Unka Glen

Let’s talk about habitual sin, shall we? Oh my, how much doubt has come into the world through habitual sin? How can I be saved if I go on sinning? We ask again and again… as if our behavior had anything at all whatsoever to do with our salvation. 

Let me give you a simple test to help you understand habitual sin. Rate yourself on how well the following statements describe your state of mind:

1. I feel ashamed of myself for all the sin I do. I feel like it says something about what kind of Christian I am, and when I think of my habitual sin, I get this sinking feeling in my gut.
2. I feel so much guilt about what I do. It’s like something I can’t get away from, I’m marked by it, and I can’t feel good about myself until I put all this behind me.
3. I feel afraid. I know I deserve to be punished, and I’m sure God must be angry with me about this sin, and it’s like I can’t face Him with what I’ve done.

Now, rate these next three statements the same way, how well do these statements describe you?

1. I’m getting good wisdom on my habitual sin. I’m learning why I do it, when I’m more vulnerable, what my triggers are, and how to pray and work through all of it to eventually get better. I’ve got a long way to go, but I’m excited by my early progress. Also, I’ve come to realize this bad habit is just the fruit of a deeper, more basic struggle I need to address.
2. I’m developing a better strategy on how to deal with this habitual sin. I’ve got accountability, emotional backup, and alternatives in place for when I know I’m in the danger zone. I still make mistakes, but each time I do, I get smarter, and my strategy gets better.
3. I’m finally getting a sense of humility about myself. I’ve stopped “shoulding myself” (I should be able to do this, I should have already stopped doing that). I recognize my default setting is to make mistakes, and in getting closer to my victory, I’m overcoming my nature (with super-natural power). I can finally be excited about my growth, now that I have a realistic expectation of myself.

If you have a habitual sin in your life, chances are you score very high on the first three statements, and very low on the second three. So your problem is no longer the bad habit itself, your problem has become: shame, guilt, and fear. Using wisdom, strategy, and humility, it’s almost impossible not to gain some ground on this bad habit.

Forget about will power, forget about mourning your sins, and kill your already wounded ego. Emotions like fear, shame, and guilt will cloud the wisdom you need to overcome this thing. Beating up on yourself will only weaken you, and make you more vulnerable to going back into old patterns. It’s time to quit playing emotional games. It’s a time to get smart and take this thing down, one brick at a time, if need be.

defeatisnolongeranoption asked: Do you think some things take longer for God to forgive than other things? And if we keep repeating a sin, I know that’s not repentance, so what happens when we wholeheartedly think it’s the end of a sin habit, and then we slip again?

Unka Glen answered: It’s a good question, but the answer will be hard to hear. Not because it’s bad news, because it’s good news we’re afraid to live with.

Let’s start here: Jesus paid for all sin. He paid for every sin that would ever be committed by anyone and everyone in the future. When you accepted Jesus as your Savior, you accepted that payment for all of your sins, and indeed that’s how you were saved. And as Jesus Himself said from the cross: “it is finished”.

This is as basic a definition of Christianity as you can get, and yet this finished work of grace is really hard to get our minds around. We read, “there is now therefore no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) and we feel.. well… uncomfortable. I’m still a sinner, so where’s my punishment? Jesus paid it. What are the eternal consequences of the sin I commit after I’m saved? None, Jesus paid it. 

This is almost impossible for us to live with, and our minds start to twist and stretch good doctrine around to fit our mentality that there must be consequences. For some of us, this is the only way the world makes sense.

To be sure, there are physical consequences to sin, steal often enough, and you’ll go to jail. Lie often enough and you’ll lose friends. Go down the wrong path far enough and yes, the Lord may put a certain physical blessing on hold until you’re ready for it. Not so much as a punishment, you understand, but because a blessing you’re not ready for is, in fact, a curse.

But these physical consequences are not enough for us, we fear a punishment and we feel this makes us better people. For Heaven’s sake, what would we have, if we took away the fear of punishment? We’d just run around doing whatever we wanted. We’d be sinning and not caring about it! 

