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.

How to Win, introduction

In a comment on my last post, I was asked about my thoughts on accountability. It's a dramatically under-used tool in beating sin in general and addictions in particular. It's not a cure-all, of course; you can have accountability and still fail, and some have succeeded without it. I don't even think it's the most important tool (given its relative prominence to other truths in Scripture). Nonetheless, it's a valuable tool, and it bears discussion. Sin thrives in darkness, and it shrivels in the light. Accountability is one way to shine light on your life.

However, that got me thinking. Instead of just dealing with one tool for beating an addiction or sin, why not address several? So I'm going to do a series of posts on how to get victory over sin and addiction.

For anyone who's wondering, yeah, I'm still clean. I guess if I'm going to talk about how to beat sin and addiction, I'd better stay that way. I'd hate to end up the spiritual equivalent of Jake Delhomme giving an off-season clinic on how to avoid throwing interceptions.

Have you won or are you currently winning a battle against a sin or addiction? What tools did you use, and which ones helped the most? Did you find ways to use those tools that worked better than others?

Two Tough Weeks

We're now up to the two week mark since everything changed. I won't say they've been easy. There has been struggle on every front. There's no sense of sportsmanship or fair play with Satan, and he's got no problem kicking you when you're down and assaulting you when you're weak.

These two weeks haven't been easy, but they have been victorious. Satan may attack while I'm weak, but God's strength is made perfect in weakness. To God be the glory; great things, He hath done.

Why I Don't Believe in Religion

I don't believe in religion. Yes, I'm a Fundamentalist. But, no, I still don't think much of religion, for the most part. I know of only one place in the whole Bible where the term "religion" is used positively, and it has nothing to do with how a person gets to God or has a home in heaven or receives eternal life.

Why would I be generally opposed to religion? Because religion, at its core, gets the most important thing wrong. Religion is man's efforts to please God. It's usually all wrapped up in what you do and how you do it. Often it brings in rituals and rites, observances and sacrifice. It's usually rooted in morality, and it often has some fine things to say about the duty of man. But when you come right down to it, religion is man trying to make himself good enough to please God. Or it is man trying to find the right levers to pull to make God happy enough to accept him. It is man trying to work his way to God.

That's backwards. Man can't ever, on his own, be good enough to please God. Romans 1-3 systematically proves that no one, not even the most religious, is good enough to please God through his works. And the clincher is that truly, none of us seek after God. Lots of people call themselves seekers - but they are usually trying to find their own way to God, to blaze a path of their own devising.

Religion has it all wrong. Man can't work his way to God. God came to man.

Religion has it backwards. Men don't seek until they find God. God isn't lost, needing us to find Him. WE are lost, needing Him to find us. Jesus Christ came to this world to seek and to save that which was lost.

I don't really have a religion. I have a relationship with God, based on the work of Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for me. I'm not some poor searcher standing at the door of heaven, frantically pulling at levers on a cosmic board, hoping to find the combination that makes God happy and convinces Him to let me in. I've already been brought into the household of the King. It wasn't because of anything I did or any good that I am. It was all because of what He did. He sought me and He saved me. All I did was believe in Him to receive that gift of salvation.

So don't call me religious, please. I'm trying to please God, sure, but it's not so that He'll let me in. Instead, call me a child of God, trying to please Him because I am in.

"Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us."

What Is a Christian Fundamentalist?

In order to address what I mean when I call myself a Fundamentalist, I'm going to have to take a little time off from my busy schedule of practicing my anti-Obama chants, working on my AK-47 marksmanship, and developing bombs. That makes me mad enough to blow something up.

Oh, wait. I don't mess much with political stuff (especially in my role as a pastor), I don't own an assault rifle, and I've never built a bomb. (Well, that egg-drop project back in high school might have come close... but nobody got hurt, aside from the smell. The fire wasn't really all THAT big.)

