What You Should Do After Sinning Sexually
We have heard so many of our counselees say that after their first homosexual encounter, they went home and took a long shower, trying to cleanse themselves from the dirtiness and filth of their sin. Others have said after longer periods of sexual sin that they will never do it again and they just want to forget it.
Obviously washing the body, while necessary, does not reach the place of guilt and sin and the need to deal with God about our sin. Forgetting, or trying to forget our sin makes matters worse because the undealt-with sin settles into your pool of ungodly, unconfessed sin and buried emotions which then connect to your sex drive causing you to desire more sexual sin to try to cover the pain and upset held inside.
Here are the things you should do after sinning sexually so you will have peace with God by confessing your sin and can uproot old ungodly reactions to pain, have one-flesh connections broken which will weaken the grip of the addiction, and have a counselor or trusted friend pray to cleanse you and cast out the demonic power. Then you know you are forgiven and restored to righteousness and you can come boldly to the Throne of Grace (unmerited favor from God) and find help in your time of need.
To be free from guilt, we must humble ourselves before God and confess our sin. 1 John 1:9 brings a clear message of how to be forgiven and cleansed from all unrighteousness. “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
What a gracious and merciful offer to the sinner! When we confess you should not confess what you feel—you’re a loser, you’ll never be free, you’re hopeless, but simply confess you have sinned against God’s commandment and then you receive God’s forgiveness and are cleansed from all unrighteousness.
We must believe this truth and receive His mercy, His grace and His faithful and just forgiveness of our sin and His cleansing us from unrighteousness. We need to pray that we choose to forgive ourselves. If God forgives us, what right have we to judge ourselves. Simply receive His loving forgiveness.
Do not try to repent at the time of confession. Repentance involves a change of mind about sin so that we agree with God about sin, turn from it completely and see it as God sees it as corrupt and filthy. We cannot do this until we have broken the addictive lies that led us to believe and justify our sin in the first place.
Until you have broken the ungodly reaction to pain and the use of the idol of homosexuality as something good that will ease the pain better than God’s way and more reliable than living a pure life, we cannot not truly repent. We must break and uproot the lie of homosexuality being the answer for our pain and God being the problem by saying it is wrong and we should turn from it.
Confess the sin to a counselor or trusted friend or pastor. Have this person pray to break the one-flesh connection and/or the soul-tie (emotional connection) and cast out the demonic power that came through the ungodly sexual union.
Write down what brought you to this sin. Try to remember the emotional state you were in prior to the sex and connect it to past experiences that have given you the feelings of being justified in have homosexual relation- ships. Or if you were molested or incested, why do you submit to these acts as if you have no choice. ( lack of personhood and feelings of worth) Never say, “I’ll never do this again.” and try to forget it. Instead, work out what you will do in the future when you are tempted.
Know that it is very import- ant for you to resist and turn from the first thoughts of this sin. Do not go near a person you are attracted to—do not speak to them. Flee fornication! Put a filter on your computer and if you keep trying to go around it, get rid of your computer. It is time to resist sin and purify ourselves by obeying the truth. (1Peter 1:22) Then we can love sincerely (not to get what our evil desires seek) and then love our brothers and sisters deeply from the heart.
Look for the roots of your sin. What was it that hurt you most? The place of the pain is the place of the addiction. Try to see how the pain distorted your view of life, God, yourself and others. There could be justified envy, anger, self-pity, hatred, self-punishment, hopelessness, fear.
We must see these sinful ungodly emotions and begin the work to turn from them, go through the pain of letting them go and having godly responses and cleaning out the storage of justified sin and unconfessed sin which we have held in because of pain. Then go for the tap root which is our case against God because we have had to go through all of this and feel very alone, hurt and angry.
Don’t settle for homosexuality because you feel this is the only “love” you will ever have. There is no love in homosexuality. It is sexual abuse because it goes against the spiritual concept of God’s design for sexuality and conspires to hold the person in deception, thinking this is the way he or she was created.
