This testimony was delivered by a 15 year old Battalion boy as a part of our mentoring module a few weeks ago. Boys are indeed being freed from sexual slavery, and the hearts of fathers and sons truly are being turned to one another.
Having a mentor is quite possibly one of the best ideas one could ever have. Having an older, wiser, more mature man who can walk you through the painful process of exposing your sins, and then help you combat them so that you become more like Christ, is truly a blessing from God in more ways than one.
The Scripture says, “two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Ecclesiastes 4:9-12.
But there’s even more. For me specifically, having a mentor has helped my relationship with my Dad. Don’t get me wrong, my Dad is an awesome guy – I am truly blessed to be his son. He’s a Christian man, his faith firmly placed in God, and – amazingly – he loves me and wants the best for me.
I know what you’re wondering. “Iain, if you knew this, why did your relationship with your dad need help?” Well, humans in general are good at a lot of things, and one of them is suppressing the truth. And, for the longest time, I suppressed the truth.
I’d been enslaved to sexual sin for ages. I knew perfectly well that it was a sin – and that didn’t help my relationship with my Dad at all. Whenever I saw him, the first thing I felt wasn’t love as it should have been – it was fear.
“Has he discovered it yet?” I’d wonder. “Does he know that I’ve been sinning sexually constantly over the past few months?” And I’d hide my sin, afraid that he’d discover it. Afraid that if he did, he’d be disappointed, or angry, or frustrated. Suppressing the truth I knew perfectly well – that instead of exploding at me, he’d try to help me.
I had no reason to fear, and I knew it – I’d never been good at hiding, and he knew for a fact that sexual sin was something I struggled with. He’d proved in the past that if I confessed to him, he wouldn’t be disappointed, angry, or frustrated. But not only am I good at suppressing the truth, I’m also very good at being afraid of absolutely nothing, even if I recognize it as absolutely nothing. And it wasn’t helping that perhaps I didn’t want to let my sin go – I knew that if Dad found me out, he’d want me to let go of it. So I kept it hidden.
If it hadn’t been for my Battalion mentor, I would have continued living this way until I left home for college, taking my enslavement to sexual lust with me, and that would have been really bad. When I try to think about what might have happened, my brain tells me, “let’s just not, all right?”
My Battalion mentor happens to be the one who takes me to Battalion on Mondays, and on one such Monday, he asked me a direct question that he hadn’t asked in ages – “how has sexual purity been going over the past week?” I kid you not, a full two minutes and at least a quarter mile of road elapsed between that question and my answer. I’m so thankful my mentor is a patient man! The phrase “the truth hurts” has never been more accurate – getting the truth out was an experience not unlike having to vomit. And the things I said were not unlike vomit either – the phrase “the truth is a beautiful thing” has also never been more inaccurate. But then again, better out than in!
Anyway, one of the things my mentor suggested was that I talk to my Dad about this sin, which I did. The waiting period wasn’t as long this time – I guess it must get easier as you keep doing it, like… well, just about everything – although it was still hard to tell him about my sin.
After I’d told him about my enslavement to lust – as well as a couple other sins I’d been having trouble with; I’ll spare you the details, they’re not really important here – my relationship with him improved dramatically. No longer did I see him as a scary police officer looking for contraband items in my luggage – I saw him as a loving father. Since that day I have seen a massive change in this area of my life.
The sin no longer has the same hold on me it once did, and maybe even more importantly my fear that Dad would discover it is gone. I know now that I can finally stop being afraid of him and instead love him as a father.
