WHAT CONTROLS YOUR LIFE?
She sat in my study, not knowing what to make of her life. She told me she loved her husband. But over the course of their brief marriage she hadn’t been able to keep away from other men. The pattern was always the same. She’d visit the bars while her husband was at work, meet someone to whom she was physically attracted, and spend the night. Then would come the tears of remorse as she confessed to her husband what she had done. She would promise it would never happen again. But it always did. On the verge of their divorce, her husband told me, "I can forgive her—but I cannot trust her."
She came to me and said that no one really knew about what was going on. We’ll, she didn’t think anyone in the family knew. But she admitted that she was drinking too much, again. "How much is too much?" I asked. A whole box of cheap wine in a night, she admitted.
He was asked to leave his last job. He felt terrible about it. It was the best job he had ever landed. But the tech department had reported to human resources that there was porn on his computer. It wasn’t the first time he had been caught. He had been told that he had used up his warnings. But keeping his distance from those triple X sites was asking too much. This time when he was caught he was simply told to empty out his desk. When he walked out the office door, he left behind his career, but not his addiction to porn. His addiction simply moved into his home computer. Now the potential casualty was not his career—but his marriage.
She was so thin she might be wasting away from cancer. But the results from the battery of tests her doctor put her through came back fine. Her problem wasn’t physical. It was that food had become her obsession. Or perhaps better, her dress size had become her obsession. Even though her doctor warned that her anorexia was threatening her very life, even though her doctor told her she needed help, every time she looked in the mirror she saw herself as someone who needed to lose another five pounds.
He had tried to throw the cigarettes away a dozen times before. In fact, he had actually gone smokeless for two weeks. But every time he tried to quit, the nicotine cravings broke down his willpower. He knew what his smoking was doing to his body. He worried about whether that persistent hack might be a sign of something far worse than a smoker’s cough. But giving up his butts was too much to ask.
He sat at the computer night after night, hunched over the keyboard. The video game that flashed across the screen mesmerized him. He knew it was after midnight—he knew he needed to break away and get some sleep. He had an early morning college class the next day. He hadn’t even begun to do the readings. But just one more round … just a few minutes more before he powered off.
Who are these people? They are our family members. They are our neighbors. They are our friends. But who are we kidding? For many of us, we are these people! And the frank truth about our lives is that we are caught in the grip of addictions from which we cannot break free.
Yes, the grip of addiction is everywhere in our world today. Recent statistics by the Center for Disease Control says 40% of Americans struggle with tobacco addiction. Among young adults, 20% struggle with substance abuse, and 10% with sexual addiction. Among college—age women, anywhere from 20 to 30% struggle with eating disorders. Addiction. It’s not just a word limited to the world of the inner city mission. The grip of addiction has made its way into the best of neighborhoods, into the best of families. Addiction has made its home in church and in the highest circles of society. And the very fact that addiction isn’t supposed to make its home in such places fuels the deception that gives addiction its power.
THE POWER OF ADDICTION
What’s our problem? Is it just a matter of immaturity? Do we just need to ‘grow up’ a little, and act more like grownups? Sometimes we think so. We tell ourselves we should simply snap out of our bad habits. But that doesn’t seem to change things much, does it? You see, the power of addiction is far from superficial. There is something about our lives that is terribly off track. The truth is, we experience a brokenness in life that again and again we try to handle on our own, without God.
It was Henry David Thoreau who once wrote: [Most people] lead lives of quiet desperation . . . an unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." Thoreau was writing before the invention of the X—box and online computer games. He was writing before professional sports had become a multi—billion dollar preoccupation—we might even say, an addiction——for millions of people. The games Thoreau had in mind from the 18th century had to be pretty small stuff compared to today! But Thoreau was dead right. There is desperation in the lives of so many. It is a desperation born of a lack of purpose and meaning. Ultimately, it’s a desperation born of absence of a relationship with God. And today, even more than in Thoreau’s time, people distract themselves by losing themselves in worlds of fantasy. I have met so many who are simply going through the motions when it comes to life. Their goal is to simply get through another day. There is no hope that empowers their lives. A sense of joy and peace has been absent for so long, that they would hardly know what these feelings are like. These folk stumble home from work to spend another night watching TV. They become addicted to things that give momentary pleasure. They’re trapped, they’re in bondage. They do not know what it means to be free.
Sadly, even many who identify themselves as followers of Jesus Christ still struggle with bondage to their brokenness, with the powers of addiction. The Apostle Paul, in his book to Roman believers, put it this way in Romans 6: "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?"
