"What benefit...?"

"Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. What benefit did you reap at that time from things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit is eternal life." Romans 6:19b,21-22.

In the week between Christmas and New Years just passed I went through a few days when I felt the horribleness of where sin had taken me. I knew it was something I had to come face to face with. God let me see the depths to where I had gone when it came to homosexuality and SSA. At the time it seemed the pain of what I saw would become unbearable. 

The line of a song that I had prayed a couple years ago, "whatever it takes for my will to break, that's what I'm willing to do!", was being answered. I guess I didn't think it would feel so bad. I was wrong. I needed to see my need of letting God cleanse and purify my heart and life, His way.

New Years came and went and there were still ups and downs but all through those days I could feel God's love. It would bring tears at times and often when I was alone a reassurance that He was working out His will in my life. Then one early morning I woke up and visualized a whirlpool. All the dirtiness and sin that had been in my life were being swept away downward into that whirlpool. 

Today I got another vision. This one came in the form of a feeling. It was a feeling of being ashamed. I felt ashamed that I had ever taken part in sexual sin with another guy. I felt ashamed that I had written so often in this very blog about my ongoing struggle with it. I felt ashamed that it had taken so long for me to let God really deal with it in my life. I had held on to it, and I am ashamed that I did. No one can tell me there is any 'pride' in it, I know from experience that there is NOT. 

I can repeat the words above, "What benefit did you reap at that time from things you are now ashamed of?"  

I am not so sure I will keep this blog going. Not that I want to forget where I have been but I feel so deeply that I need to celebrate what the Lord is doing and wants to do in my life, from this moment on.