other driver is long gone, so they’re left with the entire cost to deal with.

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Blaine and Devontae are in their early 20s and have been together since high school. They just want to have fun and enjoy life. They try to mind their own business, and they hate drama, but drama always seems to find them! Rent is high, so to save money, they only have one car. But it keeps having problem after problem. The latest problem was an oil leak that forced them to stop on the side of the road. After 2 hours of hoping someone would pull over and help them, no one did. So, Devontae had to go walk 3 miles to the nearest store to pick some up. They didn’t have money to get the car towed.

These two guys started out as fun, chill dudes in high school. But over the past few years, all the problems and struggles have taken their toll. They’re under some kind of stress almost all of the time. This has made them get snappy and bitter, and who could blame them after all the problems they keep going through? Of course, this defensive attitude has turned off a lot of well-meaning people who would have helped them, which only reinforces their general bitterness. They didn’t ask for any of this. All they want is a drama-free life.

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Here’s the lesson, what these two stories have in common:

“Whoever loves transgression loves strife.” - Proverbs 17:19 (NKJV)

In today’s language, that would read as “whoever loves sin loves drama” or “whoever loves sinning loves problems.”

The two things can’t be separated. Manure comes with flies, actions come with reactions, choices come with consequences, and sin comes with worse and worse drama. When we’re living outside of God’s spiritual laws, bad thing after bad thing, problem after problem finds their way to us.

Now, you might be thinking something along the lines of “wow, is this guy really saying that two different instances of car problems are caused by some kind of living arrangement he disagrees with? What a lunatic!” And I would have thought the exact same thing 20 years ago. But here’s the thing. When I was in my 20s and early 30s, I was plagued by problem after problem with my vehicle, or my living situation, or out-of-the-blue financial issues, or other random problems. In my 20s, it sucked. By my mid-30s, it sucked worse, but I was so used to these problems that they had sort of become like the sound of an ambulance in New York City. But then, after 15+ years of that drama and stress, it suddenly “went silent.” And it stayed silent. Problems stopped happening. Instead of random problems happening at the worst possible time, random GOOD things started happening to me. And unlike in the past when the good things eventually turned out to be bad things, these good things stayed and were ACTUALLY good. Believe me, when you’ve been in NYC for 15 years, you notice when the city suddenly goes silent. When you’ve lived all of your adult life dealing with one thing after another like waves of the ocean, you notice when the ocean stops moving!

The only variable that changed was that I’d started following God’s laws about sex, dating and relationships. Now, I’m not making the claim that all random problems are caused by sin. God is very clear that’s not the case. Life will always come with some problems. But when we live outside of God’s laws, we’re setting ourselves up for a non-stop-conveyor-belt of problems!

Lesson 12

“Sin costs us more than we want to pay, takes us further than we want to go, and keeps us longer than we want to stay.”

Imagine you’re shopping for a car, and you have a pretty small budget. You tell the sales guy at the dealership what your budget is, and he nods and takes you over to a brand-new Maserati. Then he tells you, “You can afford this! Don’t worry about the price. Just sign here, and we’ll send you a bill sometime later. I can’t tell you when the bill will come, or how much it’ll be, but you can totally afford this. Trust me!”

Many physical actions we take are the equivalent of signing a contract in the spiritual realm. If we don’t know the terms or the price of the contract, we will end up bankrupt or worse.

We all know someone with a massive character flaw who just can’t see it. Maybe someone who has pride radiating from them like steam comes off a pile of manure. If we’re not greedy, a greedy person can be appalling. But the greedy person doesn’t see anything wrong with it. They might label it as having a high standard of living.

Someone who wants to climb the corporate ladder and is willing to pull anyone above them down to climb over them might describe themselves as “driven.” What we’ve all witnessed is sin’s blinding property. It’s easy to recognize sin in other people and how bad it’s gotten. But it’s next to impossible to see it accurately in ourselves. Being greedy doesn’t “feel bad” to a greedy person. The Bible says that “the heart is more deceitful than anything else, and desperately sick” – Jeremiah 17:9 (NASB2020).

So, we can’t trust our hearts. You’ve probably seen this in other people’s lives; please believe that it is happening to you, too!

Sin’s other qualities are that it’s addictive and hardening. Sin is like a drug: over time, we need more of it and have to do worse things to get what we want. Here are a few analogies that might help, that I’ve experienced firsthand. The first is that of a spiral staircase going downward. Step number 1 is a very innocent-looking little thing. Step number 2 is almost as innocent but provides a bigger payoff of whatever it is we want. Step number 3 isn’t so innocent, and the very bottom step, step number 10 is something terrible. Before we get on the staircase, we all tell ourselves, “I’d never go down to step 10! Not even step 6! I just want to experience step 1. If I don’t like it, I’ll go right back up the stairs.” But each time we go down the steps, that terrible thing doesn’t look quite as terrible anymore. Nobody goes to a house party with plans to be a crack addict living on the street; it happens one step down at a time.

Ren Williams takes this analogy further and describes this as being more like an escalator. Sin offers us a quicker, easier way of getting to whatever we want, but once we’ve taken a few steps down, retracing our steps and getting back off takes a lot of effort or becomes practically impossible.

Another analogy is of muck in a swamp. Once we step into the muck, each step only gets us more and more stuck. And just like someone struggling to get their feet out of a swamp, we will attract predators to us. These predators don’t usually look like predators; they usually show up in disguise and offer us “help,” which eventually leaves us deeper in the swamp and more hurt than before. There is no such thing as dabbling in sin.

Remember: with sin, we don’t get to choose the price we’ll pay. We’re presented with something we want, and later, sin will present us with the bill. The first price might even be something we don’t mind paying, but that’s just the first installment. The bill just keeps coming.

Lesson 13

“Pleasure is the bait of sin” - Plato

“The devil never presents a man with a dish he doesn’t love.” – Unknown, relayed by Father Spyridon.

This isn’t to say that all pleasure is wrong! The Bible says that God has given us everything to richly enjoy. But there is a right and a wrong way to get and enjoy things. The Bible often describes sin and its consequences in terms of hunting. The Bible describes sin as a predator that’s sexually aroused by the hunt, who’s crouching right outside our door. Almost no predator pounces right away; they let the prey get closer and closer. A good predator is going to use bait that’s tailor-made to their specific prey. If we’re greedy, we’re going to be given the foolproof money-making opportunity. If our weakness is sex, we’re going to have the most delicious person, who’s almost tailor-made to our preferences, presented to us. But the opportunity or the person will require us to cross a line we know we shouldn’t, and that’s where the trap springs.

In my dating life, I noticed that when I was single, getting a date was harder. But as soon as I committed to someone and they felt safe with me, all kinds of other women would suddenly come around and be interested in me. I thought that was just because I was more relaxed and confident and that women are subconsciously drawn to scarce commodities, not realizing there was something deeper at play. Something designed to make me take the bait and destroy the heart of the person who thought I was committed to her.

Sin is something good or pleasing in a circumstance that’s off-limits. It’s always a trap. Until we acknowledge that WE are the prey, we’ll keep falling into the trap.

Bible example of how the hunt works:

“I saw some naive young men,
and one in particular who lacked common sense.
He was crossing the street near the house of an immoral woman,
strolling down the path by her house.
It was at twilight, in the evening,
as deep darkness fell.
The woman approached him,
seductively dressed and sly of heart.
 She was the brash, rebellious type,
never content to stay at home.
She is often in the streets and markets,
soliciting at every corner.
She threw her arms around him and kissed him,
and with a brazen look she said,
“I’ve just made my peace offerings
and fulfilled my vows.
You’re the one I was looking for!
I came out to find you, and here you are!
My bed is spread with beautiful blankets,
with colored sheets of Egyptian linen.
I’ve perfumed my bed
with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
Come, let’s drink our fill of love until morning.
Let’s enjoy each other’s caresses,
for my husband is not home.
He’s away on a long trip.
 He has taken a wallet full of money with him
and won’t return until later this month.[a]”

So she seduced him with her pretty speech
and enticed him with her flattery.
He followed her at once,
like an ox going to the slaughter.
He was like a stag caught in a trap,[b]
awaiting the arrow that would pierce its heart.
He was like a bird flying into a snare,
little knowing it would cost him his life.” - Proverbs 7:7-23 (NLT)

In the above verse, the stag and the bird falling into the trap weren’t thinking about a trap. They thought they were the ones on the hunt for food, but something worse was out there, looking for them.

Notice how the woman told the man exactly what he wanted to hear, that he was special and she’d been looking for someone like him. If you’re being hunted, you’ll be presented with enticing bait. Someone who really likes your jokes, smiles at you just right, gives you the respect you have been lacking, or just “gets you” in a way no one else ever has. They’ll be perfect, but…

You’ll just have to cross a line to get to them.

Just to reiterate, an attractive member of the opposite sex giving us attention can be a genuinely good thing. God made sex, He made attraction, He made the way of a man and woman romancing each other, etc., but the circumstance of her being married turns this good thing into a bad thing.

Let’s take a physical example to illustrate a spiritual concept: In nature, rats are notoriously cautious and hard to trap. You can often put a rat’s favorite bait in a trap, and the rat won’t ever fall for it. But one of the most effective methods of catching rats is something called a “Judas Trap.” Rats’ biggest weakness seems to be that they’re social. In this trap, a “bait” rat is placed in a box with mesh screens so it can see out and other rats can see in. Attached to the box is a tunnel. The tunnel goes right up to the screen. So, the “prey” rat can enter the tunnel and see one of its friends living its best life in the box right ahead. But, halfway down the tunnel is a pressure plate that the prey rat must walk over. When it does, the trap snaps, and the rat dies. Of course, the prey rat is the first to die, but just because nothing bad has happened to the bait rat yet doesn’t mean it’s going to get away. It’ll just be the last to go.

In this example, the hunter leverages its prey’s preferences against it. It also leverages physical principles within the trap: energy stored in coiled springs, gravity, etc. In the same way, we can have spiritual principles leveraged against us through our desires. And just like it looked like the bait rat was living its best life, we can observe someone who has crossed a spiritual line and hasn’t had the consequences of their actions catch up with them and mistake that for an absence of the principle. Sometimes, the “human bait rat” may already be suffering consequences, but because of shame, they won’t acknowledge the hurt. Instead, they’ll project an attitude that everything is fine or is going to be fine. A wrongly placed positive attitude can be deadly.

(This is slightly off-topic, but this is why the “Law of Attraction” can be so harmful. As we suffer spiritual consequences, we’re encouraged to put our heads in the sand and tell ourselves and other people that everything is great.)

Here’s another description and warning about sin’s deliciousness and its final price:

“Don’t you realize that from the beginning of time,
ever since people were first placed on the earth,
the triumph of the wicked has been short lived
and the joy of the godless has been only temporary? – Job 20:4-5 (NLT)

…

“They enjoyed the sweet taste of wickedness,
letting it melt under their tongue.
They savored it,
holding it long in their mouths.
But suddenly the food in their bellies turns sour,
a poisonous venom in their stomach.
They will vomit the wealth they swallowed.
God won’t let them keep it down.
They will suck the poison of cobras.
The viper will kill them.
They will never again enjoy streams of olive oil
or rivers of milk and honey.
They will give back everything they worked for.
Their wealth will bring them no joy. – Job 20:12-18 (NLT)

Proverbs 20:17 (NLT) says, “Stolen bread is sweet, but it turns to gravel in the mouth.”

Forbidden things absolutely have more pleasure for a short time, but the final price is unbearable.

“The lips of a forbidden woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil. But in the end she is as bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.” - Proverbs 5:3-4 (ESV)

An interesting thing to point out is that the word “wormwood” in the Ukrainian language is “Chernobyl.” To me, and probably anyone else who’s seen the HBO miniseries about it, Chernobyl is synonymous with radiation and radiologic contamination. Radiation, even at harmful levels doesn’t come with a noticeable feeling. The damage happens silently. Once someone’s ingested even a small radiological substance, it stays inside a person’s body, causing ongoing damage that can’t be undone. A forbidden partner is as bitter as radiation, and once you notice the damage, it’s way too late to stop it.

Another way that sin gets us is through lies. The lie might be words, but it’s more frequently in the way something is presented. What’s the best way to sell a lie? Wrap it in something helpful or good. Tell 99% truth, and sneak in 1% falsehood. It’s even more effective if the source has told you nothing but the truth and been nothing but helpful to you for a time first.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I was growing in ability and in freedom. I had to answer to fewer and fewer people and was basically able to chart my own course in life. I really felt like the world was mine for the taking, like it was my playground. What I didn’t learn until it was too late is that the world is a lot closer to a minefield than a playground. Until you learn to view the world this way, you’ll encounter so much needless pain.

