If you were emotionally or spiritually damaged by religion, today's show is for you.
Stay tuned for Polygamy. What love is this?
She was born into Polygamy.
Her family followed the teachings of Joseph Smith, including plural marriage.
Like many young girls, she had been promised to a man who was her father's age.
But she ran away.
That girl was me.
I was lost.
Then Jesus Christ found me.
I found real freedom.
He is a shield to all who will take refuge in Him.
Welcome to our show.
We have a special guest today who has come all the way from North Carolina,
someone whom we interviewed a few years ago,
and he has graciously agreed to come and share with us again.
He hosts a radio show called Sharing the Light.
It's on AM820 radio from 11.30 AM until noon on weekdays.
I would like to introduce and welcome Pastor Alan Wright from Renolda Church in...
Winston Salem, North Carolina.
Winston Salem, North Carolina, right.
So good to be with you.
And thank you so much for coming. You're the senior pastor there. How long have you been a pastor?
Twenty-one years.
Twenty-one great years. And that's great.
I think that's about how long our pastor's been here.
That's been a privilege.
It's good. It's great. And tell us about the website for your Sharing the Light.
Sharingthelight.org. We're a radio broadcast.
All kinds of resources are available.
Daily devotionals. All kinds of opportunities to grow in the gospel of grace.
Sharingthelight.org.
And to learn about grace too.
And you wrote a book entitled Free Yourself, Be Yourself.
It was formally entitled Shame Off You.
Shame Off You originally, and it's the same book by a different title.
Right. And it's a very good book.
And we did cover that a little bit last time when we interviewed you.
In fact, we interviewed him on October 16th of 2014.
And if you would like to see that interview, you can go to our website, WhatLoveIsThis.tv.
And the title of that interview is Shame Off You, and it's episode number 7.38.
And we urge you to go see it because it was a great interview.
We're going to just kind of continue now from the same topic kind of that we did at that time.
We're going to get the same thing, because there are many people who are hurt by religion.
And that's a lot of what your message is.
People who leave Mormonism or leave polygamy.
And they've been so damaged by it that what you have to say will help them.
And so that's what we're going to do.
But first, you have such a passion, such a heart to share what you do with people
so that they'll avoid religions that you shame on legalism for members' acceptance and value.
Unfortunately, Nars, the two biggest dispensers of shame are family and religion.
It's sad, isn't it?
It's sad.
And essentially, shame is a lie.
It says you don't measure up.
There's something that's wrong with you.
You need to figure out what that is.
You need to measure up if you're going to be fully accepted and loved.
And because we are made, God wired us to be loved and accepted.
We're made for that.
There's nothing wrong with wanting love and acceptance.
We need love and acceptance.
But because we need it so much, if it is withheld from us, if it is dangled in front of us like a carrot,
that if you'll do these things, then you can be loved and accepted.
Well, that's what shame does to us.
It makes us want to try harder for the short term.
But on the inside, it creates anxiety.
It creates angst and strife.
So for some people, what that shame does, it makes them eventually go,
well, I can't do all this, so I just give up on it and they rebel.
But a whole other group of people, they say,
well, the way that I'll get over this terrible angst that I have is I'll just do more and more and more and more.
And I attended more in that direction.
And to discover the grace of Jesus Christ is to discover a message so freeing
that once you've tasted of it, and what's happened to me, you want everybody to know this.
Absolutely.
You want everyone to know that religions and all the shame that goes with these religious systems
will bind you, will hurt you, and will never, ever, ever set you free.
And so it is.
And when I see people that are bound up in that shame, and I see what happens to children,
and I see the anxiety, and I see the ways in which joy is lost,
a sense of purpose in this world is forfeited, the delight of real relationship with Christ.
When I see that, it's just unbearable to me.
It is.
I'm just going to keep preaching it.
And your ministry does such a wonderful job.
In fact, you're here to do a workshop based on this book for yourself.
Be yourself.
Now, this show will not be shown.
We're taping it, so it won't be shown for a few weeks yet.
But you're doing the workshop right now.
