"Set Free" by Shawn Boonstra

[olger]

I heard this a couple years ago and thought it was really good. It reminds me how God can deliver each of us from darkness by His grace.

June 4, 2006

Set Free

Production No. 1067

Speaker: SHAWN BOONSTRA

*For more information on this topic, please visit www.victorjadamson.com

Today, we have a very special program on It Is Written, and it deals with one of the biggest debates in American society today. I think it’s going to prove to be one of the most important shows we’ve done in a long time, because it will offer hope to many people that may have given up on finding answers to the challenges they are faced with. And I think you’re really going to want to stay tuned—because today, we are going to open the Bible and look at the issue of same-sex attraction very honestly and very compassionately.

When I was a kid, the issues of same-sex attraction and the gay lifestyle were something nobody talked about. It was still in the closet not that many years ago. But today, it has become one of the hottest issues in North American society. In my home country, Canada, gay marriage has already been legislated and is quickly becoming part of mainstream life. Here in the United States, the debate is still raging.

And of course, it becomes a distinctly religious debate when you factor in the Christian church’s traditional stand against homosexuality. Some people are saying that there is a “gay gene”—something in your genetic makeup that doesn’t give you a choice. Others are saying it is learned behavior—more a matter of the environment you grew up in.

What makes the debate important, of course, is the question of God’s character. If being gay is a matter of genetics, why would God allow people to be born with a condition that is condemned in the Bible? And if it’s not genetic, does God expect the homosexual to come out of that lifestyle?

Well, those are all important questions, and to help me answer them from the Bible today is my good friend Ron, a man who knows this issue well, because for a good part of his adult life, he was a member of the homosexual community, and today he is a committed Christian who loves God with all his heart.

SHAWN: Ron—I’m just thrilled that you’re with us today on It Is Written.

RON: Well, I’m really honored that you invited me to be here.

SHAWN: Ron, over the past months, you and I have become good friends, and it has occurred to me that I don’t know anybody who is better qualified from a biblical perspective, at least, to discuss the issues that we are going to talk about today. When you and I met, one of the things that really made me curious was this fact that you claim to be an ex-homosexual. How is that possible?

RON: Well, as a Bible-believing Christian, I have to accept that it is possible. From my own experience, I know it is true. I spent many years in the gay lifestyle. You mentioned that I’m in ministry, and yes, for the last 14 years, I have been in full-time ministry—a full spectrum ministry. And I have to say that I never want it to be known as a one-issue ministry. Especially this issue.

And for the first nine or 10 years of my ministry I never dealt with this issue, because I was ashamed of dealing with my past. It was not something that I felt comfortable talking about. But I think the Lord had His hand over that for a reason. He wanted me to have years of experience as a Christian—as a born-again person with a new life, with a family, with a full-spectrum ministry—that would establish credibility to then talk about it years later.

Had I come on your program 14 years ago, one year after my conversion, no one would have found me credible.

SHAWN: Right, OK.

RON: Because the thinking is that, yes, people accept the Lord and they come out of homosexuality all of the time, but within two years, they are back in it. And so, I believe the Lord wanted me to establish credibility by walking with Him for a distance—you know, like John the Baptist counseled the people coming to him, “Bring forth fruit, meat for repentance.” And that had to be established.

SHAWN: I think there is some wisdom in that. Now Ron, you have had that new life that you just spoke about for the last 14 years. You’ve been walking with God; you help others find Jesus Christ.

In a nutshell, tell us a little bit how it is that God reached you and how God changed your life and gave you that new life.

RON: Well, for 16 years of my youth and adulthood, I was living a life of self-destruction and degradation steeped in the life of homosexuality. People—critics today—try to tell me that I was really never gay because I had been married and I had children and therefore I was bisexual and it was maybe easy for me to switch to the other side.

But anyone who knew me in Southern California 14 years ago and 16 years prior to that, would never have made that assumption about my life. I was steeped in that life. It is not something I’m proud of. And it’s still not easy to talk about.

SHAWN: Understandably, sure.

RON: But, I didn’t know. I guess all of my life I felt that I was different. From my earliest memories, I had fantasies and sexual attractions towards men and as I think about that now, I realize—what child should have any sexual fantasies or attractions, period?

So there had to be something that created in me this drive and this life of fantasy as a four-year-old child.

SHAWN: That does seem particularly young to me to be thinking about the subject at all.

RON: Well, as I have reviewed my life and gone back to try to find where I was derailed, I went back as far as I could remember. I even remember being in a baby crib and watching my mother through the railing and bars of a baby crib…but I reviewed my life and then some ugly things began to surface.

