Here is a great excerpt from the first part of pastor Rick McKinley’s fantastic new book A Kingdom Called Desire: Confronted by the Love of a Risen King.

“One of the first lessons I learned in church was not to be honest. Of course I did not learn that lesson from the man behind the pulpit, nor did I learn that lesson in the Bible. Instead, like most important lessons, this one came through experience.

A couple of weeks after I started following Christ, I realized two things in my previous life were going to have to go: getting drunk and having sex. At the time, heaven sounded like payday, so I figured my reward for my newfound sobriety and celibacy would be getting back everything I’d have to give up. So in my exuberant ignorance, I asked the college pastor if heaven was like the greatest party ever, with all the drinking and sex you could imagine.

My frame of reference was clearly rooted in my understanding of pleasure and rewards and the hopes and dreams of an eightenn year old boy-man. The only experience of ecstasy I had ever had that resembled anything of the ecstasy waiting for me in heaven was getting drunk and having sex.

I honestly think that is how most eighteen year old boys think, raised in the church or not. But the college pastor looked at me in horror as if I had trampled on something sacred and defiled something holy. He was right to think that. Drunken orgies in heaven would be unholy and quite defiling of something sacred. Yet the desire I had for an eternity of ecstasy was in fact legitimate. I had experienced ecstasy as something momentary (and painful the next morning), but I longed for something better, something lasting and life-giving.

Through that experience I learned that honest questions developed from limited life experience were frowned upon, at best and better left unspoken. An honest question – horrific as it was to my friend’s holy ears, though spoken in innocence – created a reaction that made me feel like a stupid person asking a stupid question. So I quit asking questions. I muted my rage, repressed my desire, and learned – don’t be honest here.

I later found out that there were several men in the church that I respected and had been taught by who had been living out the dreams of my eighteen year old passions – only not with their wives. In fact they hid behind a string of lies. But given the first rule of religious living that I’m quite sure they learned as young children growing up in church – which is don’t be honest – they just waited for everything to implode so they could crawl away from their respective disasters in shame.”