Month: October 2022

October 17, 2022

176 – Sin and Brutal Honesty with Guest Christy Bass Adams, Part 2

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Here’s the bad news: you cannot overcome your sin. Especially persistent sin. But there’s good news! Not easy news, mind you, but good: Being brutally honest with yourself and with God is the first step to spiritual freedom. Guest Christy Bass Adams shares how this key opened the door to a life and ministry far beyond anything she ever imagined.

About Christy Bass Adams

Christy Bass Adams worked in education for eighteen years and now serves as the Outreach and Connections Coordinator at Fellowship Baptist Church. She is passionate about connecting people within the Body of Christ and helping fellow believers find a place to serve and grow. Her writing career includes a weekly inspirational column for Greene Publishing and regular contributions to Vinewords.net and Inspireafire.com. She has also written devotions for CBN.com, christiandevotions.us, Inkspirations, and The Secret Place (Judson Press). Speaking and sharing about her own healing journey is also a big part of her life as she teaches a weekly bible study at Humble House recovery home for women and monthly leads workshops at Honey Lake Clinic (a Christian mental health center). Her most important role, however, is that of a wife, and mother to two busy, adventurous boys. Her debut book is a devotional, Learning As I Go: Big Lessons from Little People. Her second book is a middle grades novel, Cricket and Kyle: Imagination Checkers.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Welcome, listeners, into the deep. We’re excited that you’re joining us. I’m extra excited because we’re going to continue our interview with Christy Bass Adams. It’s just been a great conversation so far, and there is more to come, so we’re going to jump right in.

Erin: My favorite thing, Christy, about your healing process is that this core lie that almost started it all, “If anyone really knew me, they wouldn’t love me,” you actually had to overcome that.

If we were writing a novel about your life, that would be the climax where it would be like, “Okay, now she’s faced with having to confront that lie and overcome it.” That’s what God had you do when you wrote your testimony, when you wrote that book.

You’re right that maybe God will use it and maybe it’ll be published, or maybe it won’t be. The issue was that writing the book was your climax of your story in terms of this particular chapter of your life. You faced that deepest fear and God helped you overcome that. And man, it opened up not just healing for you, but healing for others as you talk about it.

I’m amazed by that. I think that’s very cool.

Karen: I think something you said there, Erin, is key and we need to focus on that. We don’t overcome our sin, especially habitual sin. We cannot overcome it, but the act of surrendering and placing it in God’s hands and then taking it back and placing it in his hands again, that’s key. God is the one who overcomes by continually drawing us into truth and drawing us into those uncomfortable places.

I was a habitual liar when I was younger. I mean fantasy worlds. I’ve been a writer since I could speak, in essence, writing fiction, telling stories, and I always embellished. That expanded into just flat out lying when I was an older teen and then on into college to the point that I would falsify the hours that I was working on work study.

I’d just nudge it a little here and there so that I would make more money. I love the people that God has placed in our lives to confront us. At the moment that they confront us, at the moment that a friend of mine confronted me when she realized what was happening and told me it had to stop and told me that either I would tell our boss or she would, and inside of me…the worst thing that could happen was that anybody would know that I wasn’t perfect.

I mean, I know you two are surprised by that, but…

Christy: I would like to piggyback off of that because I feel like confrontation is the biggest way we can love somebody.

Karen: Yes.

Christy: Especially when we have that relationship. I have women now that God has placed underneath of me in a ministry. I’m on staff at our church as an outreach and connections coordinator, and part of that umbrella that I’m in charge of is our women’s ministry.

God has given me the opportunity to sit down with so many women, and they’ll start sharing and I’ll go, “Time out. That’s not okay. That is the separation. That’s why you are not growing in Christ. It’s because you’re living in sin, and it opens the door.”

And I always share my story. If we’re in a big group, small group, I’ll be the first one to throw myself under the bus and say, “Hey, this is where I was and this is what God did. This is what Satan wanted, and this is what God has been able to do.”