Paul declares that just experiencing the grace of forgiveness doesn’t put us where we should be in life. We also need grace that sets us free from destructive patterns of life. These destructive patterns—these addictions—can have such a grip on us that they continue even after we have met Christ. They are so persistent we might even defend them on the basis that they only multiply our need for more of God’s good grace! It seems we can find ourselves caught in a web of sin from which it seems impossible to escape. We want to be different people—we want to experience true freedom from the powers of sin. Yet these patterns seem impossible to escape. John Burke, in his book, No Perfect People Allowed, talks about this strange dynamic in our lives. He writes, "in a generation spawned in brokenness—broken families, broken childhoods, broken lives—[in such a world] addictions rule!" (p. 244).
Addiction. Yes, that’s the blunt word that describes the way so many of us handle the pressures of life. The stress of life skyrockets and we desperately flail around to find a way to lower of the pressure we face. Too often, our way of coping leads us into addiction. Paul is speaking about the power of addiction when he writes in I Corinthians 6:12, "Even though ‘I am allowed to do everything,’ I must not become a slave to anything." (NLT) Whenever we become slaves to something or someone beyond God—even if that something is a good aspect of God’s creation—at that moment we become addicts. And addictions shame us. They cripple us emotionally and spiritually. They are so powerful. The more we try to throw an addiction off, the more it seems to roar back into our lives in full force. Addictions are masters that enslave us, trap us, and sap the joy out of life. In our world today, addictions rule!
Let me ask you—
Are there things you crave more of without being truly satisfied?
Is there something that you just can’t live without?
Is there some aspect of life over which you have lost control?
Do you deceive yourself into thinking that you don’t have a problem with addiction—when down deep you know you really do?
Is there something that is pushing out of your life really important things—especially your relationship with God?
Be honest with yourself.
INTO TRUE FREEDOM: SETTING ASIDE FAITH IN OURSELVES
But let me also be honest about the answer to addiction that God provides. It is found in one word. It’s the word GRACE. The same grace that forgives is also the grace that can set us free from our addictions, our dysfunctional patterns of coping with life.
Now let me tell you something about the pre—condition to receive grace. For you to receive grace, you’ll first have to admit you need it. And that simple admission, my friends, is the most difficult thing in the world to do. In fact, you’ll need to ask for divine grace just to do it!
You see, at the heart of all addictions is the notion that we can make it on our own. It’s the notion that we don’t need God. For that matter, we don’t really need other people all that much. We can handle life, ourselves, thank you! But we can’t. And our addictions become the crutches by which we try to limp through life. Our addictions truly become our alternatives to God. Frankly, there is an empty place in your soul if you aren’t in a relationship with God through Christ. It is an emptiness that you’ll try to fill with all manner of cheap substitutes—the stuff of our addictions. But it just won’t work.
Now when we think we can make it on our own, we end up rejecting the very idea of grace. For a need for grace confronts head—on belief in our own self—sufficiency. Grace is undeserved favor. Grace comes as an unearned gift. God’s grace is a welcome into his presence by the merit of Jesus Christ, his Son, a welcome that you—and I—just don’t have coming.
Most of us have heard of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, has said that those steps came straight from the pastor of his church, Dr. Sam Shoemaker. And the very first of the twelve steps is an admission that the addiction cycle is stronger than we are. The very first step, in fact, is an admission that we are powerless over our addiction. That our life has gotten out of our control.
It’s the Apostle Paul who talks about that reality in spiritual terms. In Ephesians 2:1,2, Paul writes: "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of the world." "Dead in sin!" says Paul, unable to break free of the hopeless, meaningless patterns of life that enslave us. No wonder Paul says in Romans 6:6 that we have become sin’s slaves.
INTO TRUE FREEDOM: PUTTING OUR FAITH IN THE TRUE HELPER
That’s bad news. But confronting the brutal facts about ourselves is good news! For it is when you are at the end of your rope, when you finally understand your true helplessness, that you are ready to receive God’s grace. For powerless people need a power from beyond themselves. The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous speaks of a Power greater than ourselves that can restore us to sanity. That Power in the Twelve Steps is left undefined. But Scripture gives us the definition we need of where that true power lies. It lies in none other than Jesus Christ. And it is at heart nothing less than the power of His resurrection. Paul writes in Romans 6:4&5: "Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life."
Resurrection power! Now, that’s truly power from beyond ourselves! It has to be! After all, corpses don’t bring themselves back from the dead. Corpses don’t have power to conquer the grave. The power of resurrection must come from beyond.
Paul says that resurrection power is available for all those whose confidence is in the Christ, who himself was raised by the heavenly Father from the grave. A resurrection miracle is possible for all of us who find us so caught in sin that we are as good as dead. A resurrection miracle is possible for all of us who feel that the only really energizing principle left in our lives is the power of our addictions. It is possible to be set free from the compulsions, the obsessions of addiction. It’s possible to freed from the prison house of death, the prison house of addiction, by God’s amazing grace.
You see