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Counseling in A Sexually Broken Culture

Truth in Love 158

The Word of God addresses the sexual sin of our culture clearly.

Jun 11, 2018

Heath Lambert: This week on the podcast, we’re doing things a little bit differently. Ordinarily, I’ll interact with some of your questions or address a specific issue on the podcast in a very limited, 10- to 12-minute format. But we’re doing something different on the podcast this week in advance of our ACBC Annual Conference on biblical counseling. This year, we’re focusing on the theme of abuse. We’re calling the conference Light in the Darkness: Biblical Counseling and Abuse. We want to show how Christians need to have a fully orbed, biblical response to those who struggle with the problem of abuse.

To help us prepare for that conference, this week on the podcast, I want to bring you a special talk that I gave to a conference of pastors back in January. This talk is not available online anywhere else, and because it addresses the issue of abuse and in particular sexual abuse, I wanted you to hear what I had to say to these pastors about this topic. It is far too long for us to do in just one podcast, so we’re going to break the talk up into two parts and give you each part over two weeks. This week here is the first part of the talk I gave on sexual abuse to a room full of pastors back in January, and I hope it is something that helps you.

I’m assigned to talk tonight about counseling in a sexually broken culture. We have to talk about this subject because a sexually broken culture is the only kind of culture we’ve got. In that kind of culture, we need to be very honest with one another that there is going to be an abundance of victims. The only thing this kind of culture can create is victims, and I want us to understand the different kind of victims that we’re going to confront in this culture. I want to survey with you here for a little bit, as we think about manifestations of sexual brokenness in our culture, six different kinds of victims that we’re going to encounter in this sexually broken culture.

Here’s the first kind: the obvious victims. These are the victims that we most readily think of. These are the ones that seem most apparently to be victims. These are the people who, through the misuse of power of someone else, they are oppressed and they become victims of rape, of molestation, of assault, and intimidation. These are the people whose lives are destroyed, who are completely reoriented, and they will never be the same. These are the obvious victims, but there’s another kind of victim.

There are the unintended victims. Obvious victims are the folks where a predator looks at them and sets out to hurt them and they are successful so much of the time. Unintended victims are very different. They were never targeted for mistreatment. Nobody ever meant to hurt that person. But when sexual sin begins to set down roots and bear fruit, these people get hurt. These are the children who are going through a long season of depression after their parents got divorced because their mom committed adultery. Nobody ever said, “We’re going to hurt those kids.” Nobody ever said we want to make them cry. But mom engaged in sexually sinful behavior, it led to the destruction of a marriage, and now the kids are in pain.

These unintended victims are the men, the pastors, who are struggling for sexual purity, but as they scroll through their Twitter feed, they see the announcement that the president of the United States, before he was the president of the United States, was sexually involved with an adult movie star. Now they didn’t set out to be sexually immoral—Donald Trump and some woman never set out to hurt anybody—but now somebody who’s trying to be pure is fighting for grace to avoid a Google image search. They’re the unintended victims.

There’s the obvious victims, the unintended victims, there are the eventual victims. The eventual victims are the people who were happy or thrilled to engage in their sexual sin, but at some point after they engaged in the sexual sin, guilt began to sink into their soul. Maybe it’s 20 years after the sexual sin. Maybe it was immediately when it was done. These are people who did what they wanted to do, but eventually, they became the victims of their own sin. This is the woman, the married mom who is overwhelmed with the guilt of a one-night stand from two years before she got married. This is the man sitting with his face in his hands in some counselor’s office after he’s been caught in adultery or caught with internet pornography. They didn’t set out to become victims, but their sin made them victims eventually.

Then number four: there are the ignored victims. This might be the most controversial kind of victim that we can talk about in our culture. These ignored victims are the people who created the obvious victims. The ignored victim is the predator who sees his prey and engages in the rape, in the molestation, in the sexual assault, sexual harassment. He was happy to do it. He was happy to make someone weak, a victim of his strength. And now, some time after he has oppressed someone else, the child molester, the rapist, the perpetrator comes from the bottom of his heart to regret what he did. He’s overwhelmed with grief by his actions. He feels trapped. He wants to change, and he has no idea how to do it. He was guilty of a sexual sin when he perpetrated his act, but he was also guilty of a sin of violence. Now having come to regret it, he’s his own victim as well.

Number five is the subtle victim. These are people that, when you consider some of the things we’ve been talking about, they hardly seem like victims at all. But don’t make any mistake. They are a victim of the sexual brokenness of this fallen world. These people are the victims of a loveless sexuality. These are the people who look the least like a victim because, on the outside, everything might seem to be fine. Everything looks good and normal and right. These are the kinds of people who, when they engage in sexual relations, they have the right kind of sex, but they do it in all the wrong ways.

