Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I’m Candace Long with Lessons in the Latter Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we’re living in. Today’s episode is going to get us down in the trenches. It’s called "How to Survive Living Among Perversion." Now a brief disclaimer here, some of the language that I use today is a little R-rated.

One of the goals of Lessons in the Latter Days is to draw wisdom from the days of Noah so that we can survive the judgment that is coming. In the last episode, Part 3, I recounted the stories of three prophetic messengers who had life-changing experiences with the Lord during the 1970s and spent the rest of their lives preaching messages of warning for our generation.

Now the common thread from all three messengers dealt with homosexuality and how sexual perversion will play a key role in bringing about God’s wrath during the Day of the Lord. Today I went back to my journal of June 26, 2015. That’s when the US Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in all 50 states and opened the floodgate to the level of perversion that we have today.

In 2015, I was serving as president of the nation’s oldest organization for creative women, headquartered in Washington, DC. As you can imagine, gay pride celebrations filled the city. Here’s what I wrote in my journal: "When I heard the news, my heart was very heavy. This is a key sign of the end of everything that we hold dear. The Lord is grieved. His children have chosen the lust of the flesh over righteousness. I really don't see life here in DC anymore, but a relocation to an area of the country that still holds to godly values."

That day was a turning point in my own life. My ten-year in DC would end in another year, so I began making plans to sell my home in Metro Atlanta and relocate to the mountains. I believe that Noah must have felt something similar, watching family and friends embrace the perversions of his day, and eventually led him to separate himself from them totally.

In a few minutes, I’m going to share with you the trap that the enemy uses to lure our children and grandchildren into this perverse culture, so you will understand what’s happening and how to pull your families out of it. First, though, I want to review an important point. What happened during the days of Noah to make God so angry that he brought about the flood to destroy everyone?

We find the answer in Genesis 6:12. We read: "And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth." I want us to pay special attention to that last phrase: "all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth." I want to look at each word. "All," as in "all flesh," means every, the whole. So this wasn't a small percentage of people. Whatever this corruption was during the days of Noah, it engulfed everyone.

Now the Hebrew word for "flesh" is the word Bassar, and it means more than just the body. Strong’s Concordance says it especially means the pudenda, which refers to the external genital organs, particularly the females. Next is the word "corrupt." The Hebrew is Shakhath, which means to decay, ruin, or destroy. So what was destroyed?

Many Bible translations say "all flesh corrupted their way," but the phrase should read "all flesh corrupted his way," meaning God’s way. Now the final word to break out is the word "way." The Hebrew word is Derekh, which means a course of life or the manner or custom of walking out life according to everything that God established for us. 613 instructions, to be precise. This is God’s way.

So what the enemy had in mind was to corrupt or ruin our understanding of how to walk out life in the way that God intended. So what this one phrase is saying is that in Noah's day, the sexual practices of every person were corrupted or ruined to such an extent that God's way was not even depicted anymore. There was no earthly righteous model of behavior for the people to aspire to. This level of sexual degradation and corruption contributed to bringing about the flood.

Now here's today's lesson in a nutshell. The trap the enemy uses to seduce people into perversion is called defilement. I learned about defilement the hard way through 40 years of experience in the arts and entertainment industry and working with countless creatives. And here's what you're going to learn: why Satan targets creatives, why creatives are uniquely susceptible to being defiled, why the entertainment industry is so corrupt, how defilement operates, and how we can recognize when it's happening so we can stop the seduction before we are entrapped in it.

Now the Hebrew word for "defilement" means to be foul or contaminated in a moral sense or to pollute oneself. The verb tense is in the middle voice, which indicates that this is something we do to ourselves. It is in our power not to be defiled. Now as I've studied the nature of creatives over the years, because I am one, two findings have been especially insightful and form the basis for much of my writing about this topic.

Finding number one is this: creatives are more wired to spirit than others. You see, we were all wired by our Creator to be able to hear him and receive revelation from him. But when Adam and Eve fell, that ability to hear God was cut off and mankind was prevented from hearing the full range of God’s voice, even though we were given the ability to do so. In studying the creative temperament, I’ve concluded that creatives are genetically given a greater ability to hear divine revelation.

That’s because this ability comes from an area in the right side of the brain, which is why creatives in the arts have a much more difficult time fitting in with regular people. We are different. We hear things differently than others. We have an internal organ of perception which is mentioned in Hebrews 5:14 that others don’t even know about. God made us this way. It is a tremendous gift.

Creatives are musicians, dancers, performers, designers, artists, entrepreneurs, visionaries, and right-brain thinkers. We have an inner beacon that is extremely responsive to spiritual data, both good and evil. And that is why many gifted artists are easily tormented. It’s also why there are so many gays in the arts and entertainment sectors. Creatives are targeted by the enemy for destruction because we have within our very makeup the ability to hear from our Father.