Despite the impressions you may have gotten from media outlets (which can rarely be troubled to make careful distinctions - it's hard to clarify who really is what in a 600-word article or 2-minute television news report), Christian Fundamentalists have virtually nothing in common with the Islamic Fundamentalists or Hindu Fundamentalists who have done such violence recently.

The reason the media can apply the term "fundamentalist" to all of us is that we all take what we believe seriously, and we're deeply attached to core tenets of our faith. But our faiths are radically different, and that's what gets missed in the popular image. I don't know of a single self-professed or accepted-by-the-community Christian Fundamentalist who has committed any act of violence in the name of his faith. We don't kill people for God, and we don't blow things up for God. We're willing to die for our faith - but we would never kill for it. That would be a foolish denial of the very fundamentals we stand for.

So if I'm not defined by radical politics or violence, what makes me a Fundamentalist?

A Christian Fundamentalist is one who holds to and is willing to stand up for the basic truths of Christianity. The list of fundamentals differs from person to person, but they pretty much all boil down to the essential truths for salvation, and those all revolve around Jesus Christ: who He is, what He did, and what we must do in response. This is no surprise - it's a Biblical idea, even though the name is recent. The Apostle Paul repeatedly told people to know doctrine and to be willing to separate from (not work with or fellowship with) people who denied core truths or who lived in blatant sin. The Apostle John nailed it down really clearly in I John 4:1-3. The person who accepts the truth about Jesus Christ, whatever else they may be wrong about, has a relationship with God. The person who hasn't believed the truth about Jesus Christ, whatever else they may be right about, has no relationship with God. When a person teaches the truth about Jesus Christ, whatever else they may get wrong, they are helping the cause of Christ in that at least. When a person teaches error about who Jesus is and what He did, whatever else they may get right, they are hurting the cause of Christ.

The difference between a Fundamentalist and other Evangelicals is not in what they believe about the gospel - both believe that salvation is by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, as the Scriptures make so plain. We all agree the Jesus Christ is God the Son who came to earth as a man, died for our sins, and rose from the dead. The difference between Fundamentalists and the rest of the Evangelicals is the Fundamentalist's willingness to obey the commands to evaluate and separate from those who don't believe the gospel.

Am I a Fundamentalist because I hate people? No! I'm a Fundamentalist because I love God and want to do what He says. (This is the test of love, after all: "If ye love me, keep my commandments.") I'm a Fundamentalist because I believe the gospel of Jesus Christ to be the most important truth this world has ever seen - so important that I can't pretend I'm the same as someone who rejects it. I want to share it with anyone who will listen - but I don't want to work with someone who won't, at least not joining together in so-called ministry.

That's what makes me a Fundamentalist - believing the fundamental truths of Christianity and being willing to take a stand for them. The movement by the name of Fundamentalism has gotten tangled up in a lot of other things, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't. (It's made up of people, even people like me, which guarantees it won't be perfect.) At its heart, though, Fundamentalism is about the gospel of Jesus Christ and obeying Him.

Now I think I'll go and make another ... sandwich, a sandwich! What, you thought I was going to make something explosively dangerous, just because I'm a Fundamentalist? Well, okay, that description might suit any sandwich I make.

The Deed Is Done, And The Chips Are Falling

I delivered the letter last night. One of the toughest things I've ever done in my life. I still don't know how it's all going to play out - you never do when you hit someone with news that big and devastating. There has to be time for it to sink in and the reactions to begin to distill.

But something is working... I'm up to 10 days now, which might be a record in recent history. And the victory is really all due to surrendering to God and doing it His way.

The End of a Letter, The Beginning of Nervous Waiting

The letter has now been finished. I'll probably give it another once-over sometime this afternoon, then print it up. (Yes, it's typed... painful though it may be, I want her to be able to read it, and that ruled out my handwriting.) I don't much like it... it's so hard to write something that's not rambling, doesn't include justifications or excuses, and breaks things as gently as possible.

I expect the best opportunity to give it to her will be tomorrow or Tuesday night. Feel free to pray for us.