The Dangerous Disconnect: Real-Life Dangers of Separating God and Sex
Hi! My name is Hunter Crick, and I am a Junior studying business administration at Lancaster Bible College. As a young college student, ready to graduate and take on the world, I am encouraged by professors that challenge me to look outside of my normal day-to-day and think about the goings-on in the world. That is why I am writing this blog. I do not want to be an ivory tower intellectual, content to think and theorize all the while drifting further and further from reality, but rather a man of wisdom who can expertly apply what he is learning to his life. So here it is: a college-age Christian’s best attempt to apply God’s truth to this crazy, messed-up world that we live in.
Everyone has someone that they look up to. Someone that they want to be like as they grow older. For some, it is a father who poured his life into growing his children. For others, it is a mentor who shared his/her wisdom with them. For me, it was a leader on a missions trip who pushed me to grow and get out of my comfort zone all while showing the other students and I how to love the people that we were ministering to.
It is all but impossible to go through life without picking out role models that we want to exemplify. After all, without something to work towards, it’s easy to feel aimless. Sometimes though, the people that we look up to the most fail us. Those who loom so large in our eyes come crashing down sending shockwaves to our core. For many, this was Ravi Zaccharias. The article on the New York Times website outlines the full results of an investigation into his alleged misconduct can be found here:
As of now, it unfortunately seems like many of the accusations levied against Zaccharias are true. But how does this happen? How does a beloved Christian leader who impacted the lives of millions get to the point where he is sexually abusing the people that he was called to minister to?
I believe the answer lies in one of the most insidious devices used by the devil to cause great men to fall: the human tendency to separate secular and spiritual. Paul David Tripp calls it “The Dangerous Dichotomy” in his book Sex and Money (27). He describes this dangerous dichotomy as “dividing your life into things that have to do with God and things that don’t or, even more dangerously, things in life that belong to God and things that belong to you” (33). As humans, we often forget that everything we do should be an act of worship. Tripp puts it this way: “ Our problems with sex begin when we forget that God must be at the center of this part of our lives as he must be with any other” (30).
This, I believe was the problem present in Ravi Zaccharias’s life. He chose to believe that his sexual pleasure was separate from his ministry and that belonged to him rather than God. He even went so far as to tell the women that he was abusing that if they spoke out, “millions of souls” would be lost (nytimes). He believed that, since his ministry was so successful, he could do whatever he wanted sexually with no repercussions. His dichotomous view of his ministry and his sexual pleasure is a stark reminder to Christians that each and every one of us is capable of things that we would have never thought possible. No one would have ever expected such a man as Ravi Zaccharias to commit such heinous sexual sins, but the evidence is pointing that way.
It reminds me of a quote that I have heard a few times, however I do not know where it originated. It goes like this: “But for the grace of God, there could I go.” No one wakes up one day and thinks: “today is the day where I sexually abuse someone.” It is always a slow slide into the depths of depravity, a culmination of years of tiny, insignificant decisions that tear down your defenses leaving you unprotected when the devil decides to strike. The best defense against the slow slide into depravity is vigilance, and that vigilance only comes about in the heart of a man or woman who is tuned in to what the Holy Spirit is speaking into their lives. I often pray the prayer of the Psalmist David in Psalm 139 that says, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way” (vv. 23, 24 NASB). I recognize that I have very little awareness of the sins that gradually eat away at my integrity, so I go to the one place that I know I can get answers; God.
If we as Christians are to run the race with endurance and protect ourselves from the dangerous dichotomy, we must pray, pray, pray; for our “adversary, the Devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8). We must also honestly evaluate our lives to find the places where we are tempted to think that we are in control or that God does not have authority and root them out to the best of our ability. Though we will never be perfect, if we walk in the spirit daily, we will find strength to run the race with endurance until the end.
For more on this subject, check out this article by Paul David Tripp.