And I remembered how my innocence was taken from me as a four-year-old child by a farmhand—I was introduced to sexual behavior, and it was perverted. Well, what four-year-old child knows how to deal with that?

SHAWN: None.

RON: And so, typical for people who are victimized, they generally look at themselves as the guilty party. And as a four-year-old, I felt responsible, I felt guilty, I felt dirty and I didn’t go tattle to mommy and daddy. I internalized.

SHAWN: Now, that is an important point, because it seems to me that most children wouldn’t go tattle to mommy and daddy. They don’t know how to deal with it or process it. And so, Ron, I would imagine that is true for a lot of kids.

RON: I think so. And because I internalized that, I had no way to deal with it and my mind couldn’t cope with what had happened. I had nothing to work with. And so I just suppressed it. But yet it was in my mind every day for many, many years, as though it had happened the day before.

Well, anyway, I trace my orientation, to begin with and there were other factors—that is not the only factor, there are many factors, I think, that led me in that direction. But I was a spiritual child, growing up. I wanted to be a Christian, I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to be approved of, I wanted to be loved. And I did all kinds of things to meet that in my life. I also did all kinds of things to meet the approval of my parents, especially my father who disapproved, ridiculed and teased me because as I was growing up, I was different.

And I really think I was different because I was dealing with an emotional problem I didn’t know how to cope with. As a child, when a young boy is victimized in that way (and this is the way I began to rationalize things) there must be something about me that is different, that would give that person the idea that he could do this. He didn’t approach my brothers. He didn’t approach my father. So something had to be different about me, so I started doubting my manhood from early childhood.

SHAWN: So you took the criticisms—I mean, you already had an issue that you were dealing with that was unspoken, you didn’t know how to deal with it, but you started to validate people’s criticisms saying, it’s got to be me, there must be something about ME that is leading to this.

RON: Yes, that is correct, because my brothers began to refer to me as a sissy. I played the piano. I took up things that were more of a gentle nature. I wasn’t a rough, rowdy, football-playing, baseball-playing kid. But there were these types of factors that encouraged them to refer to me as being different.

I grew up feeling that way, but it was all internalized. And I never spoke about it. I put on a facade, a front, and I lived as a perfectly normal child as far as possible. No one thought of me as homosexual as a child. But as I grew older and entered into puberty and the teenage years, I had other encounters where I was victimized.

SHAWN: Sure.

RON: And it just continued to perpetuate this problem in my own thinking. When I went through school, I wanted to be successful and I studied very hard to make good grades, to be at the top of the class, and to excel in anything that I tackled. I went on to college and did the same thing. I spent time in the service. I spent time as a student missionary overseas in Korea and in Thailand. I came back to America. I married one of the (female) student missionaries I worked with. At that point, I was feeling my problem, which was mental at this point—but I hadn’t overtly acted out anything.

I was having a mental struggle. And I came to the conclusion that maybe it was just a problem that could be settled and dealt with through marriage. That would be the solution. Well, I know now (and you know now) that marriage is not the solution, Jesus is the solution.

SHAWN: Of course, yes.

RON: But I used marriage to solve my issues. It was a very unfair thing to do to a woman.

SHAWN: So you actually went into your marriage experience, knowing there was an issue, knowing there was a struggle and I guess you were hoping you’d wash away the struggle by just doing something else. It reminds me of how a lot of people deal with a struggle in their life by trying to pave over it by doing the opposite or by doing something to try and fix it, but that doesn’t end the struggle.

RON: No, it doesn’t. I thought marriage would be the solution and I even decided that it was the solution for a little while. But it didn’t take very long for me to realize, I really had a problem. And this problem, of course, was all in my mind. As I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t acting out anything, but I had this mental struggle.

Eventually, I did fall into that lifestyle. I threw away everything. I had graduated from college with a degree in theology. I wanted to be a medical missionary. I turned down a call in the ministry because I felt so hypocritical. Not because of anything that I had done, but because of the struggle going on in my mind.

SHAWN: Sure.

RON: Shortly after I turned down that call, I actually fell and plummeted into that life. I destroyed my family and my marriage, and lost my hold on God, turned my back on Him and my family and the church and everything I knew and went into a foreign country as a prodigal.

SHAWN: Right.

RON: Literally. I went into, not a different country, but far away from home. And for the next 16 years I blamed God for everything wrong in my life because He had made me that way.

