How to Win, part 1 - Recognize the Roots

How do you beat an addiction?

First, and most important… recognize the struggle is spiritual. If you don’t know what game you’re playing, you will lose pretty much every time. You’ve got to know the game, the rules, the techniques, especially to play in the big leagues. And when we head into the area of addiction, we’re on spiritual territory, not just physical or emotional or psychological.

There are two huge implications to that fact. The first is that what you are dealing with is sin. It is wrong. This is not merely a disease, not just a weakness. This is sin. This is something that offends a holy God. That’s true of any addiction, I think – we should not be brought under the power of anything but Him. Our wills should belong to Him, to be exercised in accord with what He wants.

While there are physical, emotional, and psychological elements to any addiction, and probably to any sin, ultimately, the fight is not just of the body, feelings, or thinking. It is spiritual. That addiction to alcohol, drugs, or porn is a sin, and if you’re going to beat it, you must recognize it for what it is. So long as it gets whitewashed, renamed, minimized, and justified, it will never be defeated.

I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a lot I don’t know about the physiological element to withdrawal symptoms for a lot of drugs. I’m not a doctor, and I’d probably get tongue-tied if I played one on TV. But I do know that the real fight over whether a person goes back to an addiction is spiritual.

Since it is spiritual, you can’t beat it without Jesus Christ. Even if you beat the substance or the behavior you were trying to change, you just get mired in self-sufficiency and pride, which can have worse eternal effects than any drug.

Since it is spiritual, you can have victory in Jesus Christ. He died for that sin, and when He rose from the dead, He proved He beat it. You can’t beat sin on your own – but you don’t have to. Once you realize that - that you can’t do it, but Jesus Christ already did - you’re finally in a position to really begin to win. Faith in Jesus Christ isn’t just the only way to go to heaven (John 14:6 - “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the father, but by me”) - it’s the only way to real and lasting freedom and victory in this life.

Once you’ve trusted Him to save you, you don’t have to defeat that sin, because you died to it in Him, and you’re risen to walk with Him in newness of life (Romans 6). The whole process of getting freedom from addiction starts with the realization that in Christ you are already free. The shackles have been broken and trampled beneath His feet. Any victory you get is something He won.

For some people, this simple realization is all it takes. The battle is in the mind, and once they really believe the sin they fight was already defeated by Jesus Christ, they can just walk away from the battle and never struggle with the temptation again. Many just ask God to take away the desire for the sin (and some don't even ask), and He does. They never struggle with it again.

Maybe their faith is greater than mine, because I wasn’t like that. In Jesus Christ, I am dead to sin. But I’m far from dead to temptation. Yeah, there’s victory in Jesus, but I’ve got to be willing to live in that victory from decision to decision, and all too often, I’ve decided that defeat looked better than victory.

So if you’re dead to sin, but the temptation is still camping outside your door, what do you do when it knocks? How do you live in that victory Jesus already won?

I’ll get down to more practical measures in the succeeding posts… things like accountability and thinking for success. Some of those tools might work in specific situations, even apart from the spiritual foundation for them. In fact, I know that they can and do. But I like to have the whole picture. I don’t like swapping an obvious problem for a more subtle one. I want solutions, not problem exchanges. I like to know where the roots of a problem are, so I can weed them out. And the roots of the weeds of addiction are sin, burrowed deep into the heart of man.