But why don’t we take a moment and put this thought to the test? Let’s compare a fearful Christian to a Christian who is thankful for grace. A fearful Christian, for example, isn’t giving it their all, they’re doing just enough to avoid punishment, which I must tell you isn’t much at all. A thankful Christian goes the extra mile.

A fearful Christian will run away from God when they commit a habitual sin to avoid the punishment that must be soon to follow. A thankful Christian clings to God not knowing or caring if they’ve been rejected. A fearful Christian is focused on themselves and keeping their own butt out of trouble, a thankful Christian is focused on God, on His grace, His love, His amazing patience, His goodness, and believe me, that Christian is devoted.

To me, it’s no contest, fearful Christianity is weak Christianity.

So, what happens when we sin, and repent, and then screw up all over again? Well I guess it depends on what kind of Christian you are. If you’re that fearful Christian, you tell yourself that you’re not really forgiven, and that God’s grace is slow in coming, and that you’re the exception to all that Bible stuff, and that your eternal soul is now in jeopardy, and somehow it’s up to YOU (not Jesus) to get it back on track.

If you’re a thankful Christian then it’s simple: you get your narrow butt back up on that horse. You ride that thing ‘til it bucks you off, and then you get your narrow butt back up there again, and you keep doing it, until that horse learns who’s the boss. You keep fighting the good fight against the sin than entangles you and holds you hostage.

It’s not fun, or pleasant, but you remember that Jesus paid for this sin, so the least you can do is try to overcome it. You remember that Jesus hasn’t given up on you, so who are you to give up on yourself?

myalternativetofacebook asked: How do you beat a real funky habit Unka Glen? I like biting my nails on occasions, but the real funky one is this thing I’ve been doing since I was a kid; and man, even as a grown up 23 year old man, this funky habit resurfaces on occasions. Pretty much how it goes down is I’m a thumb sucker as well as a hair puller (or trichotillomania, but you can just call me trich). Is there a strategy to breaking funky habits; and keep beating them every time they stick their ugly head in my window? Much love - Johan

Unka Glen answered: I can give you some strategies on breaking all these habits, and others such as cutting, smoking, OCD, and really any addictive behavior, but in order to do that, I’m going to have to drop some science. I mean that literally. Actual science. I promise not to go too deep, but like any other struggle, it’s important to know how we got into these bad habits, and how they work once we’re in them.  We’ll take this in three parts.

Part 1: Remember that rock! Recent research has shown a connection between addiction and a substance called dopamine. This is very important because dopamine does something very specific in the front part of your brain (the Orbital Frontal Cortex, if you must know). This area of your brain has a very special job, it’s the part of your brain that says, “remember this thing, it’s of vital importance for future survival”. 

So if you’re hunting animals with a bow and arrow a few centuries ago, you might notice a herd of animals when you happen to pass by this big rock. So days later when you get hungry, your brain tells you to go back to the rock (the idea being, maybe those animals will be grazing there again). Once you know that this is how your brain works, it’s easy to see how this can go wrong (because the rock itself can’t actually give you food).

If I have a terrible day, and I decide to cut myself, maybe the pain of that terrible day goes away for a second… and in that moment, my brain says, “hey remember this thing! We just found the solution to all our problems!” 

But you know that you haven’t solved anything, no matter what your brain is telling you. And in that moment, we can turn to the Lord and tell Him, “you’re the only solution to my problems, I need your peace, not this bad habit I’m forming.” If we do, we can nip these habits, addictions and obsessions in the bud. If we don’t do that, we go to the next phase…

Part 2: Brain Police! As I mentioned already, the part of the brain that’s involved in these addictions and habits is in charge of processing information that your brain feels is life-and-death important. As such, addiction often causes this frontal part of the brain to route it’s signals to a primitive fight-or-flight part of the brain (the Cingulate Gyrus, if you must know). So your brain is trying to say, “this thing is as vital as breathing” (in fact this is the same part of your brain that tells your body to breathe), “and if you stop doing this addiction or habit, or obsession, then you just might die”. 

