Monthly Archives: January 2012

Be Fearless.

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Fear is such a horrible feeling. I struggled pretty badly with it after I was first saved. The first trial I would encounter in my walk with Christ almost drowned me in fear.

I was saved in and around September of 2010. A few months before that in June, I randomly hooked up with this guy 0ne night after the bar. Not an abnormal thing for me to do, but this time it was different. This guy was HIV positive.

I remember, in my drunkenness, him telling me that he was positive.  I responded, “I don’t care..” and continued on in pursuing what my flesh wanted. Now if this isn’t a prime example of how sin can destroy  us, I don’t know what is. Because of my drunkenness and lust I was putting my life in danger, and I didn’t care.

Of course the next day I was depressed. If I have ever been suicidal in my life, it was on that day. I had dinner with my friend Haylee that night, and even in the midst of my depression and self-hate I looked her in the face and I told her, “I know if I died right now I’d go to hell, but I can’t leave my lifestyle or my friends”. Blatant rebellion.

After a few days I put this occurrence out of my mind and continued on in my drunken festivities. As I look back now, I can see my drinking got worse after this hook up. I must have been subconsciously drowning out the thoughts of mortality and the possibility of being infected with a fatal disease. I do actually remember thinking things like, “I’ve got to go out and have fun and enjoy my life because if I don’t, I have nothing else to live for. This is it.”

Fast-forward a few months: Jesus saved me. I was so happy and excited and felt refreshed, but just a few weeks after I saw an AIDS commercial or something and immediately was struck with the memory of what had happened just a few months prior. Fear flooded through my body.

“What if I have it?”

“My life would be over”

“I just started really living for God and now this horrible thing is going to happen to me”

I can not explain to you the intensity of the fear that I experienced for a matter of weeks. It completely blocked out any “happy” thoughts that I had previously been experiencing about God and Jesus. I was overtaken by the idea that there was a very good chance I had this debilitating disease that would take my life.

I went to bed every night trembling in fear. I woke up in the morning immediately depressed as it never took long for the fear to creep back into my mind. I would try to make myself feel better by thinking, “If I do have it, God can heal me.” But that comfort never lasted long. As a freshly converted Christian, my eyes were still so horizontally placed on this world and the things of this world—and death literally scared the mess out of me.

I scheduled a blood test. The waiting time between the blood test and the arrival of the results was the darkest time of my life. When they called and told me they had the results, I was literally shaking as I drove down the road to retrieve the envelope that would possibly contain my death sentence. It was almost like an out of body experience, the drive over there. I don’t know if your heart has ever been saturated with that kind of fear, but it is in my opinion the darkest feeling that can be experienced in this life.

My results were negative. Praise God. I was relieved of this fear that had gripped the thoughts of my mind continuously for weeks. But just a few months later, I had another relapse of this fear. I had read things on the internet about people having a false-negative result if they test too soon after exposure. I had waited three months before I was tested, but of course in my obsessively pessimistic mindset, I was convinced that I would be the 1 out of 10,000 statistic who was falsely relieved and indeed was containing this deadly virus in my body. So I got tested, again, and it was negative. Another sigh of relief.

But you know what? I STILL have that same fear creep into my mind every once in a while. It’s illogical and statistically impossible, but my mind is still plagued by the fear of sickness and death at times. But you know what else? Jesus has shown me that fear only has a chance to manifest when our trust in Him is weak or absent.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has notbeen perfected in love.”- 1 John 4:18.

The solution to defeating fear is having a revelation of the LOVE of God in Jesus Christ, which only the Holy Spirit can deliver. I love that verse that I just posted above, “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear“– Jesus dying on the Cross for me was full of perfect love. Perfect love for His Father and His perfect love for me. “For fear has to do with punishment“– as I analyze my thoughts, I see that I viewed sickness or disease as a punishment. I thought that if I were to ever have a fatal disease, then God must have removed His gaze from my life and therefore sickness had snuck in, with God being unaware of it. But this is NOT true! It’s Satan lying to me and perverting my mind with twisted thoughts about God. Romans 8:28 says that God has called me according to His purpose and is working every single situation in my life for GOOD. Not evil, not punishment, but for GOOD. Even the things we view as negative, such as sickness and suffering, are under the sovereign control of God and He uses them to brings us GOOD.