I’m so grateful that he gave me the courage and the boldness, and I stopped worrying about people pleasing. Now sometimes I still get scared. Even doing this, my stomach was in knots as I was getting ready for this phone call. But I recognize also that God, if he will use this—I go back to that deal every time—if he will use one thing to set somebody free, then it’s all worth putting our junk on the table.

Karen: Amen.

Erin: Right. You know, I think, too, that Satan wants us isolated so nobody can confront us.

Christy: Right.

Erin: The more we’re isolated, the more we don’t have those people around us. You writers out there, get truth-tellers in your life. Get somebody who’s willing to confront you. Find a small group, find a writer’s group, somebody.

Pray for it if you don’t have it now. This might be one of those dangerous prayers, praying somebody will confront me for all my bad stuff.

Christy: For one that saves your life.

Karen: That’s exactly what we need. We need dangerous prayers. Remember in Narnia how they say, “Aslan isn’t safe, but he’s good, I tell you. Completely good.”

God is not safe. You pray dangerous prayers, and he will take you at your word, like you said, Christy. And in the process of taking us at our word, he heals us. He sets us free. He gives us life beyond anything we could possibly have imagined when we were so busy hiding.

Erin: Right. One thing I want to just go back and touch on, you had said that part of your issue was that you were not being satisfied by Christ. You did not find your satisfaction in him. I’m assuming that this process has changed that, but talk a little about how you find that satisfaction in him now. Are there practices that help you do that or something?

Christy: Well, I think I need to kind of say what I was living for was for “the stuff.” I was living for the things of Christ and not for Christ. For example, we get wrapped up in church and we do the things. We sing in the choir, we lead the study, we go and serve, and we set up the tables.

We do all the “things.” We do all the things that are Christlike in our eyes, but we leave Christ out of the middle of it. So much of what we do for Christ could be done without him at all. And if we’re not dependent upon the Holy Spirit, then we’re wasting our efforts.

Karen: Amen.

Christy: What God really did through this process was I was one of those smart aleck know-it-alls about Scripture. Bible trivia? I won everything. Sword drills. I was very proud of that fact. But what God did through this whole journey was he brought me back to Scripture and he showed me, “Hey, listen, you’ve got this stuff in your head. You need it in your heart.”

Hours and hours I would spend on my front porch, reading out of the Psalms and weeping, going, “God, I do have an unclean heart. Please create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit.” I prayed the words of King David in Psalm 51 and so many others.

I’d read, “My enemies are chasing after me,” and I would go in there and I would put a line through enemies and put sin, my selfishness. Whatever I was struggling with at that time, I would go back and actually write it down and mark it in my Bible.

Another big piece during this whole season, this last decade especially, but the past thirteen years of being on the other side of addiction is that God has really drawn me to him through writing in my journal.

So many of the words that I write, nobody else will ever see. It’s between me and that audience of One. It’s God dealing with my heart. I can be angry or frustrated and not know why, and I can sit down and get my pen, and I can pray, “God, show me what it is that’s going on.” I’ll start writing through it, and I’ll have that epiphany moment and go, “Oh, that’s it!”

Then I can spend that time in prayer. That’s another piece is the prayer. Spending time in the word, journaling, praying deeply. Not just, “Dear God, thank you for this day. Forgive me.”

But instead saying, “God, I am so broken. I’m hurting today. I messed up. I said this. I hurt this person. God, I was angry at my kids for no reason, and I took it out on them. God forgive me.” Being very specific in our prayers.

Then, you know, there was even a time that—I like to tell people this because I grew up in church and I knew God—but I said, “God, I don’t love you.” This was recently, in the last 10 years.

I said, “God, I don’t love you and I don’t trust you. I’ve said it my whole life, but I really need to love you and I want to trust you, and I need you to show me who you are. Show me your character, because I’ve been paying you lip service and I wanna really know you.”

