You're Strong Enough (16 page)

If you continue to partake of this type of caramel apple to quench your hunger for love, Satan will cloud your view of what God created woman and man to be. He will cloud your view that our Heavenly Father created women to be viewed as loving, kind, nurturing, mothering, and held in high regard.
The poison in this apple will make you blind to the true nature of women and men.
As a result, you’ll view women as a means to fulfill pleasures. You will see love as self-serving and not self-giving. Sex will become the tool for pleasure and not the tool to bring a man and a woman together.

The more you eat of this caramel apple of porn, the more women become objects and relationships become boring.
You will find that the poison inside your system from porn will cause you to view any love as fake, animalistic, a means to an end and ultimately a self-serving tool.
God’s love will soon not seem as important to you once you are consumed with Satan’s type of love “Porn.”
The poison in this caramel apple will darken your view of love and relationships, especially when real love finally appears. The poison of pornography will slowly kill your soul. As a result, your quest will become boring, lonely and full of self-loathing.

God’s Way
-
Love comes from reaching out to those that care about us and being vulnerable. When we communicate our need for love to our parents and God, love will come in a pure form. As you feel real love from others, your love for yourself will too increase. And when the time is right, true love will be recognized (future spouse).

Starving for Affection

As you partake of the caramel apple of pornography and your views of women and men are being tainted, Satan will then convince you to partake of the second type of poisonous caramel apple: premarital sex. Your starvation for affection becomes even greater after you have tried to quench your starvation for love.
But remember, how you tried to quench your starvation for love was not God’s way, but Satan’s way.
Similarly, how we try and quench our thirst for affection will determine whether it is quenched.

God created sex to be between a man and a woman who have saved themselves for the honeymoon night.
True love and fulfilling affection through the act of sex comes only when you have completely given yourself to another. And that type of commitment can only be achieved through marriage.
This commandment is found in Duet 5:18, “Neither shalt thou commit adultery.” Committing adultery is not just having sex with another married individual, but having sex before you’re married.

The poison of having sex before marriage is of course STDs, getting pregnant out of wedlock and ultimately feeling empty inside. The first two are widely known, but the one that Satan tries to hide from you is the one that can leave you emotionally scarred, feeling empty inside and eventually leaving a huge void in your life.

Sex is not only an avenue to have children in marriage, but also to bond two souls into one. When you give yourself to another person through the act of sex, you are actually giving them a part of you (emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually). Therefore, when you have sex with multiple people you are giving them a piece of yourself that you can’t get back.
As a result, after each act of intercourse, your soul believes it is becoming one with the other person, but because there is no lasting commitment, like in marriage, it emotionally tears you apart.
Until eventually you become emotionally scarred and callous. You will come to find that when you do finally find the one you want to be with for the rest your life, it will be very difficult to really bond to that one person because you have casually given yourself to many.

Have you noticed that those who partake in casual sex are more likely to get into drugs, alcohol, porn and gangs than those that don’t? Having sex outside of marriage will create a void inside of you, which you will try to fill through these other means. The safest and most rewarding sex you will ever have is inside of marriage. God created it to be that way. Waiting adds value to a marriage and to your self-worth. It makes the marriage special and worth fighting for in times of trouble.

Please note:
Sex is
not
bad, just like driving a car is not bad. But you must wait until you have a driver’s license to drive, as you must wait to have a marriage license to have sex.
God is the one who created sex. All He asks is for us is to wait until we have our marriage license. Then, we are free to enjoy sex to its fullest and bond two souls together as one.

Satan will try to convince you that love is love and affection is affection, no matter the form. Satan always takes a truth and twists it into a lie.
True love and real affection comes from the sweet reward of marrying your best friend.
If sex is placed on hold until you take your vows what could you truly discover about the other person? How deep could the relationship go?
When your relationship is deep, sex becomes the icing on the cake. If sex is the icing and the relationship is the cake, how much weight does the cake hold in times of trouble?
Everything, it is the cake that holds the icing together not the other way around.

As you continue on your quest, there may be times when you are starved for affection. There may be times when others come on your path and convince you to have sex. Don’t be fooled. Those that are looking to fulfill their own needs will not stick around when times get rough. God’s plan is for us to go on our own individual quests at the beginning and then be joined by another through marriage. If two are working towards the same goal, what are your chances of conquering your quests? Strong.
So take care to not give your most prized possession (virginity) to another, for the poison of premarital sex can blind your eyes when your true love is finally right in front of your
face.

Starving for Relief

Satan’s Way
-
I want you to picture yourself back on your path. Now at the moment you feel weak inside because you’ve been harmed by another (i.e., molested, bullied). You don’t want to feel the pain anymore of reliving it over and over again in your mind and you choose not to forgive, so you partake of the poisonous caramel apple of drugs. Upon the first bite you feel a little dizzy. You may think:
Nothing to worry about
. As you continue to eat that caramel apple of drugs you start to feel your senses and stability becoming wishy-washy. After feeling these bad side effects, you put the apple down and think that is the worst of it.