But it’s not just a passive minefield. It’s more dangerous than that. We live in a predatory world, and humans are not at the top of the spiritual food chain. You have a hunter. Your hunter is cunning. Your hunter has lived much longer than you. Your hunter knows your preferences and your weaknesses. And your hunter HATES you, hates your family, and hates your friends enough to be patient with how he destroys you. His name is Satan, and his preferred weapon is lies. He’s a master at weaving enough truth, and even helpfulness, into a lie or an idea to get us to take the bait. These lies can come from other people, or they can be our own thoughts. Incorrect thoughts or ideas that we accept as true and that we make decisions based on are one of his favorite methods for hurting and eventually destroying us.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, the Count seeks revenge on his adversary, Fernand. Instead of just killing Fernand outright, the Count pours all his intellect and resources into hurting Fernand as much as possible first. He orchestrates a fake ambush for Fernand’s son, Albert. The Count then shows up just in time and “rescues” him. The Count befriends Albert, spoils him, flatters him, takes him on trips, lets him in on “secrets,” and over time he turns Albert against his father. This is a perfect example of the strategy and methods Satan uses against us.

Lesson 14

Fire Illustration

God describes lust and sex in terms of fire. A fire in a fireplace (marriage) is amazing. It warms the whole house, and you want to be near it. But that same fire outside of the fireplace will destroy everything.

“Can a man carry fire next to his chest and not have his clothes burned?” – Proverbs 6:27 (ESV), talking about loving the forbidden woman.

“That would be a fire that burns all the way to hell. It would wipe out everything I own.” – Job 31:12 (NLT), speaking about what would happen if he lusted after someone besides his wife.

Lesson 15

God’s amazing design for love,
sex and marriage.

God’s design is simple and beautiful. Sex is a fire, a benefit, and a responsibility that is reserved and only “lawfully” available for a man and woman who love each other enough to commit to each other for life through a covenant before God.

Think of how amazing this is! God’s design is for two people to have the safety of knowing the other one is there for the long run and will be committed when things get hard. God’s design is that within this framework, this intimacy is reinforced through an amazing, magical experience of incredible pleasure that bonds the two people together more and more. Of all the ways “reproduction” could happen, only a wonderfully kind Being would make it happen in such a beautiful, pleasurable, incredible way!

For a lot of my adulthood, I thought love basically equaled compatibility + infatuation + how much we like spending time together. What I didn’t learn until later is that while all those things are found in love, God’s version of love is so much bigger and better than those things. When we operate in God’s kind of love, we move from “what can you do for me/how can you make me feel?” into a place where we care more about the other person’s welfare than our own. It’s giving. It’s self-sacrificing. Marriage, done God’s way, isn’t about “what I get from you and you get from me?” it’s about “How can I help you thrive and grow? How can I serve you?” When we truly love like this, we learn the truth of what God says, that “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” - Acts 20:35 (LSB)

It’s this framework of safety and security and commitment, with this kind of love, that the act of intimacy is meant to exist in. Intimacy bonds two people, and God’s framework of marriage is what He designed for our safety, to make sure this bond is a blessing and not a source of wounding.

Fletcher Armstrong also points out that God’s design is holistic. “God put sex, love, marriage, children, etc… all together in one pot. Satan tries to get us to separate and compartmentalize all this, to our hurt. He wants us to think you can have sex with someone you don’t love, you can raise a child well without a partner, and so on.” The original Greek word that we get “Satan” from is “Diabolos,” meaning “one who divides and separates.” The first step in “divide and conquer” is “divide.”

I can’t think of anyone who grew up in a broken home who would recommend it or say it was ideal. While some parents may have had no choice but to leave a toxic partner, almost everyone I know who grew up with only one parent figure feels they lost something important. And they’re right. When we allow love, sex, romance, marriage, and family to be divided and compartmentalized, it will profoundly hurt people at some point. In God’s perfect design, each element helps to strengthen and protect the others.

Lesson 16

Just because we have the physical ability to do something doesn’t mean we’re ready to do it in a way that won’t hurt people.

It’s natural to start thinking at some point that it’s unreasonable of God to give people sex drives as teenagers but not allow them to explore and expect them to wait years potentially to fulfill those urges in marriage. For a while, I thought it seemed pretty cruel to give someone urges and then tell them they can’t act on them. But this is the wrong way of looking at it. Sex is GOOD in the right context. Amazingly good. But it’s as dangerous as fire, and in the wrong context it’s not only not good, it will destroy lives.

To illustrate this, picture a rich father with a young son. Let’s say he’s around 14 years old, had an early growth spurt, and is about the size of an adult. This son has older brothers who are the exact same height as him, who are all driving Ferraris. He desperately wants to drive one and thinks that if his dad loved him as much as he says, he should get a Ferrari, too! But it’s precisely BECAUSE his dad loves him that he doesn’t give him one. The son isn’t ready for it yet. The son may have the right size, strength, and reflexes required to handle the car, but because 14-year-olds are impulsive and immature, giving this son one wouldn’t be a good gift. In fact, it would be a terrible gift! The son couldn’t handle all that horsepower responsibly and would inevitably hurt himself or someone else. And just like the son can’t really recognize his own level of immaturity/lack of readiness, we usually can’t either.

One reason that waiting to have desires fulfilled is actually helpful to us is because they spur us on to improve ourselves and build a life ready to receive the things we hope for. A young man waiting for marriage is motivated to become a person someone would want to marry, with a profession, skills, a home, etc.

“A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on” – Proverbs 16:26 (ESV)

Lesson 17

Soul Ties.

“I hate everything about you, why do I love you!?
You hate everything about me, why do you love me!?”
– Three Days Grace

Here’s another truth that took me a long time to learn. There’s no such thing as casual sex. There’s no such thing as sex without consequences. Sex always has a price. Those are so important I have to repeat them. There is no such thing as casual sex. There is no such thing as sex without consequences. Sex always has a price. One of the biggest consequences is something known as a soul tie.

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“Misty” is a working professional in her early 40s. She’s doing great professionally and financially, which is even more impressive because she used to be an alcoholic. She got clean in AA, which is where she met her boyfriend of 7 years, who had also gotten sober. Getting clean was an amazing thing to have in common, and they were great support for each other. After a few months of dating, they’d moved in together. A few months later, the trouble began.

Misty’s boyfriend relapsed. He hid this and then covered his behavior with lie after lie. He was good, and it worked for a while, but eventually Misty realized what was going on. Because she had first-hand knowledge of the battle that he was facing, she was willing to cut him some slack and be supportive. But his behavior got worse. Not only was he going on serious benders and wasting tons of their money, but he started cheating on her too.

One of the real special highlights came when he took her car, and her dog in the middle of a snowstorm and disappeared on her for a whole day. She later found out he’d gone to another city to sleep with another woman and left HER DOG in HER CAR the whole time. She’s tried to cut it off with him, time after time, but just can’t do it. She always ends up taking him back. Even though she’s a very bright, rational, successful professional, she’s lost nearly all her friends because they’re so sick of hearing about this loser guy she just won’t cut the cord and detach from!

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Science tells us that when we have sex, powerful reward chemicals (Dopamine) are released by both partners in massive quantities. There’s also a huge release of bonding chemicals: Oxytocin for women and Vasopressin for men. This brands the place and person we had sex with into our brains and bodies. That’s the science of it, but I don’t believe science can possibly paint the whole picture of a spiritual reality. Science can attempt to tell us WHY a sunset is beautiful (the scattering and bouncing of light off air molecules…), but it can’t convey the experience of a sunset at all. Science can attempt to convey why we fall in love and become attached, but a release of chemicals is only part of it. It doesn’t begin to do justice to the experience of love and attachment.

I think most people know of someone intelligent and discerning who “had a one-night stand” with someone (remember, this is called Immorality and Fornication by God). For this example, I’ll use a bright young woman in college, taking a guy home from the bar. The guy was probably hot, funny, witty, or just giving her the attention she wanted. Not relationship material, but good enough to satisfy a need for the night. Then, inevitably, one or both people “got feelings” for each other. I did it all the time in my 20s, and so did everybody else I knew. We’d joke about it and try to avoid it. But it would eventually happen. The two people would inevitably spend time with each other and recognize serious flaws in each other. These flaws would get worse and worse and cause all kinds of pain and problems. Eventually, the one getting hurt the most would decide to leave and cut all contact. But then, somehow, the other person would convince them that they’d changed or something like that.

All the girl’s friends would tell her she deserved someone better and she should just cut him off. She agreed. She was smart. She wasn’t like this! She’d try to cut him off, yet somehow, she’d give him another chance. He’d hurt her again, and the cycle would continue. Somehow, they’d get more and more entangled despite every effort to the contrary by both parties.

This happened to me! I would hurt someone badly and realize I was no good for them. I’d try to stay away, but for some reason, I was drawn back to them. I’d give them a pathetic apology or story about how I’d learned or improved. Anyone with a brain could see right through my story, and I knew it. But these bright, successful, self-confident women who otherwise had a lot of dignity would always take me back even though all their friends were screaming at them not to! I knew I should stay away for their sake, but I just couldn’t! They knew they should stay away, but they couldn’t either! What was going on?

This experience is so powerful that the comedian Nikki Glasser, who’s known for comedy routines talking about all the people she’s slept with, said on an interview that she even tried to stop having sex for a while because she kept developing such strong feelings for her partners, and it would hurt her terribly when they’d leave. Take it from “Misty,” Nikki and me: you can’t willpower yourself out of the attachment you get during sex. We’ve tried! This soul-tying experience is so reliable that it’s even a tool used by abusers! During the writing of this book, I spoke to two different women who had abusers use the attachment that sex brings to “trap” them into staying in their abusive relationships.

The Bible told us thousands of years ago what science is now confirming: when we have sex with someone, they become a part of us, and we become a part of them. The phrase “being attached” is more accurate than most people know. The Bible says: “Don’t you realize that if a man joins himself to a prostitute, he becomes one body with her? For the scriptures say ‘the two are united into one’” - 1 Corinthians 6:16 (NLT). This explains why otherwise smart, rational people get stuck with people who are hurting or destroying them. Telling ourselves we won’t have contact with a person and won’t go back to them after sex is like saying we won’t have any more contact with our arm or leg!

Of course, the more people we have sex with, the more soul ties we get. The more lives we can hurt, the more hurt we can get ourselves. This is why God says, “Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body” - 1 Corinthians 6:18 (NLT). Fortunately, when we come to Jesus, God can cut soul ties. He did for me!

Lesson 18

Other forms of ties.

“And I find something more bitter than death: The woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her.”
- Ecclesiastes 7:26 (ESV)

Several multi-millionaires and billionaires were asked about the biggest contributor to their success. Their advice for aspiring entrepreneurs might be unexpected: choose your life partner wisely. They reasoned that a spouse is the person you will spend the most time on earth with. Having the right one provided them with the support, stability, and understanding needed to grow their businesses.

So, if getting attached to the right person is the number one indicator for financial success, it stands to reason that getting attached to the wrong person would play a huge factor in bringing failure and misery into our lives.

Here’s some advice: Instead of asking yourself, “Who do I want to spend the night with?” Ask yourself, “Who do I want to be stuck with?” Because this will happen when you least want it.

Remember when I told you that we don’t get to choose sin’s price? One of sin’s prices is often a connection with someone we REALLY don’t want to be connected with. We’ve already covered Soul Ties, but there’s more. God designed sex to be the ultimate unifying, bonding act. The crown of intimacy between husband and wife. This bonding aspect of sex can’t be shut off, so choosing your partner is one of the most important decisions of your life.

“All of the good choices about sex happen before sex. After sex, the choices we’re left with are bad, worse, and worst.” – Pam Stenzel

What I thought was one night, and was determined to only be one night, often led to months and sometimes years of unwanted connection. Speaking from the guy’s perspective, here are just a few of the things that can come from a soul tie with the wrong person:

-Bad:

They may like you a lot more than you like them, or you may fall hard for them and not have it reciprocated. I’ve been stalked at work and home repeatedly by women I didn’t care about (and would be totally ashamed to have anyone know I’d been with). The poor girl was stuck really caring about someone who didn’t care about her at all, even though I’d told her everything she wanted to hear at the moment.

-Worse: STDs.

CONDOMS DO NOT MAKE SEX SAFE. I won’t belabor this one; there are better sources, but certain STDs are transferred even when condoms are used correctly. Certain STDs are transferred through oral sex. Many STDs are undetectable in one or both sexes until they’ve already caused significant damage. One night of fun can lead to a lifetime of sexual damage to you and/or someone else.

-Worst:

Pregnancy. I hesitate to associate pregnancy with a bad choice, but unplanned pregnancy leaves people in a terribly hard position. For men, once we get a woman pregnant, we get no say about what she chooses. If she chooses to keep the baby, we are going to be paying 18 years of child support for a decision that was supposed to be one night. If she chooses an abortion, our actions have made us an accessory to or participant in the murder of an innocent life. I’m writing this from the guy’s perspective, but the choices are even harder for the woman!

-Worse than Worst:

When I got my partner pregnant, I supported her choice to have an abortion. I BEG YOU, please do not make the decision we did. I wouldn’t wish the consequences of that decision on my worst enemy. If I could go back in time and make a different choice, I would pay ANY price. I would rather live the rest of my days in a ditch with all four limbs amputated than experience the consequences of blood guilt. You will experience torment in your soul that’s unbearable. Calling this torment a “mental health problem” is like calling the ocean “damp.” God actively turns against you. Circumstance after circumstance and person after person will turn against you. Things that seem like they have the potential to be good will become ashes in your hands again and again. In a world that’s already this hard to navigate, YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO KILL YOUR CHILD. It doesn’t matter the level of development or the circumstance; YOU CANNOT AFFORD THE PRICE YOU WILL PAY FOR KILLING YOUR CHILD.