However, there is a part of your brain that is shown to under-perform in OCD patients and in people suffering with addictions, and this area of the brain is in charge of shifting mental gears to process new events (it’s called the Caudate Nucleus, if you must know). This part of the brain processes the info from the front of your brain (where all this trouble started) and it’s supposed to act as a sort of traffic cop between it and the primative fight-or-flight part of our brain.

This reminds me of the verse in 2 Corinthians 10:5 “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” Our habits are giving us a false sense that they are vitally important as we move away from them, and a false sense of peace and security, as we go deeper into them. Thus we take these habits captive, and refuse to listen to the false feedback.

Part 3: Mental Jungle! This leads us the final phase, if we’re all the way into our addiction, and we’re looking to get out, it’s about literally walking a new path. As a scientist named Carla Shatz says, “Cells that fire together, wire together.” Meaning when you think a certain thought, over and over, it forms a sort of pathway in your mind, much like a well-worn footpath through an otherwise impossibly thick jungle.

If you think about it, much of your life is like this, when you drive home, you don’t really think through every step, you just tell your body to go home and it mostly does the rest on mental autopilot. When we get to the point of a locked-in addiciton or habit, it’s important to realize that you have literally re-wired your brain to think a certian way. And the only way out, is to walk the same right path over and over until you rewire your brain to work a new way. Imagine praying every time you felt the urge to feed your addiction. Pretty soon you’d find yourself automatically praying whenever the stress gets too high.

This can take some time, depending on how consistent you are and how dug-in the addiction or habit is. But walking in this new way, reminds me that Jesus referred to Himself as “The Way”, and the early Christians were often called followers of The Way. This idea of following a path, and that path becoming a part of us, is a very attractive idea to me, much more attractive than rules and rituals. And I love these verses on that subject:

Psalms 119:104-105 I gain understanding from your instructions; therefore I hate every wrong path. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.

Isaiah 30:21 Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

Jeremiah 6:16 This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.

unclaimedbreath asked: Hey Unka Glen! how are you doing today? My life took a turn for its worst a couple of years ago, but I got back up, fixed things, and now that I am clean, I’ve been trying to reach out to Jesus. I try to talk to Him but it honestly feels like I’m spilling my heart out to nothing. I feel like He answers me, but I’m scared to trust, and I never get the answers I was looking for. I have learned by experience to never trust, even myself. My youth group leader was telling me that she thinks that my heart wants this relationship with Jesus but my head won’t let me because I’m scared. I was wondering if you could give any advice to help me. [edited for length]

Unka Glen answered: I work with people recovering from addiction, and all of them struggle with trusting. The reason is simple, at some point in any kind of addiction, you start breaking promises to yourself. At that point, you begin to think, who can I trust, if I can’t trust myself?

Futhermore, you might feel that to the extent that people are aware of this addictive behavior, they may be disgusted with you in the same way you’ve been disgusted with yourself. And it’s pretty hard to trust someone that you feel is likely to judge you like that. So you start to think: “If you knew me, you wouldn’t believe in me.” 

And God certainly knows you, so there you have it.

I think your youth group leader is right on track. Being vulnerable before God can be as scary as it gets. BUT you already know how things will go with the Lord, don’t you? God doesn’t have to wait for you to present yourself before He punishes you. If He wanted to punish you in any way, it would already be done. You know His arms are open wide, you know He loves His lost sheep, your heart confirms the truth of that even as you read these words.

But in the end it’s still a leap. For all of us, it’s that final leap of faith. I know it’s scary, but take it anyway.

christopherslin asked: Aside from being illegal, what are the reasons why one shouldn’t smoke marijuana? I’ve never tried it and don’t intend to, but many people do not seem opposed to it. I have my own opinions why I wouldn’t, but I’ve never tried it so I don’t know what the real negative implications are. Could you shed light on it at all? Thank you for all that you’re doing Unka Glen, may God bless you :)

Unka Glen answered: Well let’s talk about the positives. If you smoke weed, and I can speak personally from extensive research in this area in my younger days, you will feel kinda woozy in a mildly pleasant way. …So yeah. That’s… something. 

