I just wanted to write you and tell you how much your radio show has helped me and my boyfriend. We listen every night…We started listening last year in February. Your lessons on Romans helped a lot dispel the condemnation I have felt from God and the Church I was going to. I have a mental illness and I need medication. The church I was going to took away my medication and was very judgmental. Anyway, I also have had trouble with sexual addiction. I even started to get into pornography. But now I talk to God about my feelings and I know He will not condemn me and I am not destined to stay in my addiction.
You are so realistic, Colin, and you don’t have a pat answer for the problems that people face. You have made me realize that Jesus died in my place and I can be accounted righteous in Him. It is so simple. I talked to the church I was going to and all they said was to stop it. They didn’t give me any help, or way out. They didn’t share about the Gospel and what Jesus did on the cross 2000 years ago. You have given me the freedom to love God and do what’s right through dependence on Him. And I like Romans 7:14 because it is a struggle. You have also given my boyfriend hope. He also has a mental illness that is an anxiety disorder. He tried going to church and got judged and mistreated by Christians. But he has hope through what you have taught. He was abused in his childhood and when you talk about the emotional deficits, it really helps him a lot. Also I am very relieved that we can go to God and be very human. I feel like I have come home to Jesus. He died for me and freed me from my sin and the condemnation that I put on myself for my sexual sin. Also, I need to take the cross seriously. It took a long time to admit that Jesus suffered. I wanted to believe that because He was God, He did not suffer; it just looked as if He did.
Well, anyway, what I am saying is you have helped us have a better view of God and His unconditional love and ourselves as Christians who are very human, and Christ Who took away the wrath of God, took away our sin, took away the condemnation, and took away our despair. Praise God, Colin.
P.B.
Enclosed is our annual donation to your ministry work…We are as convinced as ever that we have found in you a rare source of Biblical encouragement for all struggles. And that’s most of us!
R.H.
I just added you to my e-mail. I woke up in the middle of the night and decided to listen to your 4 a.m. show and it touched me so…I want to know if there is a possibility that I can get this tape so my son [name] can listen to it?
I am [name] and support your ministry on a monthly basis. I feel you have the best ministry to hurting people out there today, and I praise God for your “up front” style of reaching people. I have gone to Alanon for 10 years and know the “honest” approach heals.
I thank the Lord for you…but I also thank the Lord for you being there in case my son…calls and makes an appointment with you. I just gave your number to him and he said he’d call. I know you and he will meet one day and I have known that for a long time. [Name] is my precious son, who I know has a great calling on his life…he has a kind heart and God loves him so much…
C.G.
I’ve had for some years now an occasional—but extremely difficult—struggle…I would sometimes stay late at work, and surf the net, looking for pornographic sites…The odd thing, and what I think I can now call a pattern, is that I seem to behave like an alcoholic who indulges in binges with a long stretch of sobriety between. I often go months at a time without falling, and then will spend two, three or four days looking at these sites until my self-disgust peaks and I once again enter into a period where I am no longer tempted, even abhor what I have done.
It is worrying to me, this pattern. I thought…that I was entering in to a new period of greater maturity, of victory. [Recently] I…fell again…I tried to pull myself out of this space…and got busy with a project…To my horror I noticed [later] that somehow the site…was listed that I’d visited…I’m not sure my colleague saw the web…but for days, even weeks, after I was plagued by shame, a fear that he had seen and might even discuss it with others.
The fear of discovery has certainly taught me a number of things. For one, it has revealed to me once again how that private space where lust is, and which while hidden can seem fairly harmless and even comforting, once it is opened changes utterly. You see truly how ugly and destructive it is. Also, while I was trembling mightily under the fear that I’d been discovered, I was struck by how our sin—my sin—looks to God (my sin, after all, caused Christ’s death), but on the other hand I was filled with a sense of God’s grace. Despite the foulness of my sin, God’s grace through Christ is sufficient and will always be so. While I still have no idea whether I was found out or not, I do have a greater understanding of Paul’s statement that we boast in Christ, not in ourselves or anything that we are. I am left without any sense of anything about myself of which I can boast.
I do not know whether I will have victory over this soon or not…I continue to remain in Christ, resting and at peace in the assurance that He has saved me and that He is working in me each day to bring to fruition what He has begun. I also think of what you said the other day. Christ does indeed go with us when we fall, and by His grace lifts us up again, and again. I do, though, yearn to be free and clear. Last night and today, for instance, I came back into “normal” good space…I am one person, not two…I am honest. I wish I was this person all the time…So that is where I am now—grateful to God for his grace and salvation, yearning for a time when he will consummate what he has begun in me but confident that He will do so in His time.
S.J.