Be Ye Transformed

The following is a submission from an online naturist friend who goes by “South West Wil”. Thanks, Wil, for sharing it with us!

Imagine you grew up on a fairly large island.  On that island were dogs, but all of the dogs were very large and very aggressive.  This was back in the day before travel was so commonplace, so your island was pretty much isolated from the rest of the world.  A good example of this could be if you were an Aborigine in Australia before the Europeans arrived.

All your life, you had been told by your friends, family, tribal leaders, holy men, etc. that all dogs were bad.  You had even witnessed one of these dogs attacking a small child and so your mind was settled. All dogs are mean, aggressive, bad.  Any time you and your friends were together, whenever they told a story in which they needed a reference for something that was bad, mean, aggressive, a dog was usually used for the reference.

Now picture the Europeans arriving.  Once your village learned how to converse with these people with the strange pale skin, the subject of dogs eventually came up.  In your mind, they were surely talking about something bad but they seemed enamored with dogs, and talked about them fondly, even of touching them, holding them, rubbing them, sleeping with them. Not only that, but they talked about these dogs having humanlike qualities like love and excitement and bonding with humans. Not only did the dogs exhibit humanlike emotions and behaviors, but they also had unconditional love for the humans they lived with, something that was far superior to the kind of love most humans are known for.  

“Hogwash,” or whatever the Aboriginal equivalent would be. You know from all your elders and friends and even your own experience that dogs are nothing like this, and yet the strange colored people that arrived on boats keep trying to convince you of this.  

Now think for a minute how our culture, our pastors, teacher, parents, extended family, basically everyone, has drilled into all of us that the naked body is bad.  After all, naked, except for bathing, is always about sex.  The only exposure you have ever had to naked humans was watching porn, watching sex scenes in movies, or having sex with someone.  It seems to make sense that “nudity equals sex,” is an accurate statement.

Since you are a Christian, you feel sure that your bible condemns nakedness in public. Your pastors, teachers, parents, etc. have always told you this so it must be true.  So when you run across the term, “Christian Nudism,” you scoff. “That’s just sinful people trying to justify their actions,” you say to yourself.  A Christian and a Nudist are just about as far apart as you can get… an oxymoron.  You continue with this feeling knowing that you are right, without ever questioning it further.

Then one day, you stumble across a website that talks about men, (and even women) overcoming their addiction to porn, completely and totally.  Again you scoff. You know from first hand experience that no matter how hard you have tried, no matter how much you have prayed for God to take away your lusting and porn addiction, no matter how many tools the church, Christian books, other Christians told you about, nothing has worked. Instead, the church as well as our society has taught you that you are not to blame for these addictions. It is just the way men are wired. There is nothing you can do about it except keep trying and trying and trying…..   And yet like a dog returns to it’s vomit, you keep returning to your addictions.  

On top of this preposterous claim, the website also makes allusions to Christian Naturism.  What is that?  You research and find out that naturism is basically nudism, but has a lot more positive qualities associated with it. Your research reveals that with nudism, the idea is more about just wanting to be naked whereas with naturism, there are a lot more positive vibes associated with it such as enjoyment of nature.  This enjoyment of nature includes all of Gods creation, including the human body which was created in God’s image .  

Regardless of these descriptions you have found, you are not convinced.  You believe that surely if these “Christian Naturists” were to research it, they would find out that any kind of public nudity is condemned in the bible as a sin.

Your first inclination is to just disregard the website as absurd.  You know firsthand, as well as from what everyone, both Christians and non-Christians, has told you, that you can’t truly beat these sinful addictions, so you just have to do the best you can to struggle along.  And trying to drag Christian Naturism into the equation….  Well, you know better than getting mixed up with that. 

You x out of the website and move on to the next task you had to do for the day.  By the end of the day, however, you find yourself perusing your common porn sites.  When you find that you have again spent hours in the vomit, you come to your senses (again) and cry out in desperation, “OH MY GOD.  PLEASE HELP ME!!!”    

In the back of your mind you remembered the website you found earlier.  “Surely that is just some weird cult or something that Satan has put online to drag people away from God’s truth about nudity.  But in the back of your mind, you wanted to know more about what the website had to say.

After a few days of putting up with the stone in your shoe that this website had placed there, you decided you wanted to know more. “Maybe I should just go take a look at the site to see what they say,” you think to yourself.  “Now, where did I run across that website?”

You think and think but can’t remember the name of the website. Something about the Garden of Eden, but it wasn’t exactly that.  

Then you finally come out of your brain fog and realize you should just check your website history.  As you scroll down through seemingly hundreds, possibly even thousands of porn links, you finally arrive at it.  Aching for Eden.  Your excitement grows, but still, in the back of your mind, you are skeptical.  

When you click the link in your history that you had discovered initially, it took you to an article titled, “In the Beginning.”  This article was written by the wife of Phil, who created the website.  In the article she explained how she had been aware that like many men, her husband, who was a Christian minister, had always struggled with porn.  This is a huge issue with men, even Christian men.  She also said she thought it was just the way men are and he was trying as best as he could to beat it.  

One day, he had come to her with a confession. She was worried that it was infidelity, but it turned out that he confessed to her he was a Naturist and was a member of an online community of Christian Naturists.  Her world was turned upside down, and she wasn’t sure what to do. 

Her husband went on to tell her that he had been healed of his porn addiction thanks to a couple websites. After she had some time to think about it, she realized a few things.  She had noticed a definite difference in him the last few months, and she did like the new man he seemed to have become.  She therefore started to do some research and found that the Bible NEVER condemns simple public nudity.  There are also verses that seemed to make it clear that God is not opposed to public nudity.

After reading this article, you are hooked.  You devour the rest of the articles within just a few days.  You then start doing some of your own research.  What you found was that there are actually many examples where public nudity was mentioned in the bible with absolutely no condemnation.  And there were also prophets, kings, etc. who were naked in public with no condemnation from God.  One prophet (Isaiah) was actually commanded by God to strip naked for 3 years and prophesy to the people.  Surely God would not force someone to sin. Surely you have been misled by your culture, your well-meaning parents and pastors and teachers.  

The Aching for Eden website mentioned two more websites as being very instrumental in conquering porn addiction. They were Naked and Unashamed, and My Chains are Gone. 

Friends, this is my story, at least after the part about the Australian Dingoes.  Not only did I devour the articles in Aching for Eden, but I did the same with Naked and Unashamed.  Then I went to My Chains are Gone and the result is that I have had a heart change and a mind change.  

The Bible says, “And be not conformed to this world:  But be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”  -Romans 12:2.

I had been conforming to the worldly view that naked equals shame, naked equals lust, naked equals sin.  What I found is that if you change your mindset and your heart, and realize that the human is made in the holy image of God, you CAN NOT objectify it.  You CAN NOT abuse it for your personal pleasure, whether that is about direct pleasure or indirect pleasure. (Direct pleasure such as a prostitute or some other persons spouse, or some other form of non-marital sex and  indirect pleasure such as contributing to Satan’s domain of exploiting men and mostly women through pornography.)

Praise God, I, too, can say that my chains are gone.  I no longer suffer from these addictions.  Since I felt the release of the addictions of lust and porn, I can not begin to explain my joy.  My mind and my heart have been renewed, and I praise God for freedom from the chains of hell.  I will never go back to the pit of filth that I finally escaped from.