Just because you have never had a heterosexual feeling does not mean you cannot have normal, God-given responses to the opposite sex. That is the way you were created, so begin to agree with God’s design and plan for sexual union even though the feelings are not present. They are in you because God made you for heterosexual union if you are married. Agree with God and break up the old reactions to His plan for sexuality.
There is a difference between disappointment and discouragement. All of us will have disappointments–they are inherent in living. We must learn to take disappointments and grow from overcoming them. But to let them accumulate in us so that we become discouraged and no longer want to try, that is dangerous.
We must keep trying and learn to believe that God does work all things together for good for those who love Him (obey His commandments) and are called according to His purposes. Uproot old discouragement and hope in Him.
Homosexual sin does not make you lose your salvation. You must heed the truth about losing your salvation as revealed in Hebrews 6 :4-6. This passage has made many people in homosexual sin give up thinking they were lost and beyond repentance.
“It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.” Let me share with you what Adam Clarke, one of the great writers of commentary on this passage has to say:
“(1)I do not consider them ( these verses) as having any reference to any person professing Christianity. (2) They do not belong, nor are they applicable to backsliders of any kind. (3) They belong to the apostates from Christianity; to such as reject the whole Christian system, and its Author, the Lord Jesus. (4) And to those of them only who join with the blaspheming Jews, call Christ an impostor, and vindicate His murderers in having crucified Him as a malefactor; and thus they render their salvation impossible, by willfully and maliciously rejecting the Lord that bought them.
No man believing in the Lord Jesus as the great Sacrifice for sin and acknowledging Christianity as a divine revelation, is here intended, though he may have unfortunately backslidden from any degree of the salvation of God.”
Later he says in his commentary: “They show openly that they judge Jesus Christ to have been worthy of the death which He suffered and was justly made a public example by being crucified. This shows that it is final apostasy, by the total rejection of the gospel and blasphemy of the Savior of men that the apostle has in view.”
The ultimate goal of confession and cleansing is to be able to come to complete repentance–complete turning from the sin because of the truth that it is exchanging the truth of God for a lie. The lie is: ” This is who I am. I am a homosexual and it is good. ” The truth is: ”
God created every person a heterosexual and that is who we are even though we have the dysfunction of our emotions and sex drive so that we believe and feel like we are not. If we keep committing the sin, we reinforce the lie with each act. You must stay away from the places, the people and the things that agree with, practice and/or draw you to this sin. Submit therefore to God.
Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable and mourn and weep (over your disloyalty). Let your laughter be turned to grief and your mirth to dejection and heartfelt shame (for your sins). Humble yourselves–feeling very insignificant–in the presence of the Lord and He will exalt you. He will lift you up and make your life significant.
Though confession and God’s enormous gifts of cleansing, forgiveness and restoration are huge acts of love and grace from our loving Father, made possible by the atoning work of Jesus on the Cross, we must not stop there. We are not to be content to have our sins forgiven and our guilt taken away. We are to seek the ultimate goal of repentance from our sin. Repentance requires a change of heart and mind. A new heart and a new mind that loves God most and obeys His truth.
At the time prior to yielding to sin, there can be a number of experiences which will hit the stored pain from childhood. Feelings such as “I’ve been abandoned again. I’m all alone.” or ” I hurt them again by my reaction and I hate myself for it.” or “I’m angry I have to go through this and be part of this messed-up family.”
When these hit the emotions from childhood, whether one at a time or all together, the drive to have sex to cover the pain is strong. But not so strong that you cannot resist. It always feels stronger than it is. Greater is He who is in us than he that is in the world.
We generally give ourselves to sin because we stop trusting God and His righteous ways. We got a twisted idea of God when we did not understand His ways are not our ways, but God works all things together for good for those that love God and are called according to His purposes. Do not give up and give in. Stand with the Lord and He will fight for you. God bless you and be with you as you fight and gain victory over sin.
What You Should Do After Sinning Sexually
by Joanne Highley