I’ve gone to healing retreats for the abortion-wounded heart and encountered many other men and women with abortions in their past. I wish there was a way I could convey to you the pain, the unbearable agony a person carries after an abortion. I’ve met women who are 70+ years old and have lived in misery that’s beyond words for over 50 years. For some of us, the agony begins almost immediately. For others, the agony is like a piece of rotting meat that we lock away in a closet in our mind. We refuse to acknowledge it. We can ignore it for a while. Gradually, the stench starts to permeate our lives, and eventually, the decay builds and forces the closet door open. In my experience, and in almost every post-abortion story I’ve heard, we have to go to more and more extreme measures to distract ourselves from the rot in our souls.

After our abortions, nearly all of us dove headlong into sex and some form of substance abuse to try to distract ourselves from our inner pain and guilt. It works for a time, but eventually, that rot becomes overpowering. Time does not heal a person who’s had an abortion; time eats that person alive from the inside.

Women, if you become pregnant, or men, if you get someone pregnant, please don’t panic like we did. There are thousands of pregnancy resource centers that can connect you with enough resources like financial help and mentoring to survive, succeed, and eventually thrive as a new parent. Abortion doesn’t undo being a parent. You’re already a parent. Abortion turned us from parents to murderers. Abortion doesn’t make the baby magically and painlessly vanish; abortion kills the baby by either starving it or decapitating and dismembering it. As someone with personal experience, I can say this from the bottom of my heart and with every cell in my body: abortion isn’t a hard choice; abortion is an EVIL CHOICE.

“There is a way that seems right to a man…

…but its end is the way of death.” – Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)

(10-week abortion. Copyright abortionno.org)

I apologize for having to include this, but due to the nature of this book, I decided to show you the reality of abortion. This is the only picture like this you’ll encounter in this book, but I believe it’s necessary. A good driver’s education class will dissuade drinking and driving by showing the results of a DUI, and a good sex education class will equally do the same. Abortion pictures are horrible because ABORTIONS ARE HORRIBLE. At the time this book is being published, a 10-week abortion is legal in 32 states in the US. The abortion pill is even more prevalent and is prescribed as late as 12 weeks. The above baby was killed by a D&C abortion, while the abortion pill kills the baby through starvation; cutting off the baby’s supply of oxygen and nutrients until it dies. Even a baby as young as 6 weeks is remarkably developed, but because of its size it’s usually liquefied in the process of a D&C or suction abortion, making pictures nearly impossible to take.

or Click Here

Scanning this QR code will take you to a short, 35 second video with actual footage of the 6-week-old baby in the womb.

I’d like to end this section by telling you about L. I made her acquaintance and learned her story as I was wrapping up writing this book. L is a young single mother who had every reason not to keep her child. She was trapped in both a toxic living situation and an abusive romance. During a massive hurricane, she was able to escape from this, but her abusive ex took her car. Without a home and without a car, in an area that had just been decimated by a hurricane, she discovered that she was pregnant. L eventually found shelter at a domestic abuse shelter, but when the staff discovered she was pregnant, they pressured her to abort. Eventually, they kicked her out of the shelter entirely.

Needless to say, if anyone had a compelling reason to abort, it would have been L. L is a bright, competent person. She had no illusions about what keeping her child would mean. She understood her situation and the incredible challenges that she’d face. But she also knew she’d been chosen to bring life into the world. So, instead of aborting, she chose life.

As she chose life, it seemed like “the universe conspired together” to help her with her decision. Originally denied maternity leave at work, she was eventually given six months off. She was guided to a better living situation. She was given her own, private living quarters. She was able to save enough money for another car. She’s finding remote work that allows her to stay close to her new baby. L’s story has not been easy, and she wanted me to make sure that anyone who found themselves in a similar situation should expect serious challenges. But as time has gone by, L’s position has improved again and again. She also wanted you to know that you’ll experience miracles that will help you develop into the parent you’re meant to be. Talking to her, you can’t help but hear the amazing depth of fierce love she has for her child, and how fulfilling being a mother is for her.

If you find yourself an unexpected parent, you have to understand in no uncertain terms that your life as you know it is over. I didn’t want to leave the period of life that I was in, and I thought choosing abortion would give me more time where I was. That was pure fantasy. There is no going back, you’ve moved into a new period of life. You are about to enter a hard period. All of the good choices happen before sex. Your only choice now is what kind of hard you want to experience. You can make my choice, and have the outside circumstances appear to stay at the status quo, while your inner torment and regret builds, while your bloodguilt cries out against you day and night and eats you alive from the inside out. Even if you can somehow manage to compartmentalize the regret and tuck it in a deep corner of your mind, you won’t be able to avoid the consequences. The universe truly will start working against you. Ultimately, you’ll have nothing but bitter regret to show for your choice. Or you can make L’s choice and choose the hard that develops you into a better, more mature person, and that teaches you about something bigger than yourself, and leaves you something and someone wonderful to show for the difficulties you’ll encounter. Please, PLEASE do not make my choice.

Lesson 19

A huge portion of our success in life is tied to our ability to delay gratification.

This is one of the most obvious spiritual principles. We see this in fitness: delaying the instant gratification of eating junk food and lounging on the couch to choose the discomfort of exercise eventually leads to something so much better than unlimited junk food and couch time ever could.

We see this in education: After high school, you could take an entry-level job somewhere and spend the best years of your life with no obligations, partying, and traveling. But that will cost you in the end. The better choice is to delay that gratification by going to college or learning a trade. There will be the unpleasantness of long hours of study, tests, and having to say no to things you’d enjoy doing. But the payoff is worth the sacrifice.

We see this in finances: We can spend everything we earn as soon as we earn it and have a great time! Or, we can sacrifice some fun and save and invest our money.

Sacrifices today give our future selves a better life!

Relationships and sex are no different! The payoff and freedom that comes from delaying gratification far outweigh the temporary discomfort or loneliness it requires.

Lesson 20

We are slaves to whatever controls us or whatever we give in to.

One of the lies we’re presented with is that sleeping with people shows our sexual freedom. I thought so for a long time. But between the chemicals and the pleasure, sex is one of the most addicting things on the planet. As I would go to greater lengths, invest more time, and pay a higher price for my sexual partner, I eventually was forced to admit the reality that I was a slave. I was a puppet who would always dance if the right string was pulled. When I was really broke, I would have great intentions of working hard, saving money, and doing great for a while. But then a beautiful, fun woman with an expensive interest would come along, and I’d waste it all.

I was so addicted that I couldn’t think clearly enough to realize that when my money ran out and we couldn’t have fun dates in expensive places; she’d be gone. Giving in to our feelings, desires, and cravings whenever we have them doesn’t show our maturity or freedom; it demonstrates that we are unable to master ourselves. A boss I once had said it better than I can: “I’m scared of anything I like too much.” The ability to say “no” to something is what shows us our true strength and self-mastery.

There’s a story in the Bible of two brothers, Jacob and Esau. Esau was older, and, at that time, the oldest son would get his father’s inheritance. But Jacob was clever, and Esau was dependably impulsive. One day, after being out hunting all day, Esau came back very hungry. He smelled the stew Jacob had been cooking and asked for some. Jacob, like sin, saw his opportunity. He told Esau the stew was available for the very small fee of his inheritance! (In those days, a verbal promise was as binding as a legal contract today). Esau exaggerated his circumstances by saying, “What good is my inheritance to me if I’m dead?” And sold it all for a bowl of stew! The Bible specifically links this example to sexual immorality. Giving in to our cravings instead of mastering them will result in a massively unequal trade that we will regret for the rest of our lives unless God intervenes.

Lesson 21

“Life goes on, long after the thrill of
living’s gone…” -John Mellencamp

Here’s what I wish I had learned before it was too late. As a young adult, a lot of well-meaning older adults would look wistfully at me, clearly longing to be young and back in my shoes again. They would tell me things like, “These are the best years of your life, so make the most of them,” or “You’ve got the world at your fingertips!” Those people were wrong, and I was a moron for listening to them.

The truth is that when we’re young, we’ve been given everything, and we have everything to lose! A person in their early 20s is incredibly wealthy. We’re rich in health, rich in possibilities, our brains work well and don’t forget things, we have more energy, we understand things better, our reflexes are fast, we adapt quicker to new things, we’re more creative, etc., but most importantly, we’re almost a clean slate, with few sin-contracts out, and very few sin-seeds planted.

Because we’re so wealthy, we’re careless. Because everything is getting better and brighter for us for a while, and because we haven’t reaped too many consequences yet, we don’t fear them like we should.

Someone once said that life happens in our young adult years, and the rest of life is just living with the consequences. The longer I’ve lived and the more I’ve seen, the more accuracy I see in that. We see this play out all the time in the physical world. In general, if someone chooses to party their way through their 20s, eventually, they get locked into working a low-paying job and being poor. But if someone spends their 20s pursuing training and opportunities in their career, they’re much more likely to land a better job. If they invest this money, the interest compounds, and they generally get better off each year.

We can debate how useful a college degree actually is for anyone right now in this 2025 economy, but the principle applies. This physical principle illustrates the spiritual law behind it.

Lesson 22

Stating the obvious.

So, we’ve talked about the spiritual laws God has put in place. Now, I’m just going to spell things out as clearly as I can one more time for emphasis: anything done outside of God’s good designs that violates the good laws He’s put in place will eventually result in pain for both you and innocent parties. ALWAYS. Some of it is passive, just a principle of cause and effect. But part of it is active: God will be against you.

How serious is God about His good design for sex? He detests sexual sin. The Bible makes it clear that sexual sin is one of the worst sins we can commit. The Bible says that God is “Especially hard on those who follow their own twisted sexual desire.” - 2 Peter 2:10 (NLT)

There’s a letter written in the Bible to a group of people who had just come to Jesus and were learning how to live in the new life He gives. The more experienced followers of Jesus didn’t want to burden these new members of God’s family with a lot of rules and restrictions, so they boiled down their instructions to just 4 things: “Abstain from eating food offered to idols, from sexual immorality, from eating the meat of strangled animals, and from consuming blood.” - Acts 15:20(NLT)

Here’s what another letter of instruction says: “You may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God falls upon the sons of disobedience. - Ephesians 5: 5&6 (ESV)

God also says that He “Thwarts the cravings of the wicked” – Proverbs 10:3 (NIV). If we’re actively breaking His laws, He places us in the “wicked” category, no matter how harmless it seems to us. If we’re working against God, He has no other choice but to work against us as a good spiritual parent and to force us to learn. He can’t be an enabler. God tells us in Isaiah 26:10 that when He shows favor, kindness or compassion to the wicked, they don’t learn the right way to live and act.

Take it from all my life experiences: anything you get outside of God’s way of getting it will either fall apart, be taken away from you, or become so bad you’ll wish it was taken away from you! What’s true on the micro-scale of individual people is also true on the macro-scale of societies. As societies reject and forget God, life gets worse and worse. If we look at the current attitudes and understandings about sexuality in America and then look at the current state of America, the connection is undeniable.

Lesson 23

What happens when we get
things our way, not God’s way

Proverbs 10:22 (NLT) says, “The blessing of the LORD makes a person rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.” God says that His blessings have no sorrow to it. If it’s not from God, it’s going to come with sorrow. God is not the only spiritual being that exists. There are other spiritual forces that are very interested in giving you exactly what you want when you want it. But it’s not out of kindness; it’s to hurt you and hurt others through you.

Before I came to God, I spent a few years practicing the Law of Attraction and “manifesting my life,” especially my romantic partners. It really worked! I’d always get EXACTLY the kind of person I manifested. I thought I was creating my own reality! It was a delicious way to live, except that every person I’d manifest would come with a flaw that would end up terribly hurting me, or causing me to terribly hurt them, or both. After a horribly painful breakup, I’d refine what I wanted in my next partner, manifest them, have a great time for a while, and then get hurt even worse each time around.

This is compounded by the teachings in the Law of Attraction. The basic premise of it and similar teachings is that “thoughts become things.” People who follow it are simultaneously told to really “have faith,” to believe and think and act like they already have the thing they desire, but also to not care at all about it. To desire it enough to change their entire lives in anticipation of it, but then also not be attached to the outcome. People who practice manifestation are also terrified to emit “negative” vibrations that might mess up what they’re manifesting by getting them off the “frequency of abundance.” So, instead of looking around and taking stock of the burning fire of our lives, we’re encouraged to double down on emitting “positive” vibrations. It took me a long time to admit that my head was in the sand and my world was on fire. If I was the person creating my own reality, I wouldn’t be putting these barbs into what I was attracting.

Waiting on God’s gifts is hard, but they grow us, and I can say that the things God has given me are SOOOOO good that I couldn’t even have thought of them myself!