SHAWN: I think that is a very important point. Because one thing that I have heard a lot as I discuss issues with people in the homosexual community is, “God made me like this,” and there is an anger against God and against religion, because they think, “Hey, I’m like this, God did this.” So you’re saying, you experienced the same thing. Your anger was directed at God. There was a struggle going on and you were saying, “God, you did this. Why did you make me like this?”

RON: Yes, I believed that it was God’s fault because I was a spiritual person and I had prayed for years that God would deliver me from this temptation. I prayed during my marriage that God would save my marriage and that He would help me to love my wife and be in love with my wife and be faithful to my wife and to my family. I did not want to be a sinner. And then there were counselors and pastors and psychiatrists who, when we were going through our separation, preparing for divorce, advised that my wife just divorce me and get on with her life. Because, they said, people like me cannot be changed.

So there was that negative reinforcement. As I went into the world, I felt that I was rightfully blaming God because He could help anyone but the likes of me. I was the one type of person that proved Him to be impotent rather than omnipotent. He could help other sinners, but He could not help me. If I could not be changed, then it had to be His fault.

SHAWN: So, God’s doors of mercy were open for murderers and for thieves and for adulterers and liars, but closed to you. You were the one exception at that point, in your mind. You thought, “I am the one thing God can’t help.”

RON: Well, this is one thing that really turned me against the church.

SHAWN: OK.

RON: Because it was church people that were saying this.

SHAWN: Right.

RON: And I felt that if they believed this, being professors and teachers, then it must be true. And so I was very angry and very bitter with God. I spent the next 16 years with that attitude in the world. There were many efforts on the part of my parents and family and friends to reach out to me. But I was one of those people who cannot be reasoned with, because I was the one who had the degree in theology, not them.

SHAWN: Sure.

RON: So there was nothing they could bring up that I didn’t have an answer for, maybe a smart answer for. I would go through the list of choices. I had made all these right choices, all my life, school and spirituality and marriage and theology and mission work. And even having Christian babies, you know. And still, I was who I was.

And so there was nothing that they could say to me. I wouldn’t read anything. I wouldn’t watch anything. I wouldn’t listen to anything they had to say. And so these people (my parents, mainly) were very limited in how they could reach out to me. So they did two things, which I think are vitally important for anyone reading this script today who are in the same situation my parents found themselves in. They loved me unconditionally.

SHAWN: Yes.

RON: They showed that love and they prayed without ceasing. They involved themselves in intercessory prayer and they prayed that the Lord would do whatever it took. And the Lord answered that prayer.

SHAWN: That is kind of a frightening prayer to pray sometimes, because we are giving up our loved ones to whatever the Lord needs to do to get their attention. And the Lord can sometimes speak to us in a dramatic fashion. So your parents were praying. Praise the Lord that you had people praying. And Ron, how did you find Jesus? How did it happen?

RON: Well, this is really quite a long story and I just have to tell it in a nutshell and I might just say at this point that my story has been published in a book.

SHAWN: Fantastic. Can you give us the name of that book?

RON: It’s called, “That Kind Can Never Change. Can They?”

SHAWN: Now, it is very interesting. It doesn’t have your real name on the front of it. You have an interesting name on the cover and I understand there is a bit of a story behind that.

RON: Yes, I was asked to write my story as a resource for the church because it was a unique story, it was my story, and it demonstrated the power of God.

My pet theme or motto is that our God is mighty to save, the “whosoevers” from “whatsoever,” even to the uttermost. And so when I was asked to write the book, I had to take it to a publisher, not a denominational publisher and they asked me to use a pen name for my protection. And I asked, “Why is that?” They said, “Well, we had an author write on this very same subject not too long ago and the militant gay community tracked him down and burned his house to the ground. And they blockaded some of his meetings in the church and they were very vicious. We want to protect you.”

So I spent more time coming up with a name than I did writing the book, because I wanted the name to have a message. So the author pen name is Victor J. Adamson.

SHAWN: Now, tell me what that means and then tell me how Jesus gave you that name.

RON: Well, Victor J. Adamson—the very name Victor is a name of positive reinforcement. I like to say that Jesus has promised to give us a new name.

SHAWN: Yes, He has.

RON: That new name is based upon our experience and our character. And I hope He likes this one. But if He doesn’t, I’m open for a better one.

SHAWN: Absolutely.

RON: You know, in going to certain counseling groups or being invited to some of them, I was disappointed to find that we had to stand up and say, “Hello, my name is so and so and I am a homosexual or I am a drug addict or I’m a recovering alcoholic.”

And I thought, “Wait a minute, where is the victory? My Bible says that when Jesus sets you free, He sets you free indeed.” And so that was part of the reason for choosing the name because it is a positive reinforcement. And I have been on radio talk shows around the country for several years. They all refer to me as Victor.

