Watch: Caleb’s testimony

Caleb shares how a mismatch in his love language and his parents’ led him to feel that he needed to achieve high standards to receive love. The Holy Spirit set Caleb from this mental bondage by showing him the truth about God’s perfect love. Praise God!

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Video transcript

I would start to find alternative ways to make myself feel better and feel loved when my performance failed to deliver, which led to my second issue in life – porn.

Hi, my name is Caleb. I was brought up in a Christian environment. Both of my parents always put in lots of effort to provide and to take care of the family. With such a good upbringing, I would have thought that there wouldn’t be much major trauma in my family experience.

You know, there isn’t much need for inner healing but little did I know, that that was actually the very area God wanted to touch on.

Around five years ago, I heard about how many of my friends were able to experience tremendous breakthroughs in their relationships with God by inviting the Holy Spirit to search their hearts and help them to set free from sinful patterns, and I wanted to experience something similar too. So, I decided to join them and went through a discipleship course and learn more about the Holy Spirit, as well as many aspects of how we become the people we are today, all the worldly influences, emotional baggage, self-views, self-talk etc.

During a prayer session, the Holy Spirit led some prayer ministers to ask me about my love language – of my parents and also myself. 

For my parents, it would be the acts of service. They always put in so much effort to provide for and to take care of the family. They provided us with a comfortable living, put me and my brother into good schools, you know, always cooking good food for us and always keep the home nice and clean.

But, when I was asked to reflect about my own love language, how I receive love, I realised there is actually a mismatch. My love language is words of affirmation, which means that I experience love when I receive encouragement, words of approval, and loving words verbally, which unfortunately, is not something I heard much growing up.

As a kid, I only received words of affirmation when I performed well. 

So I would try hard to perform in order to earn the praises and the affirmation I craved for. This shaped me to have a performance-based identity. But this mentality also led me to have other issues that I struggled with in life as well.

One of them would be procrastination and the other one would be porn.

For procrastination, my performance-based identity would cause me to set high goals and expectation for myself, but the pressure that comes with these goals can be very overwhelming and insufferable at times. Every time when I wasn’t able to achieve a goal or standard that I set for myself, I would diss myself and beat myself up, telling myself I’m a failure and I’m unworthy. These thoughts can be very daunting because it seems no matter how hard I try, it’s never good enough and I would just end up failing.

Then I would enter into a chronic procrastination mode in order to avoid all the pressure. 

As a result, I would start to find alternative ways to make myself feel better and feel loved when my performance failed to deliver, which led to my second issue in life – porn.

In porn, I would be able to just dwell in the fantasy of being in love, without needing to perform. And scientifically, the sense of love is actually triggered by a hormone called oxytocin.

And for men, oxytocin levels skyrocket particularly during orgasm, which explains why I kept going back to porn to make myself feel loved. 

This all seems to be clear now but at that time during prayer session, it was actually very hard for me to draw the connection between the issues in my life and a sense of feeling unloved, because I was so convinced that my parents love me. What happened is that I had always been using my mind to convince my heart that I am loved, but deep in my heart, actually I didn’t feel that love.

At one point, I was asked to read the famous love passage in 1 Corinthians 13, a passage I thought I was very familiar with and read many times before. But it wasn’t until I was asked to compare the description of love in this passage to my parent’s love, then I start to realise there is actually striking difference between my parents’ love and God’s love.

In 1 Corinthians 13, it says, ”Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

And to my surprise, even though i could understand every single word in this passage, I could not comprehend what this kind of love actually looks like. 

I just know that many of the adjectives here are not how I would describe my parents’ love. And at that moment, I felt so lost. If my parent’s love, which had always been my frame of reference for love in life, is so imperfect; how do I really get to know this biblical love that is described here?

Then someone praying for me mentioned “Jesus has already shown you by what He has done on the cross.” And then she followed up by asking me, “Who is more worthy in God’s eye? Is it Jesus or is it me?”

It seems to be a no-brainer to me at first, of course Jesus is incomparably more worthy than I am.

But, but if God is willing to send Jesus to die for me, what does it really say about my worth? 

I must be equal if not more worthy in God’s eyes for Him to be willing to sacrifice His Son. And understanding this, I was deeply in awe and moved by God’s love for me.

That was such a breakthrough moment for me as I started to tear down the idolisation of my parent’s love, and started to perceive my worth based on how God sees me. Despite their best effort, my parents’ love is still flawed and imperfect when compared to God’s love for me.

From that point onwards, God led me through a journey of healing in the next few years.

He renewed my view of myself based what He says about me in His Word. I also started seeing a Christian counsellor to further address my tendency to suppress my emotions, which is something I discovered through what the Holy Spirit had been showing me.

In the past, I tend to suppress and ignore my emotions, because I thought that, “Oh, emotions only gets in the way of how I would perform.” I have discovered that emotions actually is a key way for God to draw my attention, and reveal His heart towards me. And by rejecting my emotions, I’m also rejecting a core part of myself that God has created.

I started to understand God doesn’t just want me to do things for Him, but He cares so much about my feelings and my desires as well. 

These days, I start to develop a habit to check my emotions from time to time throughout the day. And by identifying with my emotions, I’m able to understand more about what is going on, emotionally and spiritually, how to process my state, and consequently, develop a positive way to respond to whatever state I was in. Especially with negative emotions, in the past I would to avoid it at all cost, trying to distract myself with other activities, so I don’t need to face them. But now, I’ve learnt that facing negative emotions are not as scary as I thought. And going through emotional ups and downs are actually what God wants me to experience and also part of life.

As I start to get to know more about the heart of my Heavenly Father, my identity is also slowly being transformed from being a slave to His son. He is not a God who just wants me to serve Him and who keeps looking at my flaws. But He is a God who accepts all of me, including even my failure and brokenness, even like some of them, I might find hard to even accept myself. But as long as I turn to Him, turn my heart towards Him, I experience His love, His acceptance, and His peace.

Now being more secure in God’s love rather than my performance, I also experience tremendous transformation in the areas I used to struggle in for years. 

I no longer watch porn habitually and am free from chronic procrastination. I also no longer condemn myself when I fail in reaching a certain goal in life. These days, whether in success or failure, I focus more on how I’m experiencing God in whatever I’m doing — especially in the area of career achievement, which used to be an area I put my identity in and a way for me to seek my parent’s and peers’ approval. But now, my concern in work is more about how to live a godly lifestyle. Meanwhile, my office has become my mission field.

I hope my testimony can bring encouragement to all of you, especially those who are still struggling with things that you haven’t break free from, whether it is porn, procrastination or other things. In 1 John 5:4, it says God has already overcome the world and our way to access this victory is through faith.

Trusting that God as being the One who is being faithful and He will lead us toward the victorious path.

And I want to end my sharing with this verse as an encouragement to you.

In 2 Thessalonians 3:3-5, it says “The Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen you and protect you from the evil one. We have the confidence in the Lord that you are doing and will continue to do the things we command. May the Lord direct your hearts into His love and Christ’s perseverance.”

It talks about God being the faithful One and He has promised to strengthen and protect us, even when we are facing the evil one or evil temptation.

And all we need to do is to trust Him as He directs our heart and our steps, then we will surely enter into His love and walk in His righteousness.

Brothers and sisters, this is my prayer for you, that you will experience His love and His victory. And all you need to do is just to follow as God and the Holy Spirit guide you, step-by-step.