Lesson 24

Summarizing what we’ve covered so far

Hopefully, you can see by now that if we make choices based on the wrong information, even if it’s 99% right, we can suffer devastating consequences in our lives. We don’t know the price we’ll be forced to pay ahead of time either. Jesus describes a life lived without putting His teachings into practice as a house built on the sand. Building a house higher and higher, making upgrades, and adding nice things to a house/life takes time, effort, and sweat! And all of that will be utterly pointless if the foundation is sand (the wrong understanding or application of spiritual laws). Jesus says that when the storms of life come, the house built on the wrong foundation will collapse in a spectacular fall. But building a life based on the solid rock of laws and principles God laid out before He created the world is guaranteed by God to result in lives that hold up when troubles come. God is the spiritual rock and glue that keeps life from futility and collapse.

This is a physical illustration of what Jesus teaches. For a personal illustration, you can look at the news. As I write this in 2025, there’s currently a very famous rapper in jail for all kinds of sex crimes at parties. Completely unrelated to this, there’s also a very famous UFC fighter whose massive arrogance is currently causing him to go crazy and destroy his life right in front of the public’s eyes. They both built amazing dream lives for themselves and their friends. Everyone wanted to be seen with them! They all had an amazing decade or two, but it was built on sand. Now, the collapse has arrived, the price is about to be paid, and it’s going to leave a lot more than just these two celebrities devastated. Take it from me: the better of a life we’ve built, and the finer the pleasures and luxuries we’ve become accustomed to, the more bitter it is when it’s all ripped out of our hands.

“Unless the Lord builds a house,
They who build it labor in vain;
Unless the Lord guards a city,
The watchman stays awake in vain.”
– Psalm 127:1 (NASB2020)

(This isn’t just talking about building houses and guarding cities. This illustrates a principle that applies to every aspect of our lives.)

Lesson 25

Pride and Destruction

“It is better to be humble in spirit with the lowly than to divide spoil with the proud.” - Proverbs 16:19 (LSB)

Since we’re so close to this subject already from the last lesson, let’s talk about one of the things that’s the biggest insult to God: pride. If you want to paint a neon, flashing bullseye on yourself, pride is the way to go! God repeatedly guarantees His wrath on people with arrogant spirits more than anyone else. Almost everyone knows the Proverb that says, “Pride goes before destruction and haughtiness before a fall” – Proverbs 16:18 (NLT). This plays out again and again and again before our eyes.

The Bible often uses another term for arrogance: “puffed up.” There also seems to be a principle that the more arrogant a person is, the more God allows them to be built up so that they’ll be a greater example to others when they are inevitably brought low.

Imagine giving a nice gift to someone, but instead of thanking you for it, they go around bragging about how they made it, built it, or found it. That’s what pride is. But pride inevitably moves past ingratitude into self-worship and expecting and receiving other people’s worship. This is a foolish, deadly mistake to make.

God asks us in the Bible, “What do you have that you did not first receive?” – 1 Corinthians 4:7 (LSB). Even when we work hard and make sacrifices to accomplish great things, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Let’s say you study very hard in school, practice strong self-discipline, and graduate with a highly sought-after degree. Should you feel accomplished? Sure! But you have to remember that it was God who gave you the mind to be able to understand. God is so kind that instead of just giving us everything, He often partners with us and allows us to accomplish things through hard work. This gives us so much more dignity than receiving a handout would! But it would be very foolish to take the credit for the gifts we have been given. Hopefully you can see how this would apply to fitness, beauty, financial success, life insights, and everything else that we believe we accomplished.

In Deuteronomy 8:18 (NLT), God says, “Remember the Lord your God. He is the one who gives you power to be successful, in order to fulfill the covenant he confirmed to your ancestors with an oath.” From this we can see that God gave people the ability to get wealth. It had nothing to do with them whatsoever, and therefore, they had zero room for arrogance.

God makes it incredibly clear that pride brings His anger and punishment. Here are a few examples:

“Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. I cast you to the ground; I exposed you before kings, to feast their eyes on you.” - Ezekiel 28:17 (ESV). This verse is simultaneously speaking of a proud human king in ancient history, and also of Satan. Before Satan fell, he was the highest and most beautiful of the angels, but God says it corrupted him. Instead of thanking God for the gifts he was given, he placed himself above his Creator. This was the ultimate in foolish decisions and cost him everything.

In Proverbs 27:21 (NLT), God says that “a person is tested by being praised.” In Isaiah 48:11 (LSB), God says, “My glory I will not give to another.” God makes it clear throughout the Bible that our praise, honor, and admiration are due to Him because everything good that we have or see in the world originates from Him. When we receive praise and let it stop at us without acknowledging the true originator of what we’re being praised for, we take glory that does not belong to us. This is a very foolish thing to do.

Our society is saturated with messaging that encourages arrogance. But like we talked about before, it’s hidden in other nicer words. It’s usually mislabeled as self-confidence. I believe that some self-confidence, that is truly only self-confidence, is a good thing. But the message is that the more self-confidence you have, the better, and there’s never too much of it.

In society, very few people are encouraged or rewarded for acknowledging that they don’t know something or that they can’t handle something. But this quality of humility and acknowledging our weaknesses and helplessness is massively attractive to God! God says again and again that He resists the proud and singles them out for circumstances that will bring them low. But God says all the opposite things about humble people!

Here’s the kind of person God says He finds attractive, how our posture should be, and who we should be seeking praise from:

“But to this one I will look graciously, to him who is humble and contrite in spirit, and who reverently trembles at my word and honors my commands.” -Isaiah 66:2 (AMP)

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” -Proverbs 9:10 (ESV)

“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” -Matthew 23:12 (ESV)

“Let another praise you, and not your own mouth.” -Proverbs 27:2 (ESV)

“How can you believe when you receive glory from each other, but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” Jesus speaks to religious hypocrites in John 5:44 (ESV).

“Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will exalt you.” -James 4:10 (ESV)

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you.” -1 Peter 5:6 (ESV)

To sum up, we will all experience a period of being exalted and a period of being humbled. It’s our choice in which order that happens. What man gives is temporary; what God gives is eternal.

Lesson 26

Bad News, Even Worse News,
and then Amazing News!

Bad news: now that you know what immorality is, let’s see what God says about it. We’re told, “For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral, or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.”- Ephesians 5:5 & 6 (ESV).

The Bible also says, “Many sorrows come to the wicked, but unfailing love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.” -Psalm 32:10 (NLT)

This is why adulting is so hard for most people! When we commit sexual sin (immorality), it makes God angry, and we suffer punishment for it. This is why finances, car problems, relationships, and everything else fall apart and why sudden, unexpected problems happen to us. It’s why we just can’t get a break. We can have the best of intentions, but if we aren’t doing things God’s way, we are lawbreakers and fall into the category of “wicked.”

Here’s the even worse news: Thoughts and intentions count as actions to God. Not thoughts that just fleetingly come and go in our mind, but thoughts that we allow to stay and accept as valid. God tells us that being angry at someone is the exact same thing as murdering them. He knows we WOULD murder them if we had the chance without getting caught. Looking at a woman lustfully is the same thing as having sex with her because we would if we had the opportunity. So, we’re really in trouble.

As you’ve been reading, you may have been thinking something like, “Wow, this sounds really hard to do things God’s way.” You’re right. Actually, it’s impossible.

Please don’t give up on these next two paragraphs early: God tells us that we’ve all been born as sinners. Just watch a toddler be told that something is off-limits by his or her parents and you’ll see what I mean. Watch the wheels in the toddler’s mind turn, watch them get a defiant look on their face and then do it anyway, and you’ll realize that we are not born as good people. Sin is in our DNA. So, we’re born under God’s wrath because He hates sin. All we’ve ever known is being separated from God and living under the expectancy of His wrath against sin. The longer we live, the more of a mountain of violations we accumulate. The “wages” we earn for sinning is death. We’re already born spiritually dead; we’re separated from our Creator.

God is completely pure and holy, and His presence cannot tolerate sin. He’s described in the Bible as a “Consuming Fire.” His infinitely pure, just and holy presence would evaporate sinners like the sun would evaporate a drop of water. God says that the only way that forgiveness of sin can happen is through the death of an innocent party. When we die physically, we will have to stand judgment before God. And remember, God tells us that His law is written on our consciences, so we have no excuse. We know what we should have done, and we’ve failed to do it. We know what we shouldn’t do, and we do it anyway. God says He’s so holy that even one offense is enough to give us the “guilty” verdict. No matter how much good we do after the fact, it can’t undo or make up for the wrong we’ve done. If we die in our sins, we fail the judgement and are given the rest of our wages: the second death.

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death. – Revelation 21:8 (ESV)

But here’s the amazing news! God loves us and wants to have a relationship with us. So, He did what we couldn’t do. He came to earth as a man, as Jesus (God the Son). Jesus lived the perfect life and then voluntarily died on our behalf. Jesus paid the death penalty we owe. Because God (the Father) accepted Jesus’s payment, He raised Jesus from the dead as proof of His acceptance.

Imagine you’ve racked up an insane amount of speeding tickets for reckless driving that you could never pay. The judge is about to throw you in jail when someone else comes in and pays them for you. The judge can legally let you go. That’s what Jesus offers. To receive credit for His perfect life and death, all we have to do is inwardly turn from our sin, and desire to stop doing it (this is called repentance) and accept Jesus as the Savior and Lord of our lives. This means we are willing to give Him control and follow His rules and direction. When we do this and really mean it from our hearts, we receive instant credit for His innocent death. We are forgiven for every sin we’ve ever done and every sin we will ever do. We are born again into God’s family! We have peace with God. We come into a relationship with God. God moves from being our Judge, to being our Father! God is free to bless us now! We receive a new, soft heart that wants to follow God’s rules. And we receive the Holy Spirit (God’s spirit) who comes to live inside of us to help give us the power to do the things we should do and say no to the things we should say no to. Instead of being slaves to sin, we’re given the freedom to listen to our consciences and decline sin. God gives us good, new, healthy desires and the power to do them. And as we follow and obey God, He promises to bless us.

If you’ve never given your life to Jesus, you don’t really have a category for “being born again,” “having peace with God,” or “being forgiven.” Describing peace with God is so amazing and such a priceless gift that talking about it to someone who’s never experienced it is like trying to describe a sunset at the beach to a blind person. But I can tell you, now that I’ve had it, NOTHING is worth losing peace with God for. A relationship with God is what we were born for! God made us, and He made us to have a relationship with Him. Knowing Jesus is the entire point of life.

Giving our lives to Jesus doesn’t turn us into clones, robots, or zombies. Rather, the more room we make for Jesus, the more He shines through us. Just like a gem has different faces and facets, Jesus designed each of us with unique, individual, beautiful facets of character, personality, traits, strengths, and weaknesses. When we give our lives to Jesus, His love and light are free to burst forth through these things.

I want to finish this section by emphasizing that all of this happened because Jesus loves us.

Jesus LOVES us.

Jesus LOVES YOU.

The Bible says that Jesus was there at Creation, and He “delighted in the sons of men.” – Proverbs 8:31 (LSB). Jesus willingly and gladly came to earth and died the most painful and humiliating death imaginable because HE LOVES US! He saw YOU, and He saw the beautiful, free, radiant person you could be. He looks and sees our polluted, broken, warped lives but doesn’t stop there. He sees us as we could be with Him, not as we are. And the person we could be with Him is so amazing that He died for us. But because He’s so kind and respectful, He still gives us the chance to reject Him. He died for you; He went through unimaginable physical and spiritual pain for you, knowing that you might still choose to reject Him.

What love.

What kindness.

What compassion.

What mercy.

It’s a PRICELESS gift that He freely and gladly offers to you.

Lesson 27

True Satisfaction

“The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear it’s fill of hearing.” – Ecclesiastes 1:8b (NIV)

So what about when we want and pursue things that everyone knows and agrees are good? Things like a fulfilling relationship, financial security and freedom, or achievement and success? This is where the problem starts. This is where all of us begin. Almost no one sets out to be greedy, or to need endless attention and praise, or be with a different person every night. We’re just looking for what we believe will make us happy.

But if you’re anything like me, or Mick Jagger, we never quite get there. We’re like the dog in the picture. We find someone who’s almost everything we want in a partner. We can find a great job and make a lot of money - almost enough to pay for everything we want to own and do. Sometimes we do end up getting exactly what we know will make us happy…only to find, a few weeks or months later, that somewhere in the process the bar for happiness was raised. What we thought we needed wasn’t enough and now we need more.

This pursuit of outside happiness is the problem. Here’s the secret that will save you a lot of time: following your heart will never, ever get you to lasting happiness, no matter how good the thing that you want is and no matter how much of it you get. The reason is that we’re looking for outside sources of happiness and satisfaction, when we weren’t designed for it. One of the illustrations God uses to describe us people is that we’re spiritual plants, and He is the sap. He provides the life that we need to thrive, to have true satisfaction, from the inside out. Everything external - even something great, like a loving family - will never meet the deepest needs and longings of our souls that only God can fill. To quote Blaise Pascal, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, which cannot be filled with any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”

This isn’t to say that the external things we need aren’t good, or that they’re not necessary. It’s just that they’re not the most necessary thing. God has designed us for a relationship with Him as the ultimate provider of our needs, and the supplier of ultimate satisfaction. Jesus tells us that God knows what we need before we even ask. He tells us to “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” – Matthew 6:33 (ESV). When we place God as our ultimate priority and satisfaction, everything else falls into place like it should. He truly has provided me with things I could never have gotten on my own. He’s helped me meet people I would never have gained access to on my own. He’s given me mind-blowingly good things I never even knew I wanted. And most importantly, it’s been enough.