Finding number two is that creatives have a very sensitive spirit. It is tender. And we are like spiritual barometers, if you will, that are called to live in an evil world. We have internal antennae that pick up the presence of spirits easily. Now without a solid foundation in the word of God, we could easily get messed up in our thinking and fall prey to all manner of perversion. Let me give you a scenario showing how this defilement operates.

Let’s imagine a church worship leader hanging out with a male friend who, unbeknownst to him, carries a homosexual spirit. As a creative, the male worship leader’s spiritually sensitive nature picks up something and all of a sudden he feels things he never felt before. Out of nowhere, he becomes sexually aroused just talking with the guy and wonders in his private thoughts what certain experiences would feel like.

Now because he may not have been spending a lot of time with the Lord lately, maybe his faith is not built up. Maybe he’s even feeling like a failure with women since he can’t seem to connect with his girlfriend. So rather than look at his friend, discern the spirit operating in him and say, even silently, "I recognize you. You’re a homosexual spirit. I cast you away from me in the name and the authority of Jesus Christ."

Now instead of doing that, because he doesn't even know what's going on, he starts obsessing with questions like, "Why am I feeling this way? Oh God, there must be homosexual tendencies in me. Maybe that's why I'm not happy with my girlfriend." Now this worship leader does not understand that part of the call of being a creative and one who walks with God is to be fully aware of unclean spirits around him, discern what spirits they are and cast them away. That's why he was given such a spiritually sensitive spirit in the first place: to clean house.

However, this worship leader is young and everyone looks up to him because of his giftedness. He is a prime target for being defiled. Besides, who in the world is he going to confess his thought life to, his pastor? Sadly, the more he obsesses with his own self-doubts, the more that spirit has lured him into its web. He dreams about these new feelings all night, tossing and turning, wondering if it's true: "Am I gay?"

Now should he act on the impulse in a weak moment, a door to the homosexual stronghold is flung wide open. To return to normal becomes a much more difficult journey because now the cellular memory of the pathway to sexual pleasure has been corrupted. That's why the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6: "Every other sin that a man commits is outside his body, but he who commits adultery or fornication sins against his own body."

You see, once a specific cellular memory pattern is imprinted, the body automatically elicits a physical response whenever it’s triggered by a similar feeling. In other words, once he experiences sexual pleasure in a homosexual encounter, even molestation as a young boy or spankings where the nerves in the buttocks stimulate the genital area, his thoughts and body will want to go there again, all because he was defiled. Now since we live in such an evil day, we need to look at defilement from God’s perspective.

Wherever Jesus walked, the son of total righteousness, unclean spirits manifested all around him. He felt them. He sensed them. He knew what their names were. And this ability to detect spirit is a God-given ability to learn to walk as Jesus walked, to detect them, name them, cast them away. This is our challenge living in this day.

Let me give you an example of how we can deal with sexual defilement successfully. The story was told by the late John Sanford. He was co-founder of Elijah House Ministries, which was a pioneering work in the inner healing and deliverance movement in the 1980s and '90s. Typically, John and his wife Paula would counsel people together, but one day, Paula was not able to join him. So in the middle of counseling a young woman, suddenly John began to have sexual thoughts toward this woman.

Now let me say this again. John, the ministry leader, began to have sexual thoughts toward this woman. So what was going on here? He felt like fornicating, which was the trigger, a key sign that he was being slimed. Now his spiritual antennae picked up the spirit. His body manifested like an antenna what the spirit was. He was in the midst of being defiled. Now as a sensitive creative and believer, he was accurately picking up the unclean spirit and he knew what its name was. It was fornication.

So wise and discerning man that he was, he faced the spirit head-on and asked the woman point-blank, "Are you having sexual thoughts toward me?" She hung her head and admitted that she was. And he immediately took authority over the spirit and cast it away from her and out of the counseling room. The evil spirit was gone and he continued with the ministry work to which he had been called. At no time did he consider acting on those feelings.

You see, as a mature believer, he understood that defiling spirits come in and out of our lives all the time and play all manner of head games, making you doubt yourself. Now believers who walk with God fall for this demonic strategy time and again. We fail to realize that wrong feelings belong to an unclean spirit, not to us.

Now tell me, how many pastors and counselors have experienced similar circumstances and gone on to have affairs, leave their spouses, and split their churches, when most likely what was happening to them was that they were defiled. I believe this kind of demonic assault was what happened in 2012 to one of the highest-ranking generals of our day, four-star General David Petraeus, who stepped down in disgrace from his position as director of the CIA after admitting a sexual affair with a writer named Paula Broadwell, who spent time with the general working on his biography.