And he did that. He has been showing me his character. He’s been showing me who he is. He’s been breaking me. I thought he’d broken me of all my pride and then, yeah, laugh, laugh. We never get broken of it all. There’s always more pride in there.

But in 2019, my husband got diagnosed with cancer. For a whole year we went through cancer treatments. Well, here’s the ironic part. I was at my busiest season with work.

I was teaching between two colleges. I taught teachers how to teach. I had joined our staff at church part-time. We had just ordered the trusses for our house because we are doing the work ourselves. We are in year number six doing everything, with help from friends, of course.

But with my husband going through treatments, it was like he had the flu all year. God humbled me to a place where I had to ask for help and let that pride fall. But through it, God brought friends and family that I did not know would rally around us. Blessings in disguise all throughout the whole season from 2019 to now. And again, he keeps breaking that pride again and again and again.

And he’s brought people. That’s another piece of the puzzle: surrounding ourselves with people that will confront us, love us, hold us accountable. They’ll call us out on the carpet and go, “Hey, listen, you gotta work on this.”

But it’s only because I’ve invited that accountability. If we don’t invite accountability, it doesn’t just show up knocking at the door. We have to be somebody who others can be accountable to, and we can be accountable to them. That’s another piece of that growing puzzle that I always want to tell people. We don’t heal by ourselves.

Erin: Yeah. You know, one of the themes that I’m hearing from you is brutal honesty.

Christy: Yes.

Erin: I mean, if we want to know how to get closer to God, it’s called brutal honesty. We can admit, or have to admit, “I don’t love you, God. Help me.”

He knows. It’s not a secret. But I think that that kind of honesty is what opens the path to a deeper relationship with him.

Karen: Well, it’s like any relationship. If you’re having struggles in your relationship with a spouse or a sibling or a friend, you can’t restore the relationship until you’re honest. Until you share what’s going on. And then restoration can begin. It takes a long time and it’s a process, but if we just continually stuff things inside, it will fester and it will completely destroy the relationship.

It’s like that with God. The thing is he knows. He knows exactly what we’re stuffing. If we think we’re hiding it from him, we’re just dumb. He knows exactly what is in there and festering, and so he brings the people who are necessary. He brings situations, events, readings, everything that we need to be able to release it and surrender it so that it can be excised and we can start to heal.

But we can’t do it until we’re honest with him.

Erin: Right. So, Christy, one more thing before we wrap up here. Do you have anything else that you would want to say to the writer out there who is afraid, who is struggling with fear in this? They want to make this step that you did, but they can’t bring themselves to do it?

Christy: I think I would tell that writer that you gotta start with ditching the excuses. We make a lot of excuses. We need to change the things that we tell ourselves. “I’ve always been a this,” or “I’ve never been able to finish,” or “I’ve always been a procrastinator.” But changing the way that we think and going, “You know what? Yeah, that might have been the pattern, but I’m giving that to God,” that’s the place to start.

We need to say, “God, I don’t want to be this way anymore. I don’t want to be a procrastinator. I don’t want to make excuses. I don’t want this to be my identity.”

Because tThose excuses become our identity. And it became my identity, the rejection, the “I can’t do this,” and the “I don’t have time.” I had to get serious about it and go, “All right, is this something that I want to do? Is this something God has called me to do or not? Am I gonna dink at it or am I gonna be serious about it?”

It’s really laying it down on that one-yard line going, “Am I in or not?”

If we’re in, then we go, “Okay, God. I’m gonna depend on you to show me when that time is, and then when you show me when that time is, I’ve gotta hold it sacred. If it’s thirty minutes every morning, and I gotta get up at five instead of five-thirty, then I’m gonna hold that thirty minutes sacred.

If it’s a whole day of the week, then I’ve gotta hold that time sacred. I don’t take calls. I don’t send messages…unless it’s my husband, which I need to make sure he’s okay and not bringing reptiles home or anything. Which he will. He had a snake in his truck one day, which is a whole nother thing.

