This piece is from the Young Writer’s Cohort. They were asked to write about a season of suffering or a really difficult trial and share what they learned through it.
When I was sixteen, I developed an eating disorder. For three months, I restricted my food intake to the point of endangering my physical health. In that short time, I did enough damage to both my body and soul to put me on a long and trying road of recovery.
Three years have now passed since the onset of my struggle. By God’s grace, I don’t consider myself to have an eating disorder anymore. How I have tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord in freeing me! I was once deathly afraid of gaining weight, enslaved to a calorie limit, constantly occupied by counting and tracking and restricting. Now I am not. And yet, though I am no longer beset by the severe behaviors that characterize an eating disorder, the battleground has shifted from my outward action to the inward posture of my heart.
What do I mean by the posture of my heart? I mean that while I do not weigh myself obsessively nor tally every calorie I consume, I still struggle with the desires to be outwardly beautiful and to exert control over my life. More than unrealistic beauty standards or the pressures of adolescence, it was my own sinful desire that led to my eating disorder. For “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (Jas. 1:14-15). It is sin of the heart that lies at the root of all visibly sinful behavior. And this fight against vanity and control continues.
Such a fight is long and drawn out―longer and more drawn out than my initial period of recovery. In the first year, I grew in leaps and bounds with observable results: changed eating habits, a restored weight, a newfound joy in the Lord and in his Word. But it is much harder to measure progress when much of the battle is no longer so outward. Now, I must guard against the slippage of fantasizing about the perfect body, ruminating on what I ate in a day, worrying about what others will think if I eat this or that.
I would not say that I have an eating disorder any longer, but I cannot say that I have full victory, either. I often wonder if I am making concessions with my sin. I wonder what victory is supposed to look like. I wonder how long I will be plagued by these intrusive thoughts―will it be until I die? “How long, O Lord?” (Ps. 13:1).
How do we persevere in the long fight against indwelling sin? Where do we find hope? In my past and present struggle with sin, the Lord has encouraged me with two truths.
1. I need the Lord every day.
A little over a year after I first began recovery, I left for college across the country from my family, living alone for the first time in my life. I had progressed much in the intervening time: physically, my health was nearly restored, and spiritually, I had grown to love the Lord more and earnestly desire to submit my will to his. I left with the confidence that my eating disorder was a thing of the past.
But as I took pride in my supposed maturity, I stopped depending on the Lord. I was no longer cautious about the deceit of my own desires and fears. As the pressures of transitioning to college life mounted and I resisted the dreaded “freshman fifteen,” I resorted to restriction again. I did not recognize how far I had wandered until I returned home for winter break and my family immediately noticed. In the Lord’s kindness, they confronted me.
I was crushed. More than a year’s progress gone in just four months. Was I destined to live in an endless cycle of backsliding? Had I even repented truly if I returned to my sin? I struggled to see how I could continue persevering. I knew that God promised freedom from the power and presence of sin one day, but I wondered if I would be burdened with the same sin until then. What hope was there for the present?
Yet I clung to the Lord’s promise to Paul in his affliction: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Paul’s suffering was different from mine―his “thorn in the flesh” was likely a physical affliction that the Lord refused to remove; my trials stemmed from my own indwelling sin. But regardless of the exact brand of suffering, both Paul and I, in inability and weakness, were driven to depend on the grace of the Lord. This precious promise became my hope. As I lost all hope in myself, I found hope in the Lord’s grace for today―grace given for each day’s weaknesses, temptations, and failures.
God continually calls his people to trust in him to provide daily. The Israelites wandering in the wilderness relied on his provision of manna each day. They were not to collect more than a day’s allotment, but were to depend on the Lord to be faithful day by day―as he proved to be: “The people of Israel ate the manna forty years, till they came to a habitable land” (Ex. 16:35). In the same way, I was not meant to experience a single victory over my sin and then forget about my neediness. As the Israelites were daily in need of sustenance, I am daily in need of God’s grace to protect me from temptation, forgive me for failing, and grow in me the fruit of the Spirit.
It is not a malfunction of sanctification that I still find myself crying out in desperation for the Lord to keep me from straying. It is by design that I cannot remain steadfast on my own. Only then do I know him as faithful each and every day―he who “daily bears us up” (Ps. 68:19).
2. I need Christ most of all.
In that season of despair, as I came to the end of myself, I found hope not in being less sinful, but in seeing myself in stark contrast with Christ. I was prideful and self-centered like the scribes, who, in Jesus’s words, “like to walk around in long robes, and love greetings in the marketplaces and the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers” (Luke 20:46-47). I had thought of myself as spiritually mature and worthy of honor. I had failed to see my desperate need for God.
Yet in contrast to my foolish pride, Christ became all the more lovely. Here was my Savior: meek, compassionate, humble, “gentle and lowly in heart” (Matt. 11:29). I have long struggled with the desire for outward beauty―to be attractive in the eyes of others. But Jesus was not physically beautiful; he was despised and rejected. He endured temptation but did not sin. He came for sinners like me who are ugly and unlovely, for I am a sinner who has turned away from an infinitely glorious God. But Christ is beautiful―not just good or right or true―but beautiful, radiant, worthy.
I have found that fighting sin is the most difficult when my gaze is directed more to myself and my own growth in righteousness than to Christ. I often need to hear Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s words: “For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief!” It is in meditating on the beauty of Christ that the Lord has begun to teach me to pursue the inner beauty of godliness and to please him rather than others.
The Lord has promised that “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Ph. 1:6). But his work in me is not yet complete. The question remains: will I have to contend with this sin until I die? Will I have to wait until the day of Jesus Christ? In truth, I do not know how much victory over this particular sin awaits me in this life. I am not promised perfection now.
But more than the desire to be done with sanctification―to have a spotless conscience, to enjoy the blessings of righteousness, to walk easily with the Lord―I long to know my Savior, for “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Ph. 3:8).
I would rather be able to say that I am a wretched sinner redeemed by the grace of God than to say that I have sinned little and known little of him. Christ is not a means to the end of sanctification; sanctification is the means to the end, which is Christ. In him I will be content, today and for all eternity. On him I will wait.
Photo Credit: Alberto Frias