Here’s what I believe happened. A writer, who is a creative, very sensitive to spirit, begins a publisher’s assignment to get to the heart of a powerful man and write his biography. I’m assuming that Paula Broadwell did not intentionally start out to lure the general away from his wife, force his resignation, and destroy his reputation and legacy. Nor do I believe that Ms. Broadwell was a victim. I believe she succumbed to a spirit of fornication and had no idea how to handle it, nor did he.

Now ironically, the title of his biography, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, now has new meaning. From Satan’s perspective, the enemy certainly lured him all in and gave Petraeus the education of his life, namely a battle he had no clue how to fight. Now how could this happen? Ms. Broadwell had to have been a gifted writer for the publisher to have given her this assignment. Now part of the skill set of a writer is being able to dig into someone’s soul, to draw it out and communicate it in such a way that he comes alive to readers.

Performers have this same ability. We are gifted to become someone else, live in someone else’s skin or music or lyrics, and take that audience on an emotional journey. This can be a place of extreme vulnerability to the creative. It is not uncommon for a writer to form an attachment to a subject because a writer explores the depths of another’s being and draws it out. And that part of the writing assignment places the writer in a vulnerable situation because she finds herself working day after day in a very emotionally intimate setting.

If Ms. Broadwell were a believer, she would have shored up her defenses to prevent being seduced by a spirit. Undoubtedly, she experienced feelings of wanting to have sex, as did General Petraeus, just like John Sanford did in that counseling session. Now the takeaway for us is that as experienced as Petraeus was in actual warfare, he was totally blindsided fighting the unseen enemy at work.

Another well-known victim of defilement is Bruce Jenner. Now Satan’s target was not some unknown man. No, he chose an Olympic champion who was the epitome of everything male and masculine and strong. Now the world is in upheaval over the whole transgender issue, but let me put this in the context of what we’re talking about here. In Jenner’s interview with Diane Sawyer in 2015, he admitted his conflicted feelings as a young boy about his gender and sexual orientation.

Now notice the key word, his feelings were conflicted. An important principle is that feelings in and of themselves are not sin. These feelings were passed on to him from unclean spirits of gender and sexual confusion that were roving around looking for someone to seduce. As a young child, Jenner was too ashamed to talk with his parents about those feelings, so he stuffed them inside and spent years fantasizing what it would feel like to wear his sister’s clothes. He had no biblical perspective to help him make sense of this.

Genesis teaches us: "God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good." Now the word "good" in Hebrew means beautiful, at ease, pleasant, precious, and ready. God made everything to be at ease with itself and ready to spring forth into what it was created to be. So what happened with Bruce Jenner? His conflicted feelings were not sin. But you see, he was in Satan’s crosshairs to make him the poster child for transgenderism.

The strategy was to so conflict him with feelings of unrest that he would finally act on those feelings and then become trapped. The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 14 that God is not the author of confusion, but of peace. Thus, the confusion that Jenner felt as a child was not of God. It couldn't be, for it simply is not the Father’s nature. God’s heart was to take all of Bruce’s conflicted feelings and put them at rest, in line with his intended purposes for his life.

Bruce’s sin was not the desire to be in his sister’s clothes. Rather, it was in acting on those feelings. Now early on, when Bruce said to himself, "I know this is not what I'm supposed to do, but I'm going to do it anyway," God gave him that right to make his own decision, just as he gives us. Jenner chose to act on his feelings and then got hooked on that feeling and went on to live some 60 years hiding his secret sin and built a cellular memory of feeling good whenever he wore women’s clothes. Over time, something inside his spirit began to die.

This is the web that Satan tries to weave for us. He knows our weaknesses and throws us into a situation where the flesh is stirred up by strange feelings. Defilement is the trigger and seduction and entrapment is the goal. When we keep giving in to a wrong behavior long enough and there is no desire to repent, then God gives us over to that sin which Paul writes about in Romans 1 and we become its slave.

Our children need to know the Father intently watches over all of us who desire to be his. As parents, we need to live out these spiritual disciplines in front of them. It’s important to share our personal time with the Lord and our own struggles. Let us pray not only for them, but over them, laying hands on them before they go out each day. And finally, keep watch for any sign of inner confusion or turmoil within them and keep communication lines open.

I hope this episode has been helpful to you. I’ve listed some resources in the description notes to this podcast if you want more information about this topic. You’ll find it as well as all the episodes in this series on my podcast page at candacelong.com. I want to thank you for listening. I ask that the Lord would keep you from falling, to present you without blemish before the presence of his glory. I hope you join me again next time for Lessons in the Latter Days. God bless.