As far as those excuses and that time, we really need to set that time aside. But I think the biggest piece is saying, “Okay, who am I doing this for? Am I doing this for my glory or am I doing this for God? If nobody ever read a word that I wrote, am I willing to continue putting it out there and offering it to God because he told me to do it?”

That’s when you really are satisfied. At the end of the day, I have to go, “Okay, it’s not for this person, it’s not for that person. It’s for God first. And if he chooses to put it wherever he wants to put it, I’ve put it in words and now it’s there.”

But if I never take the time to put it on paper, then God can’t have it. He can’t use it. So that’s what I would say. Just get serious and decide, am I all in or not?

Karen: Amen.

Erin: Love it.

Karen: Christy, you have shared so much with us, and we’re just so grateful that you’ve been here and that you’ve allowed us into your life and into your journey, both as a writer, but more important as a believer who struggled with an habitual sin.

I want to say thank you, and I want to tell all of you listening out there, if you think that God doesn’t know what’s going on deep inside of you, you’re wrong. He knows, but the thing is, he still loves you. That lie that if people really know who I am, they wouldn’t love me? That’s just out the window with God.

He knows. He created you. He knows every single thing about you. It’s time to kick fear to the curb and just walk in boldness. Confess to him. Lay yourself in his hands, and as he did with Christy, experience the amazing restoration and the ways that God will use you for his glory.

Erin: Amen.

Brutal honesty with yourself and with God is the key to freedom! @christyadams008 #ChristianWriter #amwriting Click To Tweet

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

What are the challenges of being brutally honest with God? Or with others?

BOOKS BY CHRISTY BASS ADAMS

Learning as I Go: Big Lessons from Little People by Christy Bass Adams

Imagination Checkers by Christy Bass Adams

THANK YOU!

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October 3, 2022

175 – Sin and Brutal Honesty with Guest Christy Bass Adams, Part 1

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We all do it. We convince ourselves that that sin—the one that no one knows about—isn’t hurting anyone. Isn’t a big deal. Doesn’t matter. But we also know that’s a lie. Because hidden sin isn’t hidden from God. Join guest Christy Bass Adams as she shares what happens when we stop hiding and give God everything—even our worst sin.

About Christy Bass Adams

Christy Bass Adams worked in education for 18 years and now serves as the Outreach and Connections Coordinator at Fellowship Baptist Church. She is passionate about connecting people within the Body of Christ and helping fellow believers find a place to serve and grow. Her writing career includes a weekly inspirational column for Greene Publishing and regular contributions to Vinewords.net and Inspireafire.com. She has also written devotions for CBN.com, christiandevotions.us, Inkspirations, and The Secret Place (Judson Press). Speaking and sharing about her own healing journey is also a big part of her life as she teaches a weekly bible study at Humble House recovery home for women and monthly leads workshops at Honey Lake Clinic (a Christian mental health center). Her most important role, however, is that of a wife, and mother to two busy, adventurous boys. Her debut book is a devotional, Learning As I Go: Big Lessons from Little People. Her second book is a middle grades novel, Cricket and Kyle: Imagination Checkers.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Karen: Welcome, friends, to the deep. We have some exciting things to share with you today. We have a guest, Christy Bass Adams, and I’m gonna let Erin introduce her.

Erin: I get to do that. Yay! I met Christy at the Florida Christian Writer’s Conference last year, and we had such a grand time getting to know each other. It was so fun.

She is a former school teacher and trainer, and she now works for her local church. She’s been married for 18 years to a man she describes as a good ole’ country boy. Apparently, to keep her life from getting boring, he randomly tosses reptiles into her kitchen. I can relate to that kind of excitement, but usually it’s an accident when there’s a snake in my house!

