God Loves Addicts, This I Know - God's Word and the Road to Recovery

It’s Not That Serious, It’s Just Your Life

 

Addiction is a cruel taskmaster. It strips people of dignity and self-respect; it steals time and money; it ruins careers, and it destroys families. Those of us who suffer from addiction have had to carry the tremendous burden of self-inflicted guilt and shame as well. The truth of the Apostle Paul’s words ring both true and harsh to us: “For that which I am doing I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.”1

Addiction has killed countless people through the ages, including millions who reached the point of wishing they were dead long before their physical lives were ended prematurely. But it is hardly just addiction to drugs and alcohol that are so dangerous to us as believers in Christ, though those things tend to get the most attention. Anger, for example, brings with it a surge of self-righteousness that can be as addictive as nicotine or cocaine. So does controlling—exercising power over—other people. Sex is widely recognized for its power to ensnare us, body and mind. Body image. Gambling. Anxiety. Pornography. Eating disorders. It’s a long, sad list of idols, the things which we are prone to place on the throne of our lives in place of God.

All of those things have this much in common: they are all sinful in God’s eyes, and dangerous—even deadly—for us, His children. There are sins to which we are addicted that we can dress up and make socially acceptable. Career ambition and the desire to build a secure lifestyle for our families are certainly not wrong in and of themselves, and work itself is a gift from God.2 But when we become prideful of our accomplishments and put our security in the things we own rather than Whose child we are, we have made an idol of success. And we bow down to that idol and worship it by working a hundred hours a week so we can have the best and newest toys. And our hearts, like our family connections and our relationship with our Lord, wither.

Our children are gifts from the hand of God, and along with the blessing of the joy they bring us comes the divine responsibility of raising them well, protecting them, preparing them for life, and instilling in them the instruction of the Lord. But when our love becomes control and we find our self-worth in the image of us that our children project to the world, we have made them, too, into idols. Highly addictive idols.

The words addiction and addict are highly charged and bring with them very negative connotations—no one, after all, wants to think of themselves as an addict. And for some things it’s hard to tell the difference between a bad habit and an addiction. There’s no magic number or line we can identify that tells us the difference between someone who drinks too much on occasion and a true alcoholic; between having poor dietary habits and gluttony or anorexia. Yes, there are psychological markers and arbitrary labels that may be applied to these things and many others, but the root of addiction lies in our hearts, and anything or anyone we have placed on the throne of our hearts that is not God is an idol, a false god. And those false gods enslave us, without discrimination based upon our age, race, education, gender, nationality, net worth, or any other demographic.

How, then, can we know if we suffer from addiction? Solomon told us long ago: “Let us examine and probe our ways, and let us return to the Lord.”3 It takes some prayerful reflection sometimes for us to be truly convinced—convicted by the Spirit of God—that we have an addiction problem. The people around us may be a barometer for us as well. If people have mentioned our indulgence in some activity—smoking, gambling, gossiping, shopping, whatever—using words like obsessed, too much, or all the time, those things are at least candidates for us to consider as possible addictions.

On the other hand, there are things in our lives that we try to keep from becoming common knowledge about us. Infidelity. Overspending. Drinking alone. Pornography. It’s a pretty safe bet that if we’re trying to hide some activity from friends or family that it’s a problem of some variety. Prayerful consideration can be a bright light to shine on the darkness in our hearts: “Examine me, O, Lord, and try me; test my mind and my heart.”4

That said, we would be foolish to ignore the power of one of the greatest gifts God has given us: each other. If we are worried we might have an addiction problem, talking it through with someone who loves us enough to tell us the truth after we have shared our concerns with them can be invaluable.

What do we do if we decide we really do have an addiction problem? For one thing, keep reading. This book does not contain vast stores of complex intellectual solutions for our addiction problem, for the very simple reason that such problems are not matters of intellect. Addiction cannot be overcome with microbiology, economics, philosophy, or complex polynomials, because addiction is primarily a matter of the heart. That’s why the word and the Spirit of God are what sufferers of addiction need first and foremost.

To be clear: people in the early stages of stopping their abuse of chemicals, including alcohol, may need medical treatment. Failing to get such treatment can be dangerous. Also, there are psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, and therapists whose help in the recovery process can be priceless. We would do well to take advantage of such resources if we are in need of them and they are suggested to us by recovery professionals. Some of us may benefit greatly from prescription medications in our recovery journeys, and ought not shy away from them if recommended to us by medical experts. There is no shame at all for needing and using any and all of these resources. Of course, if we have struggled with abusing prescription medications, full disclosure of our concerns regarding addiction with our medical professional would always be in our best interest.

There are other resources that can be powerful tools in our struggle with addiction, including recovery groups. Many of these groups take the position that they are spiritual, not religious, in nature. This idea immediately dumps us into the boiling cauldron of controversy. Some Bible-believing Christians say such groups heretically demean a relationship with Christ and to join them is akin to being unequally yoked in marriage to an unbeliever. Others would cite the virtues of Bentham’s felicific calculus, claiming in most utilitarian fashion that since many more people pursue and find recovery in these groups compared to their overtly Christian counterparts that they must be superior.

Here we recognize that while they may not give credit to Christ or the Bible, most recovery groups in the US and other countries use some version of the Twelve Steps of recovery, which are themselves rooted in older recovery programs that were openly based on biblical teachings. As such, their instruction can be highly powerful to anyone struggling with addiction, Christian or not. It is our responsibility as believers in Christ to temper what we learn from any source with biblical wisdom. The root of each of the Twelve Steps is humility, a virtue valued highly by Jesus.5 And as for whether a believer ought to attend only “spiritual” groups, only those bearing the name of Christ, some combination thereof, or none at all, our suggestion comes from Paul’s writings about worship:

 

“One man regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Let each man be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day observes it for the Lord, and he who eats does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not, and gives thanks to the Lord.”6

 

In other words, all of us must make this decision in good conscience as we have prayerfully sought God’s direction in the matter.

The intent here is to provide insight concerning what God tells us about how to find healing from and victory over addiction. When we put anything or anyone ahead of God, we are choosing to sin. The Bible’s teachings on this matter are not just about recognizing and avoiding sin, but about seeing our hearts as the battlefield where we must either fight with and for the righteousness of God every day or surrender to the desires of our flesh. Either choice has important consequences for us and for those around us; those we love most.

Aside from humility, God’s word has much more specific instruction that is powerful medicine for those of us suffering from the disease of addiction. The grace of God is both beautiful and amazing. Addiction sufferers may have a lifetime of guilt over how we harmed ourselves, our loved ones, and how we disobeyed God in the depths of our sickness. We may carry backbreaking burdens of guilt and shame for how we acted in our addiction; both that which others have assigned to us and also that of our own creation. What we must recognize is the truth that God’s word makes clear for us: His grace is more than sufficient to remove from us all the guilt and shame in the world, if only we will accept it.

Refusing to forgive ourselves is another barrier that some Christians must overcome as they begin, or even years into, recovery. We may believe that we should be better than to have acted the way we did, to have sinned our way into addiction. Our Savior, we must remember, came that we might have life and have it abundantly,7 and that we ought forgive as He has forgiven us.8 If we refuse to forgive anyone—including...