We may not be able to see how such destructive things could be for our good, but that’s where trust in our heavenly Father comes in.  “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.”- Proverbs 3:5. God loves us more than we can possibly imagine. I know people say that all the time and it’s such a cliche, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that it is indeed the truth. God left His heavenly dwelling of perfected bliss and stepped into a dark, sin-filled world to die for our heinous treason against Him… before we were even born.Knowing that we would be grow up in the midst of the preaching of this good news and for years despise His name by continuing on in our filthy godless passions. We did nothing to deserve it. We deserve the complete opposite reaction from God! Yet He pours out His mercy on us through the death of His Son. This is enormous love He has demonstrated to us!!! How in the world could we doubt that His love is still motivating Him to work for our good?

Whatever circumstances may come our way, we must train our minds and emotions run into the loving arms of our God before we fall prey to the evil grip of fear. Fear does nothing but destroy us. Trusting in our God strengthens us in mighty and supernatural ways. When fear comes into my mind, I have to immediately crush it with the truth that I have a God who loves me and is for me and is working every single situation in my life for my good and His glory. There is no thing in this world or the next that can rise up against me and defeat me. I am in the hand of God, and nothing can pluck me from it. Fear can have no place in my heart, in my soul or in my life.

And the last part of that passage, ” and whoever fears has not been perfected in love”, we have to remember that God loves us perfectly. Not partially like the love we see so much of in this world. Our love, even for God, is broken because of our sinfulness. But His love is untouched by sin and unstained by evil. His love is perfect. Lord, perfect us in YOUR love.

Fear is nothing but a lie.

“ fear not, for I am with you;  be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”- Isaiah 41:10

I haven’t been doing what Jesus called me to do.

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I’m not going to try and word this eloquently or anything, but I need to say this. Mostly for my own constant reminder in the future.

For months I have had a sense of emptiness and it has been so frustrating. It’s like I’m stuck in this day-to-day routine life with no purpose. In attempts to satisfy this emptiness I have been turning to my bible, sermons, and prayer to try and fill the void that is inside me. I’ll temporarily feel better, but shortly after the emptiness is there again.

After first being saved, I found so much fulfillment in discovering new truths in the bible and discussing things like this at Starbucks with my friends. And don’t get me wrong, sound biblical understanding and constant new discovery of the attributes of God is a GOOD thing, but simply reading and discussing theology isn’t enough for me anymore. It doesn’t feed the longing I have. When I get together in situations like that, I have nothing to talk about anymore. I understand the gospel (to the ability my fallen mind can). I understand God’s sovereignty. I understand regeneration. But getting together and discussing Calvinism or how there is so much false teaching is NOT enough for me anymore. I feel like I’m surrounded by a constant re-hashing of the same crap over and over and over again, and it’s all vain.

I’ve thought to myself, “Is this the Christian life? Is my purpose in this world to just read the bible and try to live a ‘good life’? Is this what coming to know Jesus Christ means?” I never would really answer myself, but deep down I thought the answer was YES. And that depressed me. It has been depressing me.

But I’m starting to see more clearly, by the grace of God, that I wasn’t created and purchased with His blood to live the life the ankle-deep Christian life that I have been living. A life of shallow nothingness only as radical as my next facebook status. A life of living vicariously through ideas of what Christianity is in my mind.

I’m here to be used for the glory of God. I was washed and regenerated by the Holy Spirit to be an ambassador of Jesus Christ in this world. There are so many people in this world who don’t know Jesus Christ… even here in the bible belt we are surrounded by professing Christians who know absolutely nothing of the reality that they are professing. I need to stop just talking about them and talk TO them.

I have these false ideas of what ministry is, because of what the US Church culture has said ministry is. I’ve been waiting…. waiting to get involved in some kind of “ministry” that helps homosexuals and proclaims the truth about homosexuality. I’ve been waiting for the Lord to send me somewhere to be apart of some group that does this kind of work. But I’ve been missing the whole point. My LIFE is supposed to be a ministry to lost homosexuals. I am to use my own testimony as a ministry to homosexuals. Every second of every day that the Lord allows me to remain in this world is meant to be used as a ministry, not just at appointed times in specific locations among certain people.