As you continue to walk along your path you find your path becoming very dark and filled with crevasses. As you decide whether you will cross or not, you find yourself not being able to think clearly and Satan convinces you to cross anyway. As you do, you fall because your mind was altered and you couldn’t see straight. Do you think Satan will go down and pick you up and make sure you’re okay? No. He is going to laugh that He convinced you to partake of the caramel apple of drugs, fall off the cliff and allow Him to be your puppeteer.

Drugs alter our minds and darken our paths and make it very difficult to conquer our quest when Satan’s strings are attached.
They can give us the illusion that everything is great—until we fall (i.e., become addicted, brain dead). As a result, your starvation for relief only got worse. Satan will never help you find relief. The poison in drugs can be quick and deadly, or slow and painful.

God’s Way
-
Relief comes from forgiving those that have harmed us, seeking help from others, communicating our frustrations to those that can help (parents), and letting God’s justice claim the afflicter. Relief comes from not letting what has happened to us define our next choices, but healing from it with God’s help, so that we can release the pain.

Starving for Acceptance

Satan’s Way
-
With the rise in divorce, single-parent homes, teenage pregnancies, and other less-than-ideal home lives, we may be looking for acceptance in any form. Our Heavenly Father knows everyone wants someone to help them conquer their quests, defeat the dragon, point the right direction and accept them for who they are. But don’t be fooled through the poisonous caramel apple of gangs or other groups that do not have your best interest at heart.

For example, let’s say you find yourself on your path and everyone you thought should help you on your quest has abandoned you. As Satan watches you feel discouraged and lonely, He places another on your path. Upon first glance at this other person, you feel you shouldn’t join him. But through constant temptation and peer pressure, you join the group.

As you go along with this group, you find that they murder, rape and pillage every village they go through. Did you find the acceptance you are looking for or did you find more trouble, pain and hurt than you were in before? Satan always makes sin, or groups, look tempting and sweet. Once you partake of this poisonous apple, it’s hard to walk away without the poison still in your system or following you.
If you join a gang just to feel accepted, what are your chances of coming out of it alive?
The poison of gangs is both a deadly poison to you and your loved ones.

God’s Way
-
Real acceptance for who you are inside comes from within. If you are okay with who you are and what you’re made of (a Child of God) the other kind of acceptance will not be so sought out. As you accept yourself as a child of a King, then others will be drawn to you. You will find that the “group” you created by knowing you are special will help uplift others, which in turn will make you feel even more accepted.

Starving for Peace

Satan’s Way
-
So far on your quest, you’ve already come across the dragon, trials, temptations, and others trying to either wound you, or knock you off your treacherous terrain. Thus, you are starving for some peace. Satan tempts you to partake of the poisonous caramel apple of alcohol to quench that starvation for peace. He will convince you that alcohol brings peace to any troubled soul. He will have you believe it can dull your pain and make your problems go away.

What Satan doesn’t tell you is that the dull feeling that comes from drinking alcohol also greatly alters your senses, enhances your negative emotions, invites Satan in and inhibits your common sense. So here you are walking along your path and drinking every chance you can because of the many things that have happened to you. One day, you drink too much and pass out. Someone takes advantage of you (date rape). You’re angry, even more now, so you continue to drink a lot. Each drink slowly makes things worse. The next day while walking along your path, you fumble and fall off (you drink and drive and end up killing someone).

Now, the consequence that comes from killing someone makes it very difficult for you to get back on the path that will bring you peace. You can’t find peace through alcohol consumption.
Peace comes only from dealing with the problem face on, not trying to drown them.
Beware. When you are impaired, you could harm yourself and others. The poison in alcohol is poison to you and those around you.

God’s Way
-
True peace comes from forgiving those that have harmed us and asking God to heal us. Only true peace will heal our pain, sharpen our senses and positively change our emotions. Peace comes from knowing we have conquered and overcome our trials successfully. Peace also comes from staying true to ourselves, despite what happens to us.

There will be many poisonous caramel apples in your life tempting you to take a bite. They all have their Earthly consequences, and potentially eternal consequences. But there is one poisonous caramel apple that has an irreversible effect on you and all those in your life—and that is suicide.

Starvation for Compassion

Because of the hurt that we will feel by others abusing their free agency (i.e., being raped, molested, bullied, beaten, or harmed in any other way) we may be starving for compassion. Compassion is wishing that someone will listen, counsel, and console us. Recently this has become Satan’s most tempting poisonous caramel apple along people’s path. Satan will make you believe that if you kill yourself it will be better on the other side.
Don’t be fooled. Suicide will stop your quest dead in its tracks (literally.)

Remember in the Preexistence we made promises to others in our family, our Heavenly Father, and ourselves to conquer our quest, fight the dragon and come out victorious.
If you commit suicide, you are not only breaking the promises you made, but you are giving up on your quest to become an heir in the Kingdom of God.
That opportunity is given ONCE. Furthermore it will cause more pain and suffering to your loved ones. Please seek help if you are having suicidal thoughts. Suicide is not the answer. The poison in suicide is deadly here and in the afterlife.

Finding compassion starts with talking about our needs and wants with loved ones. Think about it, what is the first thing Satan convinces when considering suicide? That no one cares or understands your pain, right? If you don’t talk about your pain then, of course they can’t show compassion or try and understand what you’re going through. Finding compassion starts with you reaching out to others.

My Quest for Compassion