Julie Lyons on God’s Healing Power
1. My “deliverance” from depression and a broken sexual identity did involve choices. I ultimately wanted to obey God more than I wanted to sin. And, as I wrote last week, I do believe homosexuality is a sin. I needed supernatural help making a clean break, and I got that through faith, the prayers of others and believing God is who he says he is in Scripture. I also made a decision to put away the trappings of my broken past, such as sexual fantasizing. I still make that decision, and I still call upon God to help me.
2. I had issues with the ideal of womanhood offered to me in the evangelical church. To me, evangelicals are terribly guilty of pushing noxious stereotypes of men and women—there’s an entire corner of the Christian publishing industry devoted to that stuff. Like the women’s books with the soft-focus covers, the curly writing and the pictures of flowers. No wonder I had identity issues.
3. I married a great man who has always loved me as I am.
4. I ended up in a church of misfits, of people who once led busted lives. Former drunks and crack addicts and people who once suffered from documented mental illnesses. All manner of bad boys and girls. We were people who desperately needed intervention from above—go-for-broke kind of folks. General admonitions to be good and to be kind and to study our Bibles daily just weren’t gonna cut it. We needed God’s supernatural power. In that kind of atmosphere, people who want it bad enough get healed.
These four points finish off Julie’s piece but they are crucial to understanding the redemptive power of Christ. More than Bible studies and moral behaviour, God’s supernatural resurrection power is what changes people.
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