My Men My Self My God

By Lisa DuBois

What happens to a woman when she becomes numb to the pain that is experience because of submission to improper relationships? What happens to a woman when she believes that compromise is the only answer? What happens to a woman who is held hostage to the mistakes and the indiscretions of her past has contempt for her present and fears the future?
The author Lisa S. DuBois answers these questions as she biblically examines dating and marriage relationships. If you have ever been in a relationship, this book is for you. My Men My Self My God uses scripture and biblical application to offer the reader a look into oneself, while providing God’s answer to successful, fulfilling relationships. This is a very provocative, powerful, purposeful, and poignant work. It will be impossible to read this book and remain the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lisa DuBois
• Release date: Jun 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9780615483252

Lisa DuBois

Lisa DuBois has been writing since the age thirteen. She is a graduate of Philadelphia Biblical University and the founder of Anointed Pen Publishers. She is also a licensed associate minister at her home church, where she works in youth minstry. Her desire is to inspire, uplift, encourage and entertain men and women by deep reflection and by the art of story-telling.

Book preview

My Men

Any similarities between these situations, circumstances and events to the true life accounts of anyone are merely coincidental and unintentional.

Poetical Prelude to Chapter One

Is It Love or Lust?

At the first glance of his face and at the first touch of his embrace,

when he makes you laugh until you cry,

and you enjoy his presence so much you hate to say goodbye.

When he can read your thoughts though you have not said a word,

and even in your silence every word is heard.

When it seems as if passion is incomplete,

when you rise and when you sleep only his name you can speak.

When you travel that far off distance in your mind and within him you find yourself intertwined.

When he makes you forget everyone that matters,

when you willingly put him above all others including yourself.

When you begin to neglect everything but him,

when you begin to compromise because you're lost in his eyes.

When you give to him all of your heart and then all the other parts of you,

and when you then wake up and realize that you have exalted this man higher than the Lord above,

what do you tell yourself.

What made you do it?

Was it lust or love?

1

Is It Love or Lust?

I remember when I was around the age of 33. I was involved with a man who was about 37. After a few months of involvement, I told him that I loved him. He did not say I love you back. What he did say was You don't love me; you just love the way I make you feel. This should have been the moment in my so-called relationship with him that I should have run far away and fast, but, I didn't run. I stayed and turned a blind eye to all the signals that he was giving that said I don't love you. You see, I was sure about my feelings. I knew that I loved him (at least I thought I did). As far as I was concerned, I knew that he just had to love me, because why else would he make me feel the way I did at that time. It took heartbreak and a three-year road to recovery for me to agree that this man knew exactly what he was talking about. To be completely honest, he was more in tune with what I was feeling and why I was feeling it than I was.

There is a song that I grew up hearing my mother sing, and the hook of the song said It takes a fool to learn that love don't love nobody. I never understood what that meant as I was growing up. It was not until adulthood that the song made sense. The funny thing about love is we think we know what it is. We try our best to define it, and every time we define love we start off by saying that it involves feelings, passions, or emotions.

We can support our description of love with any dictionary. The Roget's 21st Century dictionary defines love with words like: sexual relations, caress, clasp, cuddle, fondle, lick, neck, press, stroke, take into one's arms, adoration, adulation, emotion, fervor, worship, and weakness. The American Heritage dictionary defines love as a deep affection and strong desire for another, the emotion of sex and romance, or a sexual desire for another person.

The interesting thing about the way the dictionary defines love is that this is the way most of us define love, or this is the way we have experienced love. Many of the definitions that we read are faulty and flawed in their descriptions of love. What we are defining as love is really dressed up lust. Most of the words used to define love have a condescending sexual tone to them, and most of us already know that sex and love really have nothing to do with one another. If we know this, then why, as, WOMEN do we give sex to get love?

One of the biggest concerns we have as women is being alone, without a man in our lives. If we do not have a man, the reality of being manless generally allows our emotions and feelings to go through stages. We will begin with the I don't need a man, to I don't want a man, to I don't have time for a man. Eventually this merry-go-round type of thinking leads us back to the reality that we really do want a man, and that is O.K. What we are craving above all else is a relationship. If we put our wants into proper perspective, we would recognize that our wants translate into voids. The reason many of us are so obsessed with having a man in our lives is due to the lack of a relationship and intimacy we have with Christ. We try to supplement this void anyway we can, and many times this lead us into compromising positions and situations.