Now let’s consider some interesting negatives, shall we?

Blowing other guys: There is a fairly small, but nonetheless substantial chance that you will end up losing your career, all your money, all your friends, most of your family ties, and end up giving other men oral sex for money in order to continue to buy the drugs which at this point no longer get you high, they just help you feel normal for a few hours. Right after I write this I’m heading to a meeting of former addicts, and most of them would tell you that they did all of the above, or worse, because of their addiction.

Going to jail: As spoking pot is still illegal, there is still the chance that you can go to jail for having it, or smoking it. Trust me, most of the men inside the jailhouses where I work, are there for drug-related offenses. I want you to picture how “popular” you might be in jail. Yeah. How good would that high have to be?

Ball cancer and man boobs: Of particular interest to a young man like yourself, regular marijuana use was recently shown to create a 70% increase in testicular cancer. Which is okay, if you don’t care so much about, ya know, your testicles. It also interferes with proper hormone production leading to gynecomastia, which is the increase of breast tissue in men. Not a good thing for a man on his way to jail, I have to tell ya.

Speaking of jails, most jailhouses of any real size have a rubber room where they put the addicts when they start to come down off of their addiction. If you ever get a chance to peek into one of those rooms, and hear the screams coming from the other side, you’d never again consider taking hard drugs. Ever.

Sure, it’s fairly unlikely that all this could happen to you, and I’m not saying any of this to get you paranoid (ironically, if you smoke enough pot, you’ll get paranoid all on your own). But every drug rehab in the world is filled with people who were sure they could walk between the raindrops and not get wet. It’s not that the risks are so great, it’s that the high simply isn’t worth any risk. 

Have you ever taken Nyquil, and felt like you were still sick, but but somehow you just didn’t mind so much? Then you’ve been high. Was it awesome!? Was it all you ever dreamed of? Was it WILD!?! No, you felt kind of tingly and mellow, but you also felt kind of stuck in a buzzing confusion and like you’d rather be asleep. That’s about it. Why, you may ask, do people make such a big deal about it then? Because, beloved, that’s all they’ve got.

Think of virtues like joy and peace for example. These are the pure substances that the whole world chases after in a counterfeit form. Peace and joy are free (indeed God WANTS you to have these virtues, and many more), and by simply opening your heart, you can receive them. And all the side effects are positive. The only people who would choose a drug that makes them mellow, over a God who gives unlimited, pure, uncut peace, are the people who wrongly believe that God doesn’t want them to have peace.

Enjoy the real thing, and help others to find it.

Christians often struggle to be a good witness to friends who seem to be slipping off the path into more dangerous territory. In order to deal with those situations, you need to use some basic ministry skills. And it’s surprisingly hard to find good material on those skills, so let’s take some of the methods we use in our urban and prison ministry, and figure out how to apply them to your situation.

If it works on ex-cons, gangbangers, and addicts, it’ll surely work on your friends.

So let’s dive in. People may ask me, “how can I help my friend get back on track?”, but what they really mean is: how can I get my friend on track RIGHT NOW. So it’s worth asking— is right now the best time to get your friend back on track? Certainly we don’t want to see people suffer in the meantime, so that drives a sense of urgency, but is that urgency causing us to strike a wrong note and come off the wrong way?

You bet it is.

So we turn to the wisdom of an old ministry mentor, who once said to me: “a man of God knows how to play for time”. By that, he meant that the negative consequences of people’s mistakes have a way of eventually bringing them around, and making them more receptive to the Word. It’s just a matter of waiting for that time.

This means recognizing that once people’s minds are made up, there’s nothing you can do but wait. However, by taking that “right now” element out of the equation, so many other possibilities and solutions present themselves. You see that there are plenty of ways to plant a seed that will break ground exactly when the time is right.

So let’s think of an example, imagine that someone you know is experimenting with drugs or alcohol. At this stage it’s mostly “partying” and it hasn’t advanced to addiction yet, but things seem to be headed that direction. What do you say to your friend?