My favorite picture on her website shows her in work clothes, wearing big knee pads and holding a power tool. She and her hubby are building their own house, which I totally respect. She has two young sons who may or may not be very helpful in that building process. Christy has a natural bent toward encouraging others, and she loves to share the life-giving breath of words with everyone she meets.

She’s been a weekly inspirational columnist and contributed to several other publications, including cbn.com, Christian devotions, inspireafire.com and all kinds of stuff. I’m super excited that her first two books released last month. One of them is a devotional called Learning As I Go: Big Lessons from Little People. The other is a middle grade novel called Cricket and Kyle: Imagination Checkers.

They sound so fun! Welcome, Christy. We’re super excited that you’re here, and we promise not to throw any reptiles at you.

Christy: Thank you so much.

Erin: She’s either thanking us for, you know, letting her come on the show or for not throwing reptiles. We’re not sure. No, actually, we’re blessed that she’s been willing to come on and share. Christy, let’s jump in. What does the deep mean to you?

Christy: Well, the deep to me, it goes way back. When I first decided to write, I kind of played it safe. I did easy devotions. I wrote easy picture books for the classroom, kind of math related. I kept it real safe.

I received lots of rejections, lots of rejection letters in the mail. After a season I got defeated and I quit. I could feel God nudging me way down deep, though, that I needed to write about my insecurities and write about my failures and struggles. But I was scared.

Erin: Yeah.

Christy: I was scared to air my dirty laundry. I was scared of how people would perceive me. Afraid to fully let God have my pen, really, is what it came down to. Through a series of divine appointments, which I could talk about forever, God reminded me of a deal that I made with him.

Let me say, as a sidebar, it’s not a good idea to make a deal with God. It just is not advisable. He takes you seriously.

My deal was if he would heal me and truly free me from my habitual, long-term sin and show me how to be whole in him, I’d do anything that he asked me to do. And if it was only for one person, it was worth my surrender.

I was reminded of that through that series of events, and so God and I had a pow wow on my back porch. I apologized to him for being afraid. I physically extended my hands and said, “I’m yours. This gift of writing is yours. If you choose to take it back and never let me use it again, I have to be okay with that. But I’m done taking the easy road. I’ll talk about the hard stuff. I’ll share my story. I’m surrendering at all. If I’m not writing to honor you, God, I’m wasting everything you’ve given me.”

What’s crazy is in that moment, there was this picture of a gift in my mind that was wrapped, and it was almost like God was handing me that gift back. I didn’t hear an audible voice. I didn’t hear anything specifically, but it was this feeling of, “Now, write for me. Everything you do, honor me with it.”

Karen: Yeah.

Christy: So the deep for me, it means full surrender and complete obedience. Whether it’s a text, an email, a handwritten card, a letter, a blog, a devotion, or even a book, they all are just as important in the Lord’s economy.

His words through me can make an eternal impact as long as I let him have them. I always say I might as well put my pen down if I’m not gonna let God have it. So that’s what the deep is. It’s that obedience and surrender.

Karen: That’s amazing.

Erin: That is a deep place. From what you’re saying, I’m sensing a lot of backstory. I’m a fiction writer sometimes and non-fiction sometimes, but I know backstory when I hear it!

Karen: That’s exactly right.

Erin: If you’re willing, talk about what was going on with that struggle and the backstory. Why you didn’t wanna talk about what you needed to talk about and how that had happened.

Christy: It goes back to when I was a kid. I grew up in church. I have wonderful parents. I am blessed with Christian parents and I recognize what a blessing and true reward that is in this life to have good parents who took me to church, who taught me the values of Christ.

But somewhere in the process, I started this negative self-talk thing. I really beat myself up inside and I didn’t tell anybody about it. My friends were coming to me with big, big problems in middle school and high school, and their problems were overarching compared to mine.

I shoved all of my issues down. I was struggling with some depression, with a lot of insecurity. I was worried about my appearance, and my weight, and so many things that teenagers worry about. But I wasn’t gonna say anything because my friends were more important in my eyes. Now again, I’m going to church, I’m in a good home, but these lies. I started believing them and resting on them.