Think about the times that you either fell in love with a man or told a man that you loved him. Was it before or after sexual involvement? If we are honest with ourselves, most of us said I love you to a man after we became sexually active with that man. As I view my life in retrospect, I see now that the only time I told either boys when I was younger or men when I was older that I loved them was after I gave the most precious part of myself away. We think that will make us more valuable in their eyes, but the opposite is true. Even cars depreciate in value when they are driven off the lot.

It is unfortunate that we will sell or pimp ourselves sexually to a man for the payment of love. Why is this? It is because our view and understanding of love is tainted and we are measuring love by the world's standards? This type of love leaves us empty and hurt. This emptiness and hurt is what develops into bitterness, and we then build a 12-inch thick concrete wall around our heart. This wall, believe it or not, affects all of our relationships, including our relationship with Christ. Allow me to prove my point. When you enter into a relationship in order to get to know the person and for the person to get to know you, one of the first things you do is let your defenses down to a certain degree. Understand that there will always be a certain level of vulnerability in every relationship. In order to develop trust in someone, you must willfully put yourself in a submissive—meaning, agreeable position. Either with your actions or your words you will communicate to this person that you are willing to get to know them on a deeper level. You cannot do that with 12-inch thick walls around your heart.

Protection is the primary reason we have these walls around our heart. It is the post pain experiences that prevent us from embarking on a new relationship, even if that relationship is with Christ. What tends to happen at the onset of a new relationship is that everything that did not work or everything that went bad in the old relationship takes a front row seat in our mind. Anything that an ex-love did or said to you that hurt you, or however they disappointed you will resurface when there is a new relationship on the horizon, and most times we make the new gentleman pay for all the mistakes made by the old gentleman. We never commit fully to this new relationship because of the constant reoccurring pain of the past.

What does all this have to do with Christ? Well, the first point should be evident. The reason we struggle with our relationship with Christ is because we are not willing to submit, nor are we willing to become vulnerable before Him, and we cannot seem to get over the past. We still try to hide our mess-ups and our flaws from Him, just like Adam and Eve did in the garden, as if God does not know that we have messed up and that we are messed up. The second issue we have in our relationship with Christ is accepting His love, because we have spent all of our lives receiving the world's definition of love, which I have already said, is dressed up lust. When God, who is love, shows us true love we reject it. Why? Because we are naturally pleasure-seekers and we prefer the physical attributes of love to the spiritual attributes of love, which is God. If you think this is untrue, just think of how many unmarried women in the church are shacking up and in sexual relationships with men that are not their husband or someone else’s husband. Think of how many women compromise their abstinence or celibate lifestyle everyday for love.

Love suffers long and is kind love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 1Corinthians 13: 4-7.

For an understanding of love in its truest form, the Holy Spirit directed my attention towards 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. If you look at this definition of love in contrast with the world's definition of love, the first thing you will notice is that Paul says nothing about sex, kissing, fondling, or groping. Instead what Paul does is outline for us the conduct of love—that is, how love behaves in relationships towards other people. It is within this framework of love that Christians should operate. If we were to measure love and the motive of the person professing to love us, Paul's definition would serve as the Biblical and spiritual criterion on which we could evaluate the authenticity of love that someone else has or at least say they have for us.

If we truly understood the behavior of love, whenever relationships between man and woman present themselves, we would not be so quick to become intimate to show that we love them. We would instead show our love based on Paul's description in this passage. If you really want something to meditate on think about this—operating in love of this caliber confirms where you are spiritually as a Christian. If the only way you can show love or receive love is of the physical or sexual nature, then you have been polluted by the world's definition, and you are not in line with the Word of God.

Now just for the theologically minded, I do realize that Paul's description of love is given in the context of spiritual gifts and that the exercising of these gifts should be done in love. For the sake of understanding true love in contrast to the definition that most dictionaries render, I must look at Paul's description of love from a relational standpoint between a man and a woman. As believers it is imperative that we have a better understanding of what love does so that we can correctly identify what love does not do.

The Corinthian believers that Paul addressed in this epistle were impatient, full of self, envious, arrogant, unfeeling, uncaring, and unconcerned with the interests and the betterment of others. The same sentiments can be found in us, the church of today. Sadly, these emotions and feelings produce, in my opinion, the secular definition of love and cause us to act in ways that are contrary to what we have been taught according to the Word of God. It is the impatient person and the discontented individuals that will seek to satisfy and gratify their flesh—and call it love. And just for the record ladies, I am not talking about men. I am primarily referring to us. Men are not totally at fault because sexual pressure comes from both sides. What it boils down to is if you are acting out of true love, whether man or woman, you will not put aggressive nor subtle pressure on anyone to compromise their standing before the Lord. If they happen to be the weaker Christian, love should then spring into action, and love will not behave selfishly seeking its own, but love will put the need and the betterment of that person ahead of itself.