When someone attends your workshop, what can they hope to take away with them from being there?
Well, you know, the first thing that most people take away from it is they're like I was.
And they'll say, I didn't even know this was an issue for me.
And most people that you say, well, do you think you have shame issues?
Most people say no, because it's not something we're aware of.
It was so fascinating to me that I had gone through seminary.
I had been in youth ministry.
I had done clinical partial education.
And I'd been in the ministry for about eight years before I even knew what shame was.
I remember the first time I was talking to a counselor friend,
and I said, what do you think is behind addiction, really?
And he said, I think the root behind it is shame.
I said, what do you mean by that?
Well, he went on to explain to someone what I was just mentioning a few moments ago,
and I thought, I never even heard of this.
So the first thing that happens to people in our workshop is they realize that maybe there is a silent hidden tyrant inside of them
that is dictating, that is ordering their world, and it's this silent shame
of always feeling like I'm under the pressure of having to do more.
And people discover that.
And so people say, I didn't even know I had it.
I didn't even know that.
I didn't know what that was.
And then people say this about the gospel in general, but they discover it's like, I never heard it quite like this.
In our workshops, we just have to choose certain areas.
So we learn about how not just one lie of shame that says, unless you measure up, you can't be accepted.
But if you believe one wrong thought, so many other deceptions can be joined to it, we expose a lot of that.
And so a lot of Christian growth is just replacing one lie with the truth day after day,
being transformed by the renewal of your mind.
Virtually everyone who's raised in a polygamy environment and an escape and to get out,
of course, they will carry this kind of baggage with them because the polygamy and Mormonism itself
does use the shame and the guilt as control features for their members.
But they will bring this baggage out with them and it'll dog them for the rest of their lives
unless they're labeled like you're just talking about.
And part of the baggage too is mistrust.
Mistrust of your religion and definitely mistrust of God simply because all their life,
they've been heard this way of the Lord when it wasn't the Lord who said it.
It was somebody else's agenda saying that it was the Lord's agenda.
And then of course there's parents and churches like you say that withhold love using it as a tool of control.
You said that withholding love, you said this in one of your broadcasts,
that withholding love is not God's way but is Hell's way.
And that's a heavy statement.
Would you please expound a little more on what you mean by that?
And what should those who have been spiritually abused that way do?
And what part does forgiveness hold in the total healing?
Well, let's start with this first statement.
It is a radical statement to say that the withholding of love is the strategy of Hell.
But it is the giving of love that is the strategy of God.
Exactly.
God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.
How did God set out to change the whole world?
Love.
He came to us in love.
How is it that people actually repent, the Bible says, the kindness of God leads to repentance?
Right.
See, people actually change profoundly only when they are loved.
And His love is unconditional.
His love is unconditional.
It's not a control feature on His way.
So God relates to us as the one who loves us infinitely perfectly.
What does perfect love do?
Perfect love casts out fear.
So God wants us as His children to live in a relationship that does not have fear that we would be rejected by Him,
but to come into a certainty through the new covenant of Christ.
So Christ, who died in our place, did for us what we couldn't do for ourselves, died the death that we should have died,
lived the life that we couldn't live, and yet when we accept Christ, we are imputed with the very righteousness of Christ.
So we are, this is what makes the gospel so wonderful, we are perfectly accepted in Christ.
You can't add to a sacrifice.
You can't do one thing more.
You can't do one single thing.
It's not our performance.
It's not our performance.
Jesus has performance.
In what I'm describing is the gospel.
It is exactly opposite of whether it be blatant or subtle in any cult or religious system that is institutionalized and systematizing a process of holding over you the prospect that you're going to be condemned,
that you're not going to be worthy, that you're not going to be accepted.
And that's really what hell does.
And so Jesus in his own lifetime, what was he battling over and over everywhere he would go?
Not just rebellion, but this awful ideology and spirit of religion that is wanting to say,
here's what you must do in order to make yourself acceptable.
It's diabolical.
It is oppressive.
And in the end, it will lead you only into profound angst and despair.
And I can vouch for that as well.
Explain what performance-based living did to you because you've lived this.