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” – John 10:10 (ESV)

“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” – Psalm 37:4 (ESV)

Lesson 28

What if I’ve already sown seeds of destruction, and they’re already destroying my life?

You may have been reading this book and realizing that you entered a contract you didn’t know about, you sowed seeds you didn’t realize you were planting, and you’re already paying the price. You may be getting destroyed by the price. You may have already lost deeply precious things that are beyond recovering. If you are that person, please know that even though we’ve never met, I care about you and wrote this book for you, and I’ve prayed a lot for you.

I paid prices I couldn’t possibly afford, too. I’ve had the most wonderful things and people torn out of my hands because of my own actions.

Here’s what I pray sinks into your heart: Jesus paid the price for you, and Jesus restores. Jesus is the kindest, most compassionate person in the universe, and His mercy is beyond description. When we come to Jesus, our old life dies, and we receive new life through Him. That sentence is very hard to convey. It’s a spiritual reality, and words aren’t adequate for it.

When we come to Jesus, every contract we’ve signed is cut off because that person is dead. Jesus is the God of restoration and recovery. The Bible is full of His promises about this. Here are few of them that have come true for me and will come true for you because Jesus can’t lie:

“I will restore to you the years the locust has eaten.” - Joel 2:25 (NKJV)

“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord anointed me to bring good news to the humble; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim release to the captives, and freedom to prisoners.” -Isaiah 61:1 (NASB2020) – That’s Jesus speaking about what He does. Our actions, the contracts we sign, the seeds that we sow place us in prison, and the bars grow tighter every year. Jesus brings us out. But He doesn’t stop there!

“To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion – to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair...” -Isaiah 61:2-3 (NIV)

“Return to your stronghold, oh prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double.” -Zechariah 9:12 (ESV)

Jesus has given me things I was robbed of so long ago I had forgotten them! I haven’t gotten everything back that I lost 1 for 1, but I’ve been reimbursed for them all. These are only a few of my favorite verses about what Jesus does for us, but the Bible is full of these promises. In Jesus, we become rich!

If you’re bowed down under heavy loads of your own making, come to Jesus and exchange your loads for His yoke. He’s gentle and lowly of spirit, His yoke is light, His burden is easy, and in Him, you’ll find rest for your soul.

There’s a story in Acts about a man who had been unable to walk from birth but was miraculously healed in Jesus’ name. He was instantly healed and healed so completely that he began walking and then leaping and praising God! If we receive healing from even the very best doctor, it still takes time. If we spend even a few weeks not using our muscles, they atrophy, and building them up takes a long time. Imagine the atrophy of not walking, ever. But when Jesus heals, He heals ABUNDANTLY. This miraculous healing is a physical illustration of the healing that our souls and spirits receive when we come to Him and the restoration that He gives. There’s no therapy in the world that can go as deep and no doctor in the world who can heal so abundantly as Jesus can. Jesus is extravagantly good!

Lesson 29

I know, this is a lot

I’ll be honest: as I came to God and began learning about His design, expectations, and safeguarding limitations on sex, it absolutely blew my mind. The more I read, the more I realized just how backward and upside-down conventional wisdom about sex and relationships is from what God designed. Up was down, and down was up. But the more I read, the more I realized what a good and amazing set of checks and protections God has set in place for us! For our emotional and spiritual safety and good, God requires us to wait. He asks us to get to know the person and make absolutely sure they’re someone we want to be connected to. And then in my experience, He usually has us go through some hardships first.

Before I came to Jesus, I was a chronic cheater. When things got challenging or flaws showed up in the person I was with, I’d just go find someone new. Now, I have a wonderful woman in my life. God has separated us, made us wait, and put us through some very hard times where we’ve had to have each other’s backs. But it’s all been for good, and I can say that I have a trust, loyalty, and devotion to her that I would never ever have had in a relationship I made happen on my own. We share an intimacy and love for each other that is far better than any sex I’ve ever experienced on my own. I wouldn’t trade all the amazing sex in the world for the love that I have for her that only God could cultivate. God’s ways are harder than conventional wisdom. Sometimes, they’re terribly hard. But they’re so good, and so, SO MUCH BETTER.

Lesson 30

“But I was born like this!”

As I came to learn what God’s law is and what He expects, at first I didn’t think it could be real. Then, when I realized it was real, I got mad. My thoughts ran something like this: “So you’re telling me God designed me? He’s responsible for my aptitudes, leanings, and desires. He made me want something that’s a sin, but even though He made me with these desires, He’s going to judge me for acting on them? That’s the most unfair, cruel thing I’ve ever heard. What kind of monster would create someone to want something that’s off limits for them?”

Here’s the answer: God is good. When He initially created the world He called it “good” and when He made the first humans, He called us “very good.” But when sin entered the world, it corrupted, distorted, and polluted everything, especially our hearts. Remember that the Bible says that our hearts are deceitful and desperately sick. Because we’re sinners, we are all born with distorted desires and feelings. We may be born wanting something that’s harmful, or we may want something that’s good, but we want it at a harmful level.

Let me give you two physical examples that helped me and may help you: The first is of Japanese children who were in the womb when their parents were exposed to radiation from the atomic bombings in WW2. The second is a child in the womb whose mother was addicted to heroin or painkillers. The Japanese children were born with severe health issues and deformities from radiation; the second type of child (aka a “crack baby”) is born with a physical need for something that’s harmful to them. Both of these children had nothing to do with these circumstances and would never have chosen them, but it’s also false to claim that the way they were born was healthy. These are physical examples of how our hearts, our tastes, our emotions, etc. have been deformed or warped into self-destructive desires through no fault of our own.

Remember how sin has a blinding property? Let’s apply that here. Imagine a person who’s predisposed to be violently angry. It could even be passed down from several generations, so we can safely say that the person was born that way. Would we ever excuse a person like that if he regularly punched and beat his children or wife because it was in his genes to be violently angry? Of course not. Let’s take this one step further. Would we ever say that it’s ok for a pedophile to have sex with a child just because they were born with that desire? I’ve heard pedophiles who are interviewed say that nothing feels more right to them than being with a “pure, innocent child.”

The problem is that some things that are wrong and will hurt us and other people are obvious. But other things are not so obvious and feel very right in the moment. When I was committing adultery, I intellectually knew there were people who disapproved, but it didn’t feel wrong. It felt like she and I belonged together, but she had married the wrong person. She said so too. It felt like my partner’s husband didn’t deserve her and that her marriage was what was wrong! I actually grew to prefer to date a married woman because it was so much fun giving them what they weren’t getting at home. Occasionally, I’d encounter someone who didn’t know what I was doing and would talk about people who cheated and ruined marriages with absolute disgust and anger. I could see that they truly believed it was a terrible thing, but I have to emphasize that I didn’t feel wrong in the least for what I was doing.

From these examples, we can see that we can’t trust our distorted feelings and desires, no matter how strong they may be. We have to realize that our hearts are terribly warped and diseased. We have to trust the designer who ordered everything, set up the principles for how things work, and understands the long-term consequences of our actions far better than we do.

If you asked anyone who’s lived a few decades, they’d all be able to tell you about several bad choices they made that felt right. Our feelings are liars. They distort reality, overemphasize some things, underemphasize other things, and come and go daily. What ISN’T distorted and never changes or loses relevance are God’s laws and principles that He reveals to us in the Bible. The truest fact about anything is what God has to say about it.

Just like me, you’re most likely thinking that it’s completely unfair that we’ve been born into a life and body with attractions or physical needs that are harmful to us. God completely agrees! We were born into this body through our initial parents’ sin: when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God in the garden of Eden, they condemned every person on the planet to live a warped, painful, self-destructive life. But God doesn’t think it’s fair either, and that’s why He came down as the man Jesus, to allow us to be Born Again! The amazing news of what Jesus did for us is that when we give our lives to God, He gives us a new heart and a new spiritual life! He gives us new, healthy desires and helps us break hurtful patterns we were once slaves to. Sometimes He does this instantly and totally heals us right on the spot. When I came to Jesus, I was instantly cured of certain sins. Overnight I stopped wanting to do them. Other sins required a terrible battle to overcome, just like a baby born with a drug addiction will experience profound discomfort as they are weaned off their unhealthy physical dependency. I don’t regret the battles; they helped me value and “hold the ground” I’d fought so bitterly for. I don’t know which it will be for you, or it might be a mixture of both. But I promise you, the life of freedom is priceless. I could never go back.

Lesson 31

Love and Fuel

“This is love, that we walk according to His (Jesus’s) commandments.”
-2 John 1:6 (ESV)

Imagine you were just given a prototype high-performance car that needs to be refueled, but you’re not a car person. You pull up to the gas station and have several options. You have several different things that are all “fuel.” But will all the options work?

You could use diesel, various ethanol blends, or high-octane gasoline. Or how about kerosene? It all burns, right? Without the guidance of the person who designed the car, you really have no idea what to put in. If it’s a race car that’s designed to be run on high-octane fuel, nothing else will work correctly. Diesel will destroy the engine very quickly. An ethanol-based fuel will get the car down the road a little longer, but it will also corrode the engine and drastically shorten its life. I don’t even know what would happen with kerosene! The only way to avoid damage is to use the car in the way its Designer intended.

This isn’t a perfect analogy, but thinking that all love is the same and equally valid is comparable to thinking that all fuel works equally well in all vehicles. Not all love is the same, not all love is healthy for us or others, and not everything we feel is actually love. We are not our own designers, and we don’t always know what is best for us. Only our Creator does. Our feelings can be incredibly strong. Our attractions can be incredibly strong. But underneath it all is the truth that our hearts are warped and desperately sick and cannot be trusted or listened to when they contradict what God says.

The good news of Jesus is that when we are born again, God gives us a new heart with healthy desires. Among the many amazing blessings He gives, one of them is “the spirit of self-control.” We are suddenly able to say no to things we know are wrong or unhealthy and say yes to things that are good. Some of the things I so strongly needed and craved with every fiber of my DNA before I came to God, I’m ashamed of and repulsed by now. I’ve run across countless other stories of Christians losing their wrong desires as they got to know Jesus too. Sometimes we don’t exactly lose the desires, we have them redeemed. Either way, if you’re battling with attractions or feelings you know are wrong but that feel totally right, there’s so much hope! God is in the business of doing things that are absolutely impossible for humans to do on our own.

God defines true love for people in a way I’d never have thought of in a hundred years. This is what the Bible says: “And this is love, that we walk according to His (Jesus’s) commandments.” -2 John 1:6 (ESV)

This short verse comes with at least three huge truths we all need to deeply understand. The first is that there are many good things that become harmful if expressed in the wrong way. For example, a parent’s love and compassion for their child can become bad if they always step in for their child and never allow the child to make mistakes and learn from them.

Only by following Jesus’s commands can we avoid harming other people. We can say we love someone, and we might feel a strong emotion, but if we are committing actions that have harmful consequences, our “love” is tainted and will lead to profound hurt for either the people involved or another innocent party. Sometimes, this love we feel isn’t really love. Other times, it’s love that’s doomed to fail.

We live in a time where the message everywhere is that we have no choice over who we fall in love with. The Bible says that isn’t the case. We might not have a choice in who we find attractive or interesting or charming, but we ABSOLUTELY have a choice in acting on these things. We are in control and responsible for who we choose to love, at least before sleeping with them. After, it’s a lot trickier. This is why a huge portion of the book of Proverbs is spent advising young people about what type of person to give their heart to, and what types of people to avoid.

The second truth answers the question: “why do you care what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home?” Lincoln Brandenburg says this question is not much different from asking “why do you care if I pee in my corner of the pool?” We don’t make choices in a vacuum, and what we do has serious impacts we could never imagine. Sexual sin is not a victimless act. There’s no way we can look ahead and fathom what our actions will do to someone, we have to trust the One who formed the universe with its governing principles to know what He’s talking about. When we follow His commands, we keep ourselves and others safe.

For an example of this, in the book “How We Got Here,” Jonathan Van Maren points out the sad link between violence-porn and the increase in violent sexual assaults by minors on other minors. When I say “minor”, I’m not talking about late teens here, I’m talking about an 11- or 12-year-old sexually assaulting a 4- or 5-year-old. Violence-porn between “two consenting adults” has grown in popularity, and technology has aided younger and younger people to gain access to the sites it’s found on. For many children, this is really all they know about romance, and they perceive it as normal. What happened between “two consenting adults” is harming undeveloped children farther downstream.