I’m thinking of the wife who feels distant from her husband because he doesn’t want anything to do with her until he becomes sexually interested in her. And then once that encounter has come to fruition, he goes back to being completely disinterested again. She feels hurt. She feels distant. She feels used up. This is the man who is married to his wife and he’s struggling to be a good husband, but he feels the physical ache of unfulfilled sexual desire because his wife expresses no interest in him, because she has no desire at all to engage in that element of the marriage relationship. These are the subtle victims.

Then finally, number six, there are the eternal victims. The eternal victims: these are the people who engage in sexual practices and they don’t see anything wrong with it when they did it. They don’t see anything wrong with it now today. They won’t see anything wrong with it in 10 years. They’re never called to account, and they die never having faced the conviction of their sin.

These are the students or the grown-ups who look back at their days as a student and they see not one thing wrong with the sexual experimentation of high school and college. So it’s something they did to just have a little fun. Everybody’s got to do that, right? These are the molesters and the rapists who think it’s their right to treat people that way, who think they had it coming, who think anybody who dresses that way deserves that. They’re never called to account. These are the LGBTQ advocates who fight to normalize sinful behavior, and they think haters are people in a religious group that tell them it’s wrong.

They are the eternal victims because, in God’s world, everybody gets called to account sooner or later. There is nobody who has sinned sexually, no matter how freed up they feel to do it, who on the day of judgment will not wither under the sentence that is pronounced over them. They will find that they will be a victim of their own sin forever.

These are the victims of a sexually broken culture, and we need to see these categories for a lot of important reasons. I’ll give you a few. First of all, we don’t want to fail to help people by miscategorizing the kind of struggle that they’ve got. Let me give an example or two of the LGBT movement. One of the ways that the LGBT movement has made so much progress—the logic behind what they have done—is they have positioned themselves as the obvious victims. They have positioned themselves as folks who are being mistreated by, well, let’s be honest, people like you.

When you say, “That’s wrong,” when you say, “That’s sin,” when you say, “You’ve got to repent,” they say, “You’re mistreating me. You’re using your power. You’re using your office. You’re using your Bible, your Jesus to attack me,” and “I’m an obvious victim.” One of the things about a sexually broken culture and one of the things about a confused culture is that, if you position yourself as the weak, afflicted victim, you become, in many circles, untouchable.

And so we’ve got to be clear that people who are guilty of high-handed sexual sin are not the obvious victims as we talked about a moment ago. They are a certain kind of victim. They’re either the eventual victim or the eternal victim, but that’s because sin has consequences, not because they’ve been mistreated. If we miscategorize people, we will fail to help them. Because what high-handed sinners need is not comfort. They need rebuke. They need a gracious call to repentance, and if we don’t understand these categories, we will fail to help.

We don’t want to fail to help people by miscategorizing them, but we also don’t want to fail to help people by ignoring their need for help. This is where the ignored victims comes in. One of the things that is so true about our culture today is the backlash against those who victimized the weak, and I want to say upfront that it is right to have a righteous anger and a holy fury about those who would mistreat the weak. We ought to have that. There’s nothing in the world wrong with that. That is very right. We are like God when we condemn sinful behavior. We are like God when we pronounce judgment on anyone who would use their power to oppress the weak because that’s what God does. God is the defender of the weak.

So we’re like Him, and yet it’s so easy to forget that there’s not one human being that deserves hell any more than the rest of us. There’s a very fine line between righteous anger and self-righteousness. There’s a very fine line. One of the ways you’ll know you’ve crossed that line is if you don’t care if a sinner gets help. Let me tell you what one of the things that’s going to characterize the church as different, as salt and light in a sexually broken culture, is not only that we have a kind of care to offer the obvious victims that nobody else has, but that we have a kind of care to offer the ignored victims that nobody else has. We know, in the pages of God’s Word, how to help those who have been victims of sexual sin. We know how to help the ones who have created the victims of sexual sin, and biblical Christian ministry can never do the one at the exclusion of the other.

That leads to the final reason I’ll mention. What we need to see in these categories is this: we don’t want to forget that sooner or later, we’re all victims in this sense. Sooner or later we all fit into this list of those who are victimized by sin. By my own count cards on the table, I hit four of the six categories. I have been an obvious victim of sexual sin, I’ve been an unintended victim of sexual sin, I’ve been an eventual victim of my own sin. By God’s grace, I’m not an ignored victim because I’ve never victimized. I’ve never imposed myself on someone in this way. And by God’s grace, I will not be an eternal victim of my own sin because of the blood that we sang about a few moments ago.

But you look at this list and you’re going to see that all of us are burned by a sexually broken culture. We have got to figure out how we’re going to counsel in a kind of culture where nobody has it exactly right, where nobody comes through untouched by the flames. We need to talk about this because a sexually broken culture is the only kind of culture we’ve got. We also need to talk about it because we are counselors.


To read ACBC’s Statement on Abuse and Biblical Counseling visit our Committed to Care website.