I mean, this is an experience that you're talking out of.
And the reason I'm so, one of the reasons I'm so passionate about this is that how subtle it was that I picked up these messages.
I never had anybody in my home saying, oh, Alan, if you don't perform, you're not going to be loved.
Nobody ever said that to me.
Oh, they did to me.
And I wasn't in it.
I just was able by being in the context of a home where the dad who's left and uncertainties and feeling like that always should rise up to a certain standard,
I just breathed it in and realized this became my system of thinking, which is part of what needs to go.
When you are in an abusive environment and it is absolutely lorded over you, how much more so?
But so for me, again, it could have gone in a different direction.
But for me, I thought, well, the key to having people love and accept you is make sure you please them all the time.
You please her, right.
And going on from another message that you gave earlier, explain why performance isn't everything which you've already started to do and why it's not even expected by God.
That's the beauty of it.
The whole beauty of it.
And this is the thing, and I think there are some, even within Christian churches, there are some well-meaning preachers and teachers and parents who think,
if I want my child to really be motivated, I need to withhold a little bit of my love and acceptance or else it'll go to their head, they'll quit trying.
But the fact of the matter is that we do not actually excel in an environment of anxiety.
We actually excel in an environment of faith.
And when we're born into the world, here's God's plan.
You're born into a loving family and as a baby, you can't contribute.
You can't, what can a baby do?
Exactly.
Cry, wet a diaper.
I mean, that's about all you can do.
Your baby just loves you.
Yeah, just loves you.
And what does that love do?
Love builds a sense within that little child that maybe I can trust.
If I'm loved like this, I matter and I can trust.
In other words, faith is born and security is born out of the environment of love.
When faith and security grow and mature, then what happens is we say to ourselves, God has great purposes in my life.
There are many things I can do.
I have gifts.
I matter.
And that kind of child, that kind of human being wants to move forward, wants to excel.
So the Christian life is not a life where we say, oh, because God loves you, therefore,
it doesn't matter what you do with your life.
No, not at all.
Well, that's not what happens.
That's not what happens.
Yeah, and yet, like you say, we're accused of that sometimes.
On the back cover of your book, you've got five problems that you've listed that are resulting from performance-based living.
I want to say each one and then you briefly maybe explain your answer to the problem.
The first one is hypersensitivity.
Why am I so bothered by every criticism?
It was one of the things I noticed in my own life, Doris, was, you know, why could it be, I could preach a sermon and have hundreds of people walk out and say,
bless my life and one person sends you an ugly note and you think only about the ugly note.
What is that within us?
And I know all of us have a little bit of that, but I think that what shame does is it causes us to brood over the criticism
because of the lie that says, if I'm not doing well enough, I won't be accepted.
So even smallest criticisms get generalized and we think, I am being condemned here.
And so something either bothers me a lot or I feel like I have to rise up and protect myself.
I always joke now, my wife could joke about this as well, but I think earlier in our marriage, you know,
trash would sit there, it was my job to take it out, I didn't take it out, and then it would move over in front of the door after that, you know,
and they would say, Alan, the trash needs to go out.
And all she meant was the trash needs to go out.
But I would hear through this filter, you're a bad husband.
Well, if she actually was saying you're a bad husband, we're probably going to have a fight on our hands, aren't we?
But that's not what she was saying.
So I think sometimes what happens for the person who has some shame-based thinking patterns is you hear a criticism,
but to you, it filters right through the shame and it gets generalized to you as a person and it feels crushing,
or it can make you angry, it can make you resentful, it can cause more conflict than there was ever supposed to be.
And there's some where, someone may try so hard to get for a particular project they're doing or whatever it might be,
and they've done their best, I think they've done a wonderful job and then they're criticized from it,
and that just crushes them because they tried so hard to get it so right.
The only way that you can ever be able to take criticism and not be crushed by it and not brood over it is a radical security in Christ.
In Christ, who you are in him, and we'll talk about that a little later.
Okay, the second point is self-doubt.
Why do I always question my abilities and motives?