The third truth we need to understand is that God is the spiritual “glue” that keeps a relationship together. Without God actively protecting a relationship, there’s an overwhelming number of things that can come and pull the two people apart: Another more enticing potential partner, an unforgiven hurt, a miscommunication, a life event or tragedy, financial stress, etc. The longer I live, the more of a miracle I realize a healthy relationship that has stood the test of time is. Only God’s blessing can keep two deeply flawed people together in a way that’s healthy, and only walking in Jesus’s commands keeps us in the window of God’s favor and blessing.

Lesson 32a:

“Everything that kills me makes
me feel alive” – OneRepublic

What if no one believed cancer was real? If people had problems like unexplained weight loss, or unusual bleeding or bruising, or persistent fatigue, the medical professionals would always address the symptoms but would never be able to get to the root cause of them. Instead of having the underlying problem addressed, the sick person might walk away with a diagnosis of “acute fatigue syndrome” and be prescribed with extra rest. With this diagnosis, other people would be sympathetic and expect less physical exertion at work from the person, but the root issue would still be there unaddressed and growing worse.

In the same way that an unaddressed physical sickness inside the body will eventually manifest as external symptoms, so too unaddressed spiritual sickness will eventually manifest itself to the outside world. Frequently, these manifestations appear in our demeanors or mental health. When our spirits are sick, it’s foolish to expect our mental state to be fine, because one flows from the other. When the inner person is festering and putrid, the stench will eventually work its way to the outside and become impossible to ignore.

Would anyone expect to find clean water downstream?

Before I get to my main point, I’ll give one final illustration. Antifreeze is usually labeled with all kinds of warnings and kept away from children and pets. Why? Because even though it’s poison, it has a sweet taste. It also looks a lot like a sports drink. If someone didn’t know any better, it would be the most natural thing in the world for them to drink the delicious-looking, colorful liquid!

So, here’s the point: Humans are not just physical beings. We’re not just “walking meatsacks.” A person consists of 3 parts: body, soul and spirit. Only addressing one dimension of health will never get to the root causes of many of our problems. So, what’s making us so sick inside? SIN. Sin is as delicious to the taste and as lethal to our soul and spirit as antifreeze is to our bodies.

We live in a world brimming with enticing spiritual poisons. The more we ingest these things, the more our senses are momentarily pleased, and the sicker and more diseased our spirits get. At some point, this inner sickness will manifest as things like depression, anxiety, outbursts of uncontrollable anger, and so on.

If you’re someone who knows much about nutrition, you’re aware of how many harmful things are in our food. For example, try to keep a sugar-free diet for a week and you’ll discover sugar is in EVERYTHING. Then also try to avoid bio-engineered foods, and your task gets even more difficult. Try to avoid MSG and all its lesser-known names too, and things can get maddening. You start to really realize just how much of a traditional American diet is harmful to us. You also start to realize just how sneaky food companies are!

Our American spiritual intakes are even worse. We basically live in a “spiritual supermarket” of pleasures and activities that are bitter poison, and the warning labels have all been stripped off. What we take into our spirits can either heal us or hurt us. And just like in the physical world, things that heal us don’t usually “taste” as good as things that hurt us.

There’s a phrase that’s used a lot in the fitness world that says “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” A half-dozen glazed donuts taste amazing for a few minutes. Waaaaaaay better than a vegetable stir-fry! But 20 minutes after we eat those donuts, we feel sick. That stir-fry doesn’t have an immediate sensory payoff that can match the donuts, but the healthy feeling we have the rest of the day from it is so much better than the donuts. The good news is that over time we can train our bodies and taste buds to prefer the wholesome, nutritious food over the quick pleasure that we know will leave us feeling sick for hours after.

All of these illustrations apply to our spiritual health, and is one reason why God establishes certain boundaries. What we ingest spiritually is either healing us and helping us to grow, or it’s making us sick. We often can’t discern which is healthy and which is harmful, so we have to trust God when He tells us what to avoid and what’s ok to partake in.

Lesson 32b

“The eyes are the window to the soul.”

In the first lesson in this book, I mentioned Tony Robbins and his mentor, Jim Rohn. Jim said that if you want to learn about a person, you should look at their library, because this is a storehouse of the ingredients they’re allowing into the factories of their minds. Now, Jim Rohn lived and gave speeches before the age of social media. In today’s terms, we could replace “library” with things like “social media algorithm,” or “Netflix history.” Mr. Rohn always warned people that they absolutely have “Got to stand guard at the door of their minds.” The Bible tells us the same thing in a different way: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” – Proverbs 4:23 (ESV).

What we give our attention to is the biggest form of mental and spiritual consumption there is, and we’re either healing or harming ourselves with it. Every single TV show, movie, and social media reel we see presents us with ideas and messages. So does every song that’s ever been made. And a lot of the ideas that are presented are complete fantasy or downright lies, but we never pick up on it. Right now as you read this book, you’re probably evaluating whether what I’m presenting is true or not. You might be agreeing with certain things, mulling some things over, and rejecting other parts of what I’m making a case for. But because we think of media as “entertainment” we relax and turn off our filters and allow harmful things to get past us unchallenged.

As best-selling author Lee Strobel pointed out, laughter lowers our defenses. When we categorize something as a comedy, we don’t use the same discernment that we might in other situations. For example, let’s take the show “Friends.” I loved that show. But only now do I see that one of the main ideas that it presented - and that I gladly swallowed - is that there are little to no consequences of casual dating. In real life, carelessly going through partners leads to profound hurts and soul ties and other consequences that stay around. But in Friends, when someone doesn’t work out, they’re usually just gone. We forget about them and rarely see them again. There’s not much drama, no STDs, and no truly crazy exes that we’d gnaw off one of our own limbs to escape from, only comedically crazy ones. In TV land, there’s no price to be paid in consequences for sleeping around. I think most people watched Friends thinking it was a comedy about actual adult life, never realizing the whole premise was a complete fantasy from the very beginning.

Around the same time, “Will and Grace” presented us with the unspoken premise that living a homosexual lifestyle could be just as normal as the family down the street, and again, come with no consequences, just fun and fabulousness.

Social media presents us with other ideas: that everyone is better than us, having more fun, or more successful, or experiencing the things that we need to experience to really be happy.

Music is both more and less subtle. What I didn’t realize for a long time was that when I would listen to a song, even though I didn’t really care about the words and I was usually just listening to it for the music, I was still absorbing the lyrics. Each genre of popular music has its own messages that the listener absorbs, and most of them are harmful to our perspectives, attitudes, and ultimately to our spirits. Listen to the lyrics of the top three songs on the radio at any given time and you’ll start to see what I mean. Think about some of the lyrics of the songs you find yourself humming throughout the day. You probably wouldn’t naturally say or agree with some of them if they were just spoken. But because they come “riding in” on a great beat, we start absorbing and then agreeing with things we never would otherwise. It may sound extreme, but the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve come to look at a lot of popular music with the eyes of “what message is this really amazing rhythm trying to sneak into my subconscious?”

The phrase “the eyes are the window to the soul” is incredibly accurate. In America, we use that term to mean that looking into someone’s eyes gives us insight into who they are. But windows work both ways. Jesus says, “Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!” – Matthew 6:22-23 (NLT)

It’s pretty common for someone to say something like “music is my escape” or “TV is my coping mechanism.” But if we’re listening to messages in our music that feed despair or anxiety or arrogance or greed or selfishness, or we’re watching TV shows that show murder or betrayal or selfishness, etc., then we’re feeding the problem! Saying “music is my escape” can actually be almost identical to saying “I need a shot of vodka to help me with my hangover.” The thing that gives us quick relief can often be the same thing that’s causing our problem in the first place.

Moving on from media, another source of ingredients for our “mind factories” comes from the voices we listen to in our lives. If we grow up with an authority figure who tells us or implies that we’re no good unless we do X or have X, those messages are very easy to internalize and start believing over time.

Now here’s the thing: We’re all born spiritually sick, and we can’t cure it. We can sure make it a lot worse, or we manage certain symptoms by what we consume, but we all have cancer in our spirits that no amount of watching puppies on IG and no amount of happy music with positive messages can fix. We’re beyond repair. This is why Jesus tells us we have to be Born Again. When we give our lives over to Him, the first thing He does is heal us from the inside out. When I gave my life to Him I had no idea how sick I was until He’d healed me! Imagine having gangrene, chronic pain, or the worst migraine ever, and living with it for a long time. You might know you don’t feel good, but you wouldn’t even remember what being healthy felt like after a while. And then imagine if that sickness or pain was suddenly removed. Imagine how good you’d feel! That’s what Jesus does for us spiritually. He gives us a brand new, sparkling clean, vibrantly healthy Spirit – His Spirit – when we come to Him!

I can tell you from experience that no pleasure on earth “tastes” as good as a clean, healthy spirit feels!

This is the kind of spiritual feast God promises and delivers to those who come to Him:

“You there! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;
And you who have no money come, buy and eat.
Come, buy wine and milk
Without money and without cost.
“Why do you spend money for what is not bread,
And your wages for what does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good,
And delight yourself in abundance.”
-Isaiah 55:1&2 (NASB)

I want to be clear that I’m not claiming that all mental health issues are a result of spiritual sickness. I’ve personally suffered from periods of depression both before and after knowing Jesus. But many of my worst mental health issues like bouts of uncontrollable anger vanished instantly when I was Born Again and never returned!

Lesson 33

“I can feel it coming in
the air tonight” – Phil Collins

“Like a city that is broken into and without a wall is a man without restraint over his spirit.” (Proverbs 25:28 LSB)

Let’s talk more about spirits and mental health.

If you turn on the radio to a pop or country station, you won’t have to go very long before you hear a song that’s basic message is “I know this is a bad idea and I’m going to regret it but I just can’t help myself.” Just like the Phil Collins song, we’ve all experienced a time when we just felt something in the air urging or even compelling us to do something. It’s very comparable to a scent that comes along and makes us hungry. Or it could be something in the air that makes us look for trouble. There are times when I’ve just felt like I really, REALLY needed to get downtown, and when I got there, it seemed like everyone else had been drawn the same way and was feeling the same way.

I’ve had other nights where I was out, and it seemed like everywhere I went, people were quarreling. Restaurant customers were complaining about things to the managers. Couples were having arguments, and men were in actual fights with each other. At the same time, I’d really have an urge to start something and tell someone in my life all the things they were doing to piss me off.

In the Bible, God makes it clear that there are not only spiritual laws and principles, but actual SPIRITS that interact with us. Spirits are invisible and are not bound by the physical limitations that bind us. Matter and flesh can’t stop a spirit from permeating it. Distance doesn’t have any effect on a spirit. I can’t tell if all spirits have personalities, but the Bible makes it clear that some of them do. There’s a scene in 2 Chronicles 18 where God is looking to punish an evil king. God presides over the heavenly council, a bit like a CEO, but he takes other spiritual beings’ input into consideration. Eventually, one being comes forward with a suggestion that God approves of: he’s going to go and become a lying spirit in the mouths of this king’s prophets.

All the prophets (who do not serve God but have some spiritual insight and can possibly see glimpses of the future) will all be led by the same spirit to agree to tell the king that he’s going to be successful in the war that he’s about to begin. The king believes these prophets, who are all speaking the same message, and he goes to battle and is killed as punishment for his evil deeds.

The Bible speaks of many things that we’d call emotions to be something deeper. There are spirits of lust, spirits of jealousy, spirits of anger, spirits of divination, etc.

Another type of spirit that exists is “a tormenting spirit.” The Bible describes this in the Old Testament story of King Saul. As Saul turned more and more evil, God punished him by sending him a tormenting spirit. This spirit drove the King into fits of suspicion and rage so that he hated his best, most loyal servant and thought his family and friends were conspiring to overthrow him. He had no control over this spirit; it would just come on him and cause him to do horrible things.

I had the very same thing happen to me at the height of my rebellion against God. After I’d given God both middle fingers to His face through my actions, I began to have a tormenting spirit that would come upon me. I was running a gym at the time, and this spirit would randomly turn me into the most hate-filled, bitter person you can imagine. I’d see all the flaws and annoying things about my clients, plus a few imagined ones, and it would take everything I had in me not to say the most hurtful things to them. Eventually, I couldn’t fight the spirit anymore, and I’d let loose on someone. I’d just absolutely rip into them, even if they were a good friend. Because of this spirit, I lost several very loyal friends who had done incredibly kind things for me. But it wasn’t there all the time. One day, I’d be an absolute monster of a person to someone, and the next day, I’d be as happy and reasonable as I could be. Then the next day I’d have fits of the most evil road rage, with me pounding and pounding the ceiling of my car and screaming at the top of my lungs in rage if someone in front of me stopped at a yellow light instead of going through it. I had no control over it or when it would happen. In fact, it frequently came over me the most severely a day or two after I’d done something enjoyable that was meant to relax me or help me unwind, like having “casual sex” or smoking weed.

I want to emphasize that this was out of character for me. Up until my late 20s, I’d been a fairly chill, friendly guy. I couldn’t have gotten a successful personal training business going if I’d been an A-hole! At the time this started happening, I had almost no stress, so that wasn’t the issue. I was finally doing what I loved, in my own gym, and not having to answer to anybody! I was very aware that what I was doing and saying during these spells of anger was not good, and that it was costing me more and more of the years of goodwill I’d built with these people. And yet, I just could not keep my irritation and hate and rage inside.

