Listen to the song “There is No Chain”

It has been over 45 years now since the Lord set me on the path toward wholeness. People who hear my story for the first time often believe—mistakenly—that my healing occurred all at once. That is simply not the case. It has taken me that long to recognize many of the lies I had believed...that long to build on a sure foundation of truth...that long to learn to recognize wrong thought patterns and to replace them with right thought patterns...and the work’s not done!

One of my heroes of the faith is the ancient King of Israel, David. Here is a man who committed adultery and murder and had a horrible family life...yet he is remembered in God’s Word as being a man after God’s own heart. That’s how I want to be remembered. David was a worshipper of God...so I became a worshipper of God. What I discovered is that worship requires my entire being. When I worship my mind is engaged, my will is engaged, my emotions are engaged, and even my physical body is engaged...and focused on God and others. What I recognized early on was that if my entire being was focused on God and others, temptation was severely weakened! (More on the joy of temptation in the next chapter).

Of course we can’t walk around singing and praising God all the time can we? I believe we can. Since God is God and I am His child, I want to be like Him. He is about healing, serving, comforting, building up, and, of course, loving. I made a conscious decision years ago that I would worship Him with my actions, my attitudes, my thoughts, and even my physical body. After all, I had used all those same parts of my being to willfully sin against Him. In a sense, I had allowed the very attributes God had blessed me with to be used in less than holy and eternal ways. The enemy had taken good things and had led me to use those attributes in a perverted form. When I came to realize this, I decided that all these things were ground the enemy had stolen in my life... and it was up to me,( by God's grace), to take back that ground.

King David had faced a giant named Goliath. I had always thought Goliath meant huge or big...but Goliath actually means naked and ashamed! For far too long I had allowed the giant of same-sex attraction to shame me into dishonesty. He had been there all along saying things like, “If anyone finds out, you’ll be humiliated. If anyone finds out, you’ll be rejected. If anyone finds out, you’ll never be loved or accepted.” On November 7, 1981 I put that giant down for the first time by finally getting honest and walking toward the freedom offered by Jesus Christ. Reality is that I’ve had to put him down many, many times...along with many of his brothers like confusion, fear, habitual sin, perverted thinking, selfishness and self-focus, etc. When you begin to mess with the enemy he is not going to go down without a fight. But let me clue you in: his only weapon is deception. He is a liar whose bark is worse than his bite. When we learn to recognize then put down his lies, we will see victory upon victory in areas we never thought possible. I believe I will have to fight until the day I die to some degree...but I tell you this: knowing Christ intimately is worth every single battle...and I proudly let the world see my scars—because they declare the power of God’s love better than any sermon!

Are you going to kick the giant’s butt or is he going to kick yours?”

Excerpt From

Victim to Victor

Dennis Jernigan

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