See, I would find myself sometimes in situations where maybe the Lord had really promoted me to a certain place,
he wanted a certain task or something for me to do, but I always just remember feeling like,
well, I don't know, maybe they should get somebody else for this.
Even if I was God's man for it, why would I feel that way?
Why always doubting myself?
I came to discover it was through the roots of shame-based thinking
because in shame-based thinking, once again, if I have somehow believed a lie that I don't measure up,
then even when you're being used by the Lord, and you know God has put you in this position,
I've taught myself to doubt whether really I am the one for this.
And I think the solution to this is I come to realize, well, it doesn't mean that I'm the best,
it doesn't mean that I was the one who had proved myself worthy of it.
It just means that this is the way God does.
He uses who he wants to use, and he can use me as much as he can use anybody else.
Might as well be me.
Especially when he's the one who equips you for it too.
Exactly.
Okay, the third one is people pleasing.
Why do I have a hard time saying no or facing conflict?
This might be one of my worst problems, and I think a lot of our viewers could identify with this.
The problem that sociologists and psychologists might call boundaries that have become blurred.
Well, for me, it was rooted in if I need to please you to make sure that I'm accepted,
then it's going to be very hard to not wonder if I say no to this.
Does that mean you're going to reject me?
So that was my problem. In the worst cases where people have been abused or molested,
they've been treated like you exist for my satisfaction.
And when you begin to think that way, you begin to think,
I exist in order to please someone else's, meet someone else's needs.
Those boundaries, those lines of which you clearly know what you should say yes to
and what you say no to, they become very blurred.
And there's a lot of healing that needs to happen before you can comfortably say no.
Yes.
And so it's okay to say no, and it's okay not to please all the people all the time.
It's not only okay to not please all the people all the time.
It is imperative not to please everybody all the time.
Because not only will you never be able to, but if we seek to,
then we won't be sensitive really to the actual promptings of the Holy Spirit.
Very true. And also what we care about sometimes when we're in that process is
what's more important is what people think of us rather than our own well-being.
Your own health spiritually, emotionally, even physically can be in danger.
Exactly.
Okay, number four, fear of failure. Why do I feel like I have to be perfect?
And this kind of goes on with, these are building upon each other.
They build upon each other.
And I really think that in the New Testament image of what a stronghold is,
a spiritual stronghold, it is what one writer has called a house of thoughts.
It is where you start with the wrong presupposition and then you build upon it
and you build upon it and you build upon it.
So if I were to believe, which I think was the root of my problems,
that because I'm flawed, I'm less loved, if you believe that foundational lie,
then the next layer of this wall that got built, this figurative stronghold,
is well, I need to close up, hide from people.
I need to be more.
Because think of this, if it were true that I'm less loved because I'm flawed,
I'd want to cover up my flaws and I want to do everything I could to not have any flaws.
That's right.
And so that effort to not let anybody see your flaws and yet try to get rid of all your flaws
is perfectionism that is woven into a horrible place of hiding
because nobody's going to be perfect but that's what causes it.
Absolutely.
And of course that's what religions, they thrive on that kind of doing.
That's what religion does.
Exactly.
And then of course we're afraid of negative judgment.
Somebody's going to judge us in a negative way and then there's those who think they can judge our motives
and we're afraid maybe that they're going to make a misjudgment or a negative judgment or whatever.
So we're living in that kind of fear of well so we can't fail because we can't handle that kind of criticism.
Exactly.
And then the number five is self-sabotage.
Why can't I celebrate my gifts who I am rather than an accept God's blessing?
In shame-based homes there's not a lot of celebration but the kingdom of God is full of celebration.
It is, isn't it?
Look at the image of who God is in the story of what we call the prodigal son who comes home
and the father says we want to kill the fatted calf and we're going to have an unbelievable party.
That's a picture of the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God is compared to a wedding banquet which was the greatest of all celebrations.
In the environment of celebration, children discover that life can be a delight,
that my life is worthy of being celebrated just because I exist.
And in the context of that celebration where there is joy, there is a strength that comes from that.