There’s not a doubt in my mind that a high percentage of the “mental health issues” that our society is plagued with are brought about by tormenting spirits that gain access to our lives through willful, habitual sin. Think about it. Are you truly in charge of your emotions and mental health? If you suffer from anxiety, depression, or suicidal thoughts, what does it feel like? Does it really feel like a chemical imbalance that just needs some adjusting? Or is it more like a 1000 lb. gorilla has grabbed ahold of you and is whipping you around like a ragdoll? I’d also like to make the personal observation that the more I made my mental health a priority, the worse things seemed actually to get for me. Things might go “dormant” for a while, but then they’d reappear even worse at the worst possible time!

Now, I’m not making the case that ALL mental health problems have spiritual origins, but I am making the case that to believe that mental health problems can only be caused by chemical imbalances and trauma is unlikely.

The Bible calls the Devil, who is the leader of all evil spiritual forces, “The Prince of the power of the air, The Spirit who is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” – Ephesians 2:2 (ESV). Think about it. Have you ever felt that pull in the air to do anything good? I sure haven’t. But I’ve been absolutely compelled by a feeling, a spirit that’s too strong to resist, to do harmful things!

So, we’re not just unaware of spiritual laws that we’re breaking. We’re not just needing to master our bodies’ natural urges and impulses. We’re actively being acted upon by an outside, evil spirit who urges us to do things that will hurt us and hurt innocent people. How do we defend ourselves against this?

We can’t. We have no defense. I’m sure you’ve tried to ignore an impulse you’ve had that you knew was harmful but every molecule in your body wanted to do. It could be as simple as saying something that you knew you were going to regret for a long time if you did. And if you’re like me, you probably restrained it for a time, but it was like pressure building inside of you until you couldn’t keep the words in any longer. It probably felt super relieving to say it, even though you knew how bad it was going to be later.

We can’t defend ourselves on our own. But when we come to Jesus, He gives us His Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a person; He’s part of God. So we end up having God living inside of us, and God is the strongest Spirit in existence. Just like we have harmful urges and desires from the Devil and his forces, when we have The Holy Spirit living in us, we’re given good urges and desires. But unlike the Devil, the Holy Spirit doesn’t compel us. We aren’t forced to do anything. God is so loving and kind; He never forces Himself on us and never overrides the free will He’s given us.

The other vital part of resisting evil spiritual influences is knowing what the Bible says. Like I said, evil spiritual forces very frequently come to us in the form of thoughts, feelings, or emotions. We defeat this by telling ourselves, “My thoughts, feelings, and emotions are telling me to do X, but God says it’s going to hurt me and innocent people if I do it. Therefore, I will overcome my feelings that come and go and trust God’s Word that never changes.” Of course, this is impossible on our own! But when we have God’s Spirit in us, the impossible battle becomes winnable!

God promises us that His Spirit that He gives us is greater than the spirit that is in the world. A helpful illustration of this is a soft drink can. When it’s empty, it’s easy to exert enough pressure to crush it. But when that can is filled and sealed, the pressure that’s inside of it is greater than the atmospheric force outside of it. The can is still being acted upon by external pressures, but they can’t overcome what’s inside of it. It has nothing to do with the can; it has everything to do with what’s inside of it. Or, in our case, WHO is inside of us.

The battle is even more winnable when we have access to God’s good promises. When “The City of Us” is coming under attack, when the enemy is “squeezing our can,” we will get strong thoughts or emotions that God is being cruel or withholding something good from us. But when we have promises from God (and the Bible is FULL of His good promises to us), we can overcome these spirits/emotions/thoughts! When we can’t think of a specific promise that applies to our situation, we can look to God’s character. God promises that He’s the same yesterday, today, and forever. If God has promised that He loves us, our feelings about our desires or circumstances don’t change or override His promises. God is infinitely stronger and more dependable than our feelings!

“The truest fact about anything is what God says about it.” – Karen Ellison

We can also overcome by remembering how good and kind God has been to us in the past. The longer we walk with God, the bigger and better this track record becomes! This kindness, this love, is God’s posture towards us. Even when the feelings that come with circumstances say otherwise, God’s past track record is a strong promise to us.

Lesson 34

More about spirits and
spiritual judgments

When it comes to almost everything spiritual, we usually can’t feel it. There are some exceptions, and there are times when our consciences will point us in the general direction of what we should or shouldn’t do, but by and large, we can only feel the effects. Many spirits seem to “lie dormant” in a person until the right opportunity presents itself. Frequently, the only time I “feel” anything spiritual is when thoughts come into my mind, inviting me to be bitter or judgmental. If I accept the thought, then the spirit of bitterness is able to take root. If I reject the thought, I also reject the spirit behind it.

There’s a good illustration of this in the story of Samson and Delilah. Samson received his strength through God’s spirit. Whenever He needed extra strength, God’s Spirit would come upon him and help him rise to the occasion. Over time, Samson got so used to this happening that it became second nature and he took it for granted. But when his mistress betrayed him and cut off his hair (which God had decreed was his means to receive God’s power) the Bible says that Samson “did not know that the Lord had departed him.”

There’s also a Psalm that illustrates this. In Psalm 10:5 (ESV), the author says that God’s judgments against the wicked person are “on high, out of his sight,” so the wicked person continues to do evil. The judgment was decreed against the wicked person, but the wicked person had no indication of what had been decreed. I can tell you from experience that some of the most hurtful, evil things I’ve ever done were accompanied by total silence. Because there was no gong, no sirens, and no flashing of lights, I thought I’d gotten away with my crimes. I thought God couldn’t possibly exist. It was only much later, when the judgments came rolling in, that I realized, too late, that He did exist and I hadn’t snuck anything by Him.

So please don’t rely on your feelings when it comes to spiritual matters. We are completely blind spiritually, and we can only rely on someone else’s sight, God. With His Word to guide us, we can navigate what we don’t have the ability to do by feeling.

Lesson 35

More about God’s Spirit
and His love for YOU

The Bible says that, “The Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” – 2 Corinthians 3:17 (ESV). Before I came to Jesus, I thought He was a choice to believe in, like a belief that vanilla is the best ice cream flavor or the belief that a Democrat or Republican has about their party being the correct one. It might be right for them, but it was just a belief, and other beliefs were equally valid if someone had different perspectives or life experiences. But when I cried to Jesus in desperation, I actually MET HIM and learned the truth. Jesus IS A PERSON, and HE’s ALIVE RIGHT NOW.

I’ve met Jesus, but I’ve never seen Him. What I mean is that when I cried out to Jesus, His spirit flooded the area I was in. You know sometimes if you’re alone in a room with your back to the door, you can still tell when someone else has entered the room? You didn’t hear them or see them, but you just knew they were there. It was like that. Not everyone experiences Jesus the same way I did though, and I don’t experience Him in the ways other people have. His relationship with each of His children is unique and personal to them, so just because you haven’t had my experience doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing anything wrong.

Now, imagine two different people. The first person is the creepiest, darkest-souled person you’ve ever met. Probably someone who tortures animals. Someone who just gives you the sense that you’ve gotta get out of the area and away from them as quickly as possible. And then think of the person in your life who loves you most, who would selflessly do good things for you at the expense of themselves (for me it was my mother). If either of these people came into the room, even if you had your back turned to the door, you’d sense either one, and they’d both have a different presence that you could feel, right?

That’s Jesus, except that His loving presence is similar to but infinitely stronger than, the person you thought of in the last paragraph. His love is so strong it’s overpowering. When I met Jesus, my emotions receiving His love were so overpowered I literally couldn’t function. Tears of gratitude and love flowed from me, and I was powerless to restrain them. His love is like being at the bottom of the ocean, under massive, irresistible pressure, except the pressure is GOOD, and instead of water rushing in it’s love. Instead of deep water crushing and bursting us, it’s unbridled love overwhelming us, and we burst into pure joy and gratitude.

As a person who’s been involved in high-level military fitness tests of willpower and endurance, I am very familiar with the mind being the make-or-break factor in what someone can accomplish. My mind has been the thing that’s taken me to places that my body couldn’t do on its own. I’ve also practiced “manifesting,” which requires a warped type of belief and faith. I know what my mind is capable of and what it isn’t. I could never in a million years have imagined, thought of, or believed-into-existence anything like Jesus’s presence and love. It’s infinitely MORE than a human could fabricate.

Jesus loves YOU like this, too, and is just waiting for you to invite Him into your life. When a Christian says, “Jesus loves you,” we’re telling the truth, but our words aren’t adequate for the reality. Mere words saying, “Jesus loves you,” are like calling the surface of the sun “warm.” YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT LOVE IS UNTIL YOU MEET JESUS. But He won’t force Himself on you because He loves you that much. I think the most sad and frustrating part of a Christian’s existence is our inability to express to people just how deeply Jesus loves them and how empty and low a life without His love is.

Lesson 36

“Don’t ever buy a house based on the view from the street!” – Pastor Barrett Marshall

(Selecting the right mate)

“Charm is deceitful, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” - Proverbs 31:30 (NIV)

“Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.” - Proverbs 11:22 (ESV)

“A continual dripping on a rainy day and a quarrelsome wife are alike.” - Proverbs 27:15 (ESV)

Of course, these three verses are from the perspective of a father giving dating advice to his son, so women need to take similar precautions when choosing a man.

Here’s my advice for selecting the right person, summed up in one sentence. Filter for character first.

Of course, you need the traits and qualities that are important to you. They could be things like attraction, personality matches, compatible senses of humor, intelligence, etc., but these are all less important than a person’s character. Character is what determines if someone with an STD tells you about it before you sleep with them. Character is what determines if the person you fall in love with will keep your heart safe or will cheat on you. Character is what determines if a person will work on their flaws to improve themselves for you or gaslight you when you bring them up. Character is what determines if a person will stand by you when life gets hard or drop you for an easier situation when you desperately need their strength and support.

Now, here’s the secret. You can’t really know anyone else’s character because we don’t even know our own characters fully. You can devise a series of elaborate tests, and these would reveal a lot about a person but not the whole. But there’s someone who does know the person you’re considering:

“For God does not see as man sees, since man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” -1 Samuel 16:7 (NASB2020)

“House and wealth are an inheritance from fathers, but a prudent wife is from the Lord.” - Proverbs 19:14 (NASB2020)

If you’re dating on your own, you can only catch things with your filters. But your filters are limited. When you leave your dating life in God’s hands, He’s free to give you good gifts. He knows whether that person will be good for you or hurt you. I can tell you that I truly had the best of intentions with most of the women I dated. I really did want to treat them well. I thought I had the ability to treat them well! But I didn’t know my character as deeply as God did.

When things got really bad or really tempting, I would always choose myself over them. Before I came to Jesus, I used Tinder a lot. I would occasionally match with a Christian girl. Each time we would make a plan for a date, some set of circumstances would come up to force the date to be canceled. I realize now that God was protecting His daughters from me.

“Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” - Matthew 7:9-11 (ESV). These girls were looking for a good guy, and from the outside, I looked like one. But I was the stone and the serpent. I would have hurt His daughters, so He kept me away from them.

Please don’t date someone based only on your attraction to them, your feelings, your intelligence, or your reading of a person. Ask God to help you know who to date. Ask Him to guide the right person into your path and keep the wrong people away. And ask Him to help you trust Him and be patient until He does.

Lesson 37

“The Hard Way or The Easy Way”

We’re close to wrapping up, so I want to clearly spell out what I’ve been illustrating and making a case for. Adulting is so hard for three reasons:

-The first one is because we’re trying to navigate life on our own, and make all the breaks happen on our own, when we weren’t designed for it. We were never meant to bear life’s brutally heavy problems by ourselves. We’re meant to do life in partnership with God. Jesus says “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” – Matthew 11:28-30 (ESV). A yoke implies shared work, and I can tell you from experience that what Jesus promises is true.

-The second reason that we’ve already covered is sin. Sin separates us from God and always comes with a painful price. Willful sin comes with an even worse price. It’s worth repeating that “Sin costs us more than we want to pay, takes us farther than we want to go, and keeps us longer than we want to stay.”

-The third reason is my opinion, but I think it matches reality. God’s word is full of patterns and examples that we’re meant to learn from. That’s why they’re included in the Bible. A large portion of the Bible is devoted to God warning and warning and warning and then finally punishing Israel for their flagrant sins against Him. Israel was set apart and birthed as a nation that served God, a “priest nation.” But every time they grew prosperous, they discarded God’s laws. This is what God said to them, and I believe it’s also for us: “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.”

After World War 2, America enjoyed a period of incredible growth and prosperity. Most people acknowledged God and regularly attended worship services. But starting with the Boomer generation, more and more people began walking away from what their parents had believed in each subsequent generation. I don’t believe it’s coincidence that each generation has also had it harder than the previous one, with Gen Z inheriting a terribly bleak future from the choices of their recent ancestors.

The good news is that you, the reader can step out of this reality and experience the new reality of having God’s supernatural help, blessing and compassion as His child.

Lesson 38

Count the Cost

So, why isn’t everyone living this way if it’s so good?