Now, remember at the beginning of this chapter I said that I was involved with a man and that I told him I loved him. Well, I now see that what I was acting on was not love (at least not according to Paul's description). It was dressed up lust. It is always after the fact that we see clearer. The hardest part of this lesson to learn for any of us is taking responsibility for the unnecessary pain we bring into our lives when we insist on functioning in relationships that do not honor God. In addition to this we bear the responsibility of not only causing ourselves to stumble, but we cause our brothers to stumble also.

At this point you may feel like I am putting most of the responsibility of sexual relationships on women because it takes two to tangle. You are right; it does take two to tangle, but it only takes one to decide to do the right thing. I remember as a young adult, before I would go out to the club with my friends, my mother would say two things to me. Lisa, be careful and remember the woman is always in control. If you think about it and be honest with yourself, you will have to admit that we have controlled the love, sex and lust in a majority of our relationships with men. We choose to act out of lust, and we choose to relinquish self- control. We act out of the intense craving of our flesh allowing it to override us, and we give into our sinful desires.

The will for our lives as Christian women is not to engage in premarital sex with men as an interview process for a lifetime mate. The will of God is your sanctification; that is, that you should abstain from sexual immorality (fornication); that we should know how to possess our own vessel in sanctification and honor; not in passions of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God."¹ We already know what we should and should not be doing, but we continue doing our own disobedient thing. Then we wonder why God has not given us the husband that we have been praying for, for years. If we are having trouble with submission and obedience to God, which is one of the ways we show God we love Him, what makes us think God is going to give us husbands in whom we are expected to love, obey, submit, and commit ourselves to? If your relationship with God is not right your relationship with your spouse will not be right.

The truth of the matter is if our relationship with God was right, many of us would not have allowed the physical aspect of male and female relationships to be the deciding factor in who we choose for a lifetime mate. It is hard to spiritually discern someone that you are sexually involved with prior to marriage because your judgment is clouded. This is why some people are married to the wrong person. They did not obey God, and they did not wait for God. They just rushed into a serious commitment based on a physical feeling. For that reason they are miserably married, and you can see it all over their faces. It was the passion of lust, dressed up like so-called love that they fell in love with.

We defy God's will and way for our lives by blaming our actions on the I can’t help it disease, or we will just blame it on love. I am not trying to imply that you do not love the one you are with if you happen to be in a relationship at the moment. I am trying to get you to see that the feelings and emotions that lead us to sex do not have as much to do with love as we think they do. The Christian man or woman does not show love to our significant other by acting sexually on those feelings before marriage. Actually the opposite is true. As corny and as outdated as this may sound, true love will show itself by exercising restraint and patience. What I am saying just in case you missed it is this—true love will wait to have sex. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.

You might be wondering what Christ has to do with this worldly way we perceive and receive love. Well that's just it. He has nothing to do with it. That is what most of us fail to see. Christ is not going to fit into our understanding of love. As I said before, our understanding is flawed, and this is one of the reasons why our relationship with Christ will suffer. We try to love Christ with that same superficial, non-sacrificing, self-serving, shallow type of I got to have it or give it to me now love that we find in the world and in most of our relationships. Loving Christ is never deep when it's done this way.

Think about it. Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who you loved, but you knew that they didn't quite feel the same way? Maybe you loved them and they held back; it didn't feel like they loved you as deeply as you loved them. You could tell that their love was just surface type love. Now here is where it gets a little tough to swallow. I know that I have been talking about love much on the physical side of things, but it is that understanding about love along with those same thoughts, beliefs, actions, and behavior pattern that we try to love Christ with. The reason why it doesn't feel right between you and Christ is because the Lord wants more from you than some leftover, worldly, half-hearted affection.

The bottom line is that we cannot continue to pursue Jesus this way, nor can we continue to love Him the same way we have loved the many men in our lives. HE is God—and we are to love the LORD our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength. ‘This is the first commandment²." We ought to love God deeper and harder and more completely than any man we have ever loved or will ever love in this lifetime.

Poetical Prelude to Chapter Two

Impostor

It looks