So in this spiritual battle that we're in, our enemy wants us to have no joy
and so celebration and steals it, so celebration gets muffled.
And I just have discovered in my life the more that shame lifted and the more the gospel of grace comes in,
it brought a spirit of celebration.
I used to think, because I was always lean towards being more of this kind of intellectual type people
and I always thought, well those people that celebrate all the time, they're just not serious enough.
They're spiritual.
And now I realize, no, the joy of the Lord is our strength
and it actually by that means in the spiritual battle for the fervor that we need
and the resolute standing strong in the day of temptation, the joy of the Lord is our strength.
Well and you know in the Old Testament, this surprised me as a new Christian
when I started really digging into the Bible, how many times God told the Israelites in the Old Testament,
ancient Israel, to celebrate and sit and drink and be merry and you know.
They gave them seven feasts a year, spring, summer and fall.
There's going to be some celebration on the way.
All the time and if you can't take your food with you, sell it and buy it when you get there.
Exactly.
Okay, I want to take our conversation now to a little different level or topic.
You're a pastor and you read and you study and you pray over the Bible and you teach it
and you're always, I know from hearing you that you're really on your knees before God
to get a greater or deeper understanding of how to teach it.
I would like to bring up an exclusive question that this culture would thrive on.
From a biblical standpoint, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,
does it establish exclusive relationship between one man and one woman
and is it the authority and the standard for monogamy for all mankind for all time?
Well, absolutely.
And I think that one of the things that you learn as a student of the Bible
is that there's sort of a principle of first things.
First time you see something mentioned in the scripture,
you're going to learn a whole lot about what is going to be consistent
throughout the entirety of the Word of God.
Yes.
And so that God could have chosen so much to tell us about creation and early humanity.
I've often wondered, there are a lot of things I wonder about Adam and Eve.
A lot of questions.
A lot of questions.
But here's what he wanted us to know, that being man by himself as a male gender,
that the creation wasn't complete yet, so he created female.
And that in so doing, he made these two very, very different,
these very different creatures who yet were both equally in his own image,
male and female, and that through these seeming opposites,
he brings about his plan for procreation in the world, productivity,
and he showed us that in this monogamous relationship between one man and one woman,
there is the place for the kind of love that God has for us
within that type of monogamous covenant.
See, in marriage between man and a woman, there is on display
the opportunity for a love that is seated in choice.
So anybody who's been married a long time and been married joyfully and happily
through that knows that you love in a way that the world does not know
in its simply romantic ideas of love.
And you're loving someone different than you, but the same.
But the same.
And so the idea of one man and one woman in a monogamous relationship
is not, despite what the spirit of the age might say, is not restricting.
It is absolutely freeing because I know that I have my wife's love
and she knows she has mine because we're in a covenant that's not going to end
as with each other.
And I ask this question because in, of course, our culture, and I'm from a
polygamy group and they don't believe that that is the standard for monogamy
just because it happens to be there.
But I'm also getting questions from people who are living what they call
Christian polygamy because it's in the Bible.
It's OK.
And we don't make it a requirement for salvation like the Mormons do.
But, and so they question the monogamy that that is not the standard just because
it's there.
It does not necessarily mean it's God's standard.
And so which is why I point not just to, oh, here's like a law that God says,
although he's clearly spit out this is what marriage is.
But to understand that it's not freeing to go into plural marriage
or plural relationships is binding.
You lose more and more and more and more and more and more.
And the more wives you take, of course, the worse it gets for all the parties
involved.
Well, we're almost at the end of our first.
We're going to do two parts on this.
Wonderful.
And I want to thank you very much for coming and sharing.
We're going to talk a little bit more about stuff like this.
Wonderful.
In part two.
Our greatest desire, of course, is to see the spiritual abuse find their way
to deepen total healing.
And because of the nature of their abuse, they often reject the very person
who can heal them.
And of course, that's Jesus Christ.
And they reject him because it was in his name that the damage was done.
Jesus has no part of religious violence, oppression or polygamy.
He proved his love for you on the cross.
And that's the best way to prove it.
See you next time for part two of our interview.
Thank you.
.