Well, I don’t want to mislead you: it’s because of the cost. I’ve found that the cost is absolutely worth it for the blessings we receive, and is often what actually produces the blessings, but there is a high price. This is the paradox of doing life with God - that in loss we find gain, in death we find true life.

As Jesus tells us “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’” In another place, He tells us, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses His life for My sake will find it.” – Matthew 16:25 (NASB)

Jesus’s way is completely opposite of the normal way of the world, of conventional wisdom. When we give our lives over to Him, an ongoing death happens. Believers refer to this as the process of dying to self. The only way to come to Jesus and to live the kind of life He offers is to completely surrender to Him. We have to write Him a blank check when it comes to our lives. Our plans, our dreams, our hopes - everything has to be on the table and available to be sacrificed to His better plan. But His plan is SO MUCH BETTER.

Everyone who ever comes to Jesus pays a price and will continue to pay a price. You will lose things. You will be required to give up things that are dear to you. But the price is a bargain compared to what’s waiting for you on the other side.

Here’s a simple illustration to help you think about the cost: If you drink alcohol, wouldn’t you rather get the hangover out of the way first, and then enjoy the buzz worry-free? What if you knew that the level of sickness you were experiencing with the hangover was going to correlate to and even be exceeded by the buzz later? If you regularly workout, you already experience a version of this: the pain of the workout comes first, and then later the endorphins and improved fitness and health. The pain of the workout is temporary; the benefits last a lot longer.

This has been my experience living life following Jesus. I’ve lived life both ways - with Him, and without Him. Without Him, I’ve always gotten the thing I wanted first, and later down the road had to pay a price that just kept costing me more and more. Sometimes this price was unbearable. With Him, it’s reversed. I’ve experienced periods of going through humbling, only to have it followed by periods of being honored. I’ve had things and people taken out of my life, only to have them replaced with far better things down the road. I prefer His way.

There is a period of real loss. I’ve gone years without certain things that made my life enjoyable, or even tolerable. I’ve had years of emotional pain at the loss of people who were dear to me. But it’s all been reimbursed and even upgraded.

If you’ve ever played a video game RPG like any of the Zelda or Elder Scroll games, there’s almost always a quest where you have to give up your best item. Maybe you leave your sword with a blacksmith or toss your bow into a fairy’s pool or something. Then you have to play the game without it for a while. The game gets harder and is less enjoyable, but you’re gaining experience and leveling up. Eventually, you get the item returned to you, massively improved, and it unlocks things for you that were closed off before then. It’s a goofy illustration, but I’ve found this to be pretty accurate of my life with Jesus. Many other people have too.

There’s even a story about a follower of Jesus who lived a few hundred years ago. He’d lived for a few decades with Jesus as his master and loved Him. At one point, he actually asked God to just let him give God a sacrifice without reimbursing him for it, so it could be his first true sacrifice. In all his life he’d never lost or given anything to God that hadn’t later been repaid. That’s how dependable God’s reimbursements are! God knows our hearts, and He knows what’s in store for us in the future. He knows the best things to give us, and He always gives them to us at the absolutely perfect time, in the coolest ways, when we’re developed and ready to fully appreciate and enjoy them.

Here’s Jesus’s promise about what you get for the cost: “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.” – Mark 10: 29&30 (ESV)

There’s a motivational lesson I’ve seen in the fitness world that basically says that all we get to choose is what type of “hard” we want to deal with. We can deal with the “hard” of going to the gym and being sweaty and out of breath and having aching muscles. We can deal with the hard of denying ourselves sugar and other tasty foods in pursuit of something better. Or we can choose the “hard” of being a couch potato who has diabetes and high cholesterol and can’t do anything fun with our bodies. Of the two options, I’d rather choose the hard, painful way of discipline that later gives me the freedom to hike up a mountain and see a breathtaking sunset.

All we get to choose in life is our “hard.” There’s no option that isn’t hard. It’s just a matter of when you want it. We can choose sin, get the pleasure upfront, and then get a huge price tag of consequences later. Or we can choose God’s way. There’s suffering first, and then the blessings and rewards follow. In both cases, the thing that follows is always much larger than the thing that leads. What I’ve gained quickly through sin has paled in comparison to what I’ve had to pay and lose. And what I’ve suffered for God has absolutely paled in comparison to what He’s rewarded me with later.

Lesson 39

Self-love

“Self-love isn’t spa days and candles; it’s doing the stuff that future you will thank you for.” – Sandra Osetek

Early in this book, I used illustrations like a faulty compass, and the calculations required to send a rocket to the moon. My recommendation to you is that you seriously ponder and calculate what you reason out will give you the greatest happiness, joy, fulfillment, peace, pleasure and meaning. Whatever it is, set the trajectory of your life towards that and pursue it with everything you’ve got.

We’ve covered how delaying gratification is a fundamental principle of life. A 15-year-old who’s done no calculations, or thinks that life has no point, is going to drop out of high school to go have fun. Someone who’s thought a bit more and taken a longer view of time would delay their gratification and sacrifice some of their youth towards graduating and earning a degree or learning a trade. They do this because they’ve reasoned that their long-term well-being will be much greater if they make sacrifices in the short term.

This leads me to the concept of “Christian Hedonism.” Christian Hedonism is essentially the calculation that our greatest and longest source of well-being is found in God, and doing life with Him, according to His principles. We have looked at things and reasoned that the sacrifices in this temporary existence are worth the eternal rewards that God promises.

I want to emphasize that you should absolutely not do this blindly! Count the cost. See if what God has said has proved true in the past. See if God’s word matches and makes sense of reality. See if He can be relied on. I’ve done this, and this has led me to say - from research, reason and personal experience - that God is completely trustworthy. What He says has come true for me; what He promises happens.

“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” – 2 Corinthians 4:17 (ESV)

Lesson 40

“Your Very Great Reward”

We’ve covered a lot of ground here. Early in this book, I mentioned that God’s spiritual laws are not just for our protection; they’re also for our reward. It may be helpful to think of them as guardrails that keep us on the road to God’s blessings. I want to finish this with a list of some of those blessings:

-God’s spiritual laws keep us from harmful things that only appear good, and direct us towards things that really are good through and through. Remember, when God gives a gift, He adds no sorrow to it.

-God gives us gifts and blessings that we’re ready for. He won’t allow us to hurt ourselves or other people. So when we receive His blessings, we can have confidence about them.

-He knows and gives us our hearts’ desires. When I first read this promise that He gives us the desires of our hearts, I thought it meant He’d give me whatever I wanted. But it’s actually BETTER than that. God made each of us, and He’s placed things deep in our hearts that only He knows about. We have longings and purposes that will profoundly fulfill and satisfy us that we don’t even realize we have. But He does. Let me give you an example from my personal life. I was recently on a work trip to Arizona, and I had an extra day at the end. God had made the word “Sedona” come up in a few different conversations I’d had the week before, and I knew it was somewhere in AZ. So, I decided to check it out.

I’d never seen one picture of Sedona in my life before that trip that I know of. But when I got there, it filled my soul. The absolute massiveness of the cliffs beside the roads, the vastness and quietness of the desert, the beautiful colors, everything about it was something that quenched my soul like a glass of cold water on a hot day. I’ve been all over the world, and in less than 3 hours, Sedona had become my favorite place on earth. It was a gift from God that I didn’t even know I wanted because I’d never seen it before, but it was perfect. Another example is the sports car God gave me. I’ve never been a car person; I always drove trucks. I honestly always thought sports cars were for people who were compensating for something. But then God orchestrated some divine circumstances to give me one, and it’s been so, sooo fun!

-Material gifts are great, but even better than trips and cars are the spiritual blessings God gives us. One of them is a purpose. God specially made each of us to do and accomplish certain purposes. For some of us, it could be writing a book. For some of us, it could be as big as achieving a social justice change that makes the world better. For others, it could be as simple as loving and enjoying your family and friends well. But whatever that purpose is, it’s something that He’s put within us to enjoy, to desire, and to be fulfilled by. God has given me tasks and sent me on missions for Him that I would never have chosen for myself because they appeared too hard and unpleasant. But then, when I’ve been in the middle of doing them, my soul has had a song, and I realized it was something I’d been born to do! Sometimes, He gives us desires (that we may not even know about) that we’re not ready for yet. And in those cases, He sends us circumstances and lessons and people who prepare us for them. I can’t tell you how cool it is when you’re doing something that God directed you into, that’s totally fulfilling, and you can look back on your life and think, “Wow God, all those weird things that happened to me that seemed random and didn’t make sense, were getting me ready for THIS!” Sometimes, getting to it is really hard and can really hurt, but what God has for us is so much better, higher, more fulfilling, and more significant than we could ever come up with on our own.

-You can put a price tag on a car or a trip, but there’s no money in the world that can buy the blessing of being at peace with God. If you’ve been to somewhere like Sedona or Hawaii, words and even pictures can’t capture the beauty and the majesty of the location. You just have to be there. Being at total peace and favor with the One who knows us, made us, and loves us is a gift that words can’t touch.

-We get access to His great and precious promises. God’s word is full of amazing promises about what He will do for us as His dearly loved children, and what evils and problems He’ll protect us from. I can tell you from experience, God always tells the truth, and what God says always comes true. Most of the time it’s even a bit understated. I’ve been walking with Jesus for about 6 years at the time of writing this book, and hundreds of His promises have come true for me. One of my favorites is His promise that He’ll “Work everything together for the good of those who love Him.” – Romans 8:28. Before I came to Jesus, things that started out good usually turned bad or fell apart at the end. Now it’s the complete opposite! I’ve had “terrible” things happen to me that actually helped propel me into bigger blessings than I would have ever found on my own. This amazing promise was true for Paul 2000 years ago, and it’s still true today, I’m living it. If God is for us, who can ever be against us!?

- I mentioned math earlier in this book. While I wasn’t very good at it, one thing I did learn is that the multiplier is what really matters. I can “have” 1 million of anything, but if I multiply it by zero, I actually have nothing. 10 of something, with a multiplier of 1, yields more of that thing than the previous equation (1,000,000 x 0 = 0, 10 x 1 = 10). I’m here to tell you, Jesus is the infinite “life multiplier.” I’ve traveled the world, been to beautiful places, and enjoyed the finest things in life. I can tell you from experience, Jesus is better. INFINITELY BETTER. I’ve been far more full of unspeakable, inexpressible joy just walking to work with Jesus than I’ve ever been at the most exotic tropical destination where everything is paid for without Him. Jesus gives JOY and LIFE from the inside out, while everything else only gives temporary happiness from the outside in.

-And this leads me to the final and biggest blessing of all: God Himself. Everything else I’ve mentioned was just things He has to give. But He is the reward of all rewards. You were made to be loved by and love Him. Until we’ve been born again, we can’t receive and experience that, but please trust me when I say it’s what you were MADE for. The best illustration I’ve ever heard is that we’re all like fish who’ve been born out of water. We’re all born on the shore, having to flop from tidal pool to tidal pool, trying to suck in a little bit of muddy water. But God’s love is the crystal-clear ocean we were designed to swim in and when we’re born again, that’s where we find ourselves! If you could combine all the other love you’ve experienced from parents, family and friends, pets, and everywhere else, and put all that love into one experience, it doesn’t even hold a candle to the love and joy God has to give you. My deepest hope is that this book makes you want to taste and see HOW GOOD God is for yourself.

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stubborn, stony heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.”

Ezekiel 36:26 (NLT)

“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

- Psalm 37:4 (ESV)

Resources

Thanks for reading this all the way to the end! Here are some resources I’m sure you will find to be helpful:

If you have questions about Christianity, God, etc., and don’t know where to begin, I highly recommend the online Christian chat service called “Groundwire.”

Groundwire anonymously pairs chatters who have questions with Christian coaches who can help you:

or Click Here

If you’re curious about reading the Bible, but find it’s hard to understand, then I can’t recommend “The Bible Project” highly enough for you! It has tons of well-illustrated videos to explain almost any question you have or concept you need help with. It also has a fantastic Bible reading plan, with explanations, notes and even some essays that add a lot of clarity:

or Click Here

Here’s a great sermon for teens and young adults about how your future self will thank you for making the right choices about sex now:

or Click Here

I think the entire books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes should be mandatory reading for teens to spare them from needless pain:

or Click Here or Click Here

If you’re a parent and could only have your teens watch one video about sex and relationships, this should be the one. It’s called “sex has a price tag” and is given by a mom of 3 who has spent years working in Crisis Pregnancy Centers. She breaks down the consequences of sex, STD statistics, and everything else you probably want to be able to talk to your kids about:

or Click Here

About the Author

In his 20s and 30s, Danny was a Hedonist. He’s a combat veteran and spent 20 years as a personal trainer. He loved fitness and challenging himself, but his favorite conquests were romantic ones. He’s been on hundreds of dates, had several long-term relationships, and everything in between. He’s an inadvertent expert on the subjects in this book, and hopes his pain will become your gain.

You can find out more about what he’s up to, get in touch with him, purchase other books he’s written, or support his work by visiting www.dont-follow-your-heart.com or scanning the QR code below.