There are so many times when I avoid homosexuals in person. Or I even avoid conversations about my own personal salvation with family, clients, or gay members who I see everyday at the gym . All because of fear. It’s easy to sit behind a computer screen and blog and tweet and post to facebook, but it’s a completely different thing in real life when you are put in a situation like that. It’s like I want to tell them about Jesus, the real Jesus, but not enough to actually do it.

I know many of the people who read this have not been on the inside of the gay lifestyle, so you may not understand exactly why I would fear real life situations or conversations with people of the gay community. There is more violence, anger and hatred in a homosexual’s heart than you can possibly begin to imagine. Not to mention the demonic spiritual forces backing up the movement and even individuals. If they feel you have betrayed them or when you say their lifestyle is not right in the eyes of God, they respond in anger, hatred and violence. This happens all the time. I’ve heard of the things that have even happened here in Shreveport. And they feel that I have betrayed them by turning away from the lifestyle and pursuing the real Jesus Christ and His holiness. I can tell you, positively, that if I were to walk into the gay bar in Shreveport I would not come out looking very good. Same thing if I were to run into a group of them in a not so-public setting. This scares me. I need my faith strengthened. And I need the will of God, whatever it may be, to be more important to me than my personal safety or comfort-ability.

I know that confronting homosexuality and sharing the truth of Jesus Christ with homosexuals is the ministry that God has called me to. And this has to start going beyond “internet ministry”. I know that the Lord has allowed me to help many people through my blogs and posts, etc. But this isn’t the entirety of what my life should consist of. The satisfaction and fulfillment I have been lacking is due to the fact I have been avoiding the fullness of the purpose that Christ has called me to. Only in pursuing the call He has placed on my life will I find my purpose here.

I know my future is going to be full of putting myself on the front line of being scorned and ridiculed and attacked, even physically. It’s not exaggerated to say that there will be situations ahead of me where I will be very literally putting my life at risk. There are those like me, saved out of homosexuality, who have had to send their families out of town because of threats against them. But I know I’ve got to do this. It burns in my heart. I’ve got to get out from behind the safety of my computer screen and start doing what I know God has called me to do. I want to see people who don’t know Jesus come to love and worship Him with everything they are. I want people to be awakened and see Jesus as I see Jesus– my everything. I want Him glorified, and I want to see people make much of HIM.

How this is going to start taking place, I do not know. I don’t know how to go about it. But I’ve told the Lord that I trust Him and have asked Him to start leading me into the good works that He predestined I should accomplish for the glory His Name.

I trust Him. And I’m ready to do what He’s called me to do, no matter what it costs me.

” For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”- Romans 14:8.

Matt Moore †
mmoore0689@yahoo.com
http://www.moorematt.com
http://www.facebook.com/truthaboutgaylifestyle

There is nothing you can do.

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What can you do to save yourself? Nothing.

Though this funadmental truth of Christianity is widely accepted to be true, many of us really don’t believe it. Subconsciously we live out our lives as if we are saved by the things we do— abstinence from sin, church attendance, prayer time, bible reading. And we fall under self-condemnation when we inevitably fall short of meeting our own standard of religious obedience. Living a spiritual life of constant ups and and downs…. thriving on a peak one day, trudging through a valley the next. A bipolar Christian life is not what God has called us to.

When the bible says that we are justified as a gift, believe it.

When the bible says that your faith is a gift, believe it.

When the bible says nothing you can do to separate you from the love of God, believe it.

When the bible says God will finish the work He began in you, believe it.

When the bible says that you are the righteousness of Christ, believe it.

When the bible says we are more than conquerors over all things, believe it.

When the bible says ALL your trespasses are forgiven, believe it.

Realizing that your obedience doesn’t dictate your standing with God will in turn lead you into a life of delightful obedience. That’s the irony of how the gospel works. Realize that Christ has done everything. When you trusted in Jesus, there was nothing left for you to do to affect your position with God. It is forever true that you are a child of God. The child of a God that loves you deeply, more than your earthly parents could ever even attempt to.

Don’t worry your soul with “working” yourself up to what you think God wants from you. All God wants you to do is believe. Trust in the work of your Savior. He finished the work, you can rest.