You know that trying to use fear, shame, or guilt won’t work, because those things are based on emotions, and emotions quickly fade. Plus, manipulation and ministry don’t overlap, my beloved.

So you play for time. You’ve gently but directly told them you think this is a bad idea, they disagreed, so you’ve lost that battle. So now design something loving and caring that will have an impact when it’s most needed. Here’s the kind of thing I would say to the men or women in our ministry:

“Take this card and stick it in your wallet. It’s got my name and number on it. If you find yourself hitting rock-bottom and you need to figure a way out, call that number. I know you think you don’t need it, but take it just in case. In the words of that great theologian Jonas Blane, ‘You ever hear of a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card? This is a Get-Out-of-Hell card.’ You call that number, night or day, I will come get you no matter where you are. From there, we’ll sit down and figure things out together.”

I get a lot of calls from old wrinkled cards. And all those people are WIDE OPEN to what God has to say about their situation. Heck yes it hurts a lot, watching people make costly mistakes, and having to hold them at arms length while they learn things the hard way, but it’s worth figuring out how to keep people from burning bridges with you, and being prepared with some loving guidance when they come to their senses. 

Don’t look to fix everything right now. God is patient with us. We can do the same for our friends. 

Anonymous asked: I’m teetering on the line that divides purity and sexual immorality. I’ve grown up in the church my whole life so I know all of the reasons why I’m not supposed to have sex or fool around outside of marriage, but I still find myself not caring anymore and just wanting to go for it. I’ve found access through friends and drinking into a new world that I enjoy. I enjoy who I am when I drink, and I enjoy the attention I get from girls in those situations. Anything to say? 

Unka Glen answered: Nope. Go for it. Probably this whole new way of life will end up being great. I mean, think of all the people that noticed that drinking and getting attention form the opposite sex felt good, and invested their time and money and life to pursuing that good feeling. Almost none of them ended up at the bottom of life, addicted, burned out, or dealing with some form of STD.

C’mon brutha, don’t ask me to talk you out of what you know to be a bad idea, if you’re determined to learn things the hard way, what can I say, except I’ll still be here to help when you’re done. You aren’t charmed, you’ve seen the consequences of chasing that life, and you can’t avoid those consequences any more than you could avoid getting wet by walking between the raindrops.

But when you’re sad and depressed, any existence that numbs the pain, while simultaneously giving you the feeling of acceptance, is a pretty powerful thing. The only problem is, it’s not a cure for what ails you, it’s just a patch on the symptoms. Meanwhile, if you find it hard live with yourself now, try waking up in a strange place having done God-knows what, and see how much harder it gets.

For you to even consider this, there has to be something wrong with your walk, and you won’t find peace until you work it out. And I’d guess that it has something to do with you feeling like you let God down. And that you despise yourself because of that, so you might as well pack your bags and head out on your own, to at least milk some pleasure out of your empty existence.

But here’s the truth: God doesn’t care about all that. He just wants you. He doesn’t want you to perform like a puppet on a string. He wants the real you. Rebellious, carnal, clueless, and wayward as you may be, He wants you. It doesn’t make sense, but heck, when did love ever make sense? 

Before you throw away your relationship with God, throw away your religion, it probably didn’t have much to do with who God really is anyway. 

I work with men and women coming out of jail, and off the streets, and this is a video of Jason, a brother I’ve been discipling for a few months now. Jason is currently living in an inner-city drug rehab. The video was prepared for our BRIDGE service, a service where hand-picked pastors come, three at a time, to try and and convince our guys and gals to go to their church. During that service the pastors preach on a topic that was submitted anonymously by those attending the service.

This is the topic that was submitted, and I think many of you can relate— Going Unnoticed ”What do you do, when you’re trying your best and people seem like they just don’t care? You feel left out or locked out. No one really notices how you feel. What can a person do in that situation like that? Sometimes I don’t feel accepted by anyone. So what can I do?”

In our service, we have a short segment called The One Thing I’d Tell ‘Em, where some of the men and women we’ve discipled give their take on the topic. This is what God can do with a brother from this rough a background, think what more He can do with you.