And this is very positive reinforcement.

SHAWN: What about the “J.”

RON: “J” just sounded good as a middle initial, but as you look at it, it also stands for “victory in Jesus.” When it comes to “Adamson,” Jesus was the Son of man—His favorite term for Himself was the Son of Man. He wanted to identify with us as humans. Yes, He is and was the Son of God. But what was so important to me was that He was the Son of Man as well, and I’ll tell you why. Because, the Bible tells us that Jesus was tempted in all points like as me—yet without sin, and I had to come to the place where I accepted that Jesus understood me. And I read in Hebrews that He was tempted in all points like as me, and that He even resisted unto blood.

And I felt like such a wimp with my own experience because I had thrown in the towel because Jesus had not delivered me from temptation.

I felt that I was who I was because of my temptations and Jesus had not set me free from that temptation and so I gave up. And then I realized through the study of God’s Word that if temptation were to define who we are, then the Apostle Paul would not have been the chief of sinners.

Because the Apostle Paul was not tempted in all points like as we are. And Jesus was. And no one would dare say that Jesus was a sinner or a murderer or an adulterer or all of those things, yet the Bible says He was tempted in all points like we are.

And as I came to grips with that reality, I remember thinking, “I can trust this Man with my life and my salvation. He will not let me down. My acceptance of Him, my new birth, will not be an exercise in futility.”

SHAWN: So you found Jesus. You found victory in Him. This is not a struggle. You are not fighting now to change your orientation—you are trusting Jesus Christ. You are relied on Him. Am I hearing you right?

RON: Not entirely. There was a great struggle involved. It was a cooperative effort. Yet I could not make that struggle without depending totally upon Jesus Christ and trusting Him to see me through. The text of Scripture that I rely on so much is Second Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold all things are become new.”

And I believe this to mean that when we’re born again, we develop new tastes and new tendencies and new motives that in genuine conversion results in those things, and that we are to overcome every inherited and cultivated tendency to wrong.

SHAWN: So, that verse says, we can be new creatures. We are not the old creature, still struggling with a homosexual attraction. We are somebody new. Jesus gives us a brand new life.

Ron, I believe that somebody reading this script right now is struggling with the very same things you struggled with. And I know we don’t have much time left, but what would you say to that person who is struggling with a same-sex attraction and doesn’t want that attraction, but doesn’t know where to turn?

RON: I would say, turn to Jesus. And don’t confuse temptation with sin. Satan will make sure that you are tempted, but you can overcome and Jesus will give you that strength. He says, “My grace is sufficient.” And grace is divine strength and divine power that then reflects in the life.

SHAWN: Ron, I know that our time is really short today, but we are going to have a few more programs this month that deal with these issues. We will have the opportunity to open the Word of God and look at some of the issues that are being debated in the public arena right now.

I can’t thank you enough for joining us on It Is Written today. And I look forward to our further discussions.

RON: And thank you for having me.

SHAWN: Now, listen, I know that a lot of you watching today are struggling with something. Maybe it’s not a same-sex attraction, but it’s something else that you wish would go away, because you are not convinced it’s the right thing for you.

I want to tell you today that God cares deeply about you, and He knows what you are struggling with. And the good news is that you can be free. Never forget what He promises in that passage in First Corinthians 10, verse 13: (1 Corinthians 10:13)

“There has no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that you are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

Ron, I know that somebody listening today understands what you’re talking about. They have the very same struggles in their life. They long to be set free. They are looking for a new life. They’re not sure where to turn. I would love it, if for a few moments, you would pray for that viewer who is watching.

PRAYER:

Our Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity that we have to share the power of God to save the “whosoevers” from “whatsoever,” even to the uttermost. We know that there are those who are struggling with the besetting sin of many different kinds. But we know that we are serving you, an awesome God whose grace has promised to be sufficient and Jesus came to save His people from their sins and we commit these people to your keeping and ask that you will bless them with your Holy Spirit, leading them ever closer to you through the power in your word. In Jesus’ name, we pray, Amen.

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”

—2 Corinthians 5:17

“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

—1 Corinthians 10:13

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olger

[Stan]

We interviewed Ron here under his other name.

http://clubadventist.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/forums/270/1/Interview_with_Pastor_Woolsey.html

[olger]

I do remember that, now that you mention it.

Excellent,

g

[GreatLakesGramma]

I have met him. He was at our campmeeting a few years ago.

[phkrause]

I remember that interview also, it was pretty good. Thanks for the post Olger.

pk