As middle school and high school kids do, I started having this desire to rebel. It is a thing that runs across the board in all teenagers, all adults. We just have this innate desire to rebel against the things that we know are good.

I decided that I wanted to keep a good name. I wanted to keep a good face. I wanted a facade of looking like I was doing everything right, but I still wanted to rebel like my friends were doing. And honestly, I was curious, so I sought out pornography from time to time. It wasn’t a big deal until I got into late high school and early college. Then the internet became more accessible.

I wanna say this, my problem was not pornography. My problem was that I was not satisfied by Christ. My insides were running from Jesus. My insides were not being totally surrendered. And I was using the excuse of, “God, you made me this way. Why won’t you take it away? Why won’t you fix this?”

I blamed him for a lot of things that were happening in my life, instead of going, “Christy, you did this. You chose this. You made this decision.”

Basically what happened during this ten year period from late middle school, all the way into early adulthood, outside of college, and on into my marriage is that I was trying so hard to keep up the outside facade of going to church, being a teacher—that’s what I went to school for—being a good wife, leading Sunday school, but I was basically a Pharisee when it comes down to it.

I was a hypocrite. There were two people living inside of me. I had the Christy who was broken and ashamed of the things that she was doing and the sin that she would not confess. Then I had this other version of Christy who was trying so hard on the outside to honor God, so I said, and do the right things on the outside.

But at some point I had come to the realization when a friend finally got the courage to confront me. In 2009, she came to my house. She checked my computer because she was checking her email for school. I had not cleared my history, and she got the courage to confront me.

I can tell you at that moment, because I was a Christian during all of this, I just was living in unconfessed habitual sin, and when she had the courage to finally confront me, God got hold of me.

I recognized that I was the one making excuses. I was the one not owning my sins, and I was living this fake version of Christianity that is not what God intended. I was not talking about my struggles, my sin. I wasn’t addressing the issues of my heart. And I wasn’t letting him have everything. I was just talking about it.

I was good at lip service. I was like a Christian Milli Vanilli. I was lip syncing this whole Christian walk thing instead of actually living it. So from 2009 until the present, God really rocked my world.

When my friend confronted me, she said, “Christy, you’ve gotta do four things. You’ve gotta tell your husband. You’ve got to step down from all leadership roles at church. You’ve got to tell your family, and go to a Christian counselor.”

Karen: Yeah.

Christy: Through Christian counseling, I was so prideful. I was like, “No, I don’t have a problem. No, this is not a big deal. I can take care of this on summer break.”

I made so many excuses and justifications for these sins that my moral compass, which used to run straight ahead, it would notch away a little at a time. And when I looked back, I was completely off track.

Erin: Wow.

Christy: As God continued dealing with my heart and I began Christian counseling, the conversations came down to, “Christy, you’re believing lies.” That’s what my counselor told me.

One of the core lies that stemmed all the way back from middle school was that if anybody knew the real me, then they wouldn’t love me. If anybody saw my weaknesses, if I let them see who I really was, then they would make fun of me or reject me.

Instead of being rejected, I put walls up so nobody would ever see that weak version of myself. After that year of counseling, I said to my counselor, I call her Dr. T, and I said, ” Dr. T, you’ve walked with me this whole year. Where do I go from here?”

She said, “Well, you don’t need me anymore. You’ve got Jesus, and you’re walking with him.” But she also said, “You’re a writer. You have journaled through this whole process and you need to write your story.”

Karen: Yeah.

Christy: So I really thought that I was supposed to write a book about my testimony. I started it, and then I set it down, and I got scared. That season that I talked about in my answer about what is the deep, that was the season that I walked away and got scared. I went to easy, safe writing. I set aside my testimony, and for probably ten years, I did not pick it up and I did not write it.

That series of events I mentioned earlier was workshops and conferences where God kept putting people in my path going, “Hey, Christy, you need to tell your story. You need to write your story. You need to let God use these things because he can bring redemption where Satan wanted ruin.”

Erin: Mm-hmm.

Christy: So the last, really three, four years I got serious. One of my friends looked at me, her name’s Vicki, and she said, “Christy, when are you writing?”

I went, “I don’t know when I’m writing. I mean, I’m just doing it when I can. I’ve got kids, you know. I just pick it up when I can.”

She said, “No. When are you writing? If you’re serious about this and you really have surrendered your pen to God, then you need to set aside time to write.”

Through her encouragement and through her opening her home, where I’m actually sitting right now, in her extra room because it’s quiet and I’m not distracted by the things at my house—the dishes and the garbage and the laundry that would distract me—

Erin: And the reptiles!

Christy: And the reptiles that are randomly thrown on my floor. She offered me this space, and she offered me a gift. She said, “Christy, you need to designate a whole day and not let anybody take that from you and write.”

I finished writing my testimony. I put it in book form. It’s a Christian living book. I tried to put it out there, and I offered it to God, and nobody’s wanted it so far. That’s okay because I was obedient. When the time comes, God will take it .

But I’ll tell you what he’s done. He’s opened the door for speaking at recovery clinics. I go twice a month and I speak at a recovery clinic, Honey Lake Clinic, over in Greenville, Florida. I get to teach them about how to go home, and how to make a plan, and how to protect their minds, and how to change, and how to heal.

I always tell them, “Your story’s not my story, and my story’s not your story. But the healing process of wandering away from Jesus and losing ourselves, and moving back to him, and taking up residence and abiding in him, that process is the same. That healing process of grace and forgiveness and redemption and restoration, that looks the same, no matter what our journey is.”

As God has continued growing me in that area, I’m recognizing, you know, pornography? Yes, that was a struggle of mine. But that was a symptom just like alcohol, drugs, appearance, overeating, under-eating, exercise, all those things that we focus on and become outward symptoms of inward problems.

God is calling me to heal and help heal others on this journey. So that’s the big picture of the struggles that I had and how God is now using them, for writing, for encouraging. And speaking, which honestly terrifies me.

Karen: Which is why he’s called you there.

Christy: There you go.

Erin: You don’t sound terrified, so that’s good. It’s always good.

Karen: It’s interesting to me, because I think that another, human, earthly, natural thing inside of us is deflection. There’s something—especially

in Pharisees and believers minds—especially wrong with a woman with pornography. I mean, you see men with pornography and you think to yourself, “Well, of course. They’re men.”

When it happens with a woman, the attitude from people in the church can be especially judgmental, and they become this deflection about their own sin and saying, “Well, at least I don’t…”

It’s such a dangerous place for anyone to be who claims to be a believer because that’s the first foothold into pride, saying, “Sure, I may do this, but I would never do that.”

Satan absolutely loves it when Jesus’ children say things like that. Satan is just so excited and clapping his hands because that’s his access point to get into us.

All of us need to recognize that those sins that we continually return back to, those are weaknesses inside of us that separate us from Christ. And it doesn’t matter. There are no degrees of sin when it separates us from Christ. They’re all equally damaging. It’s not that Jesus is saying that you’re a terrible person for doing that.

He’s saying, “I want you close, and this is between us, and it has to end.”

Christy: Right.

Karen: Wow. I don’t know about you guys, but this has been such an amazing podcast. I so respect Christy and everything that she’s shared with us, everything that you’ve shared with us, Christy, and thank you for that. But here’s the good news. There’s more to come!

Erin: Indeed.

Karen: We will have another podcast finishing our conversation up, but talking about things like courage and brutal honesty, so don’t miss it!

Hidden sin is never hidden from God. Join guest Christy Bass Adams as she shares what happens when we stop hiding and give God everything—even our worst sin. #ChristianWriter #amwriting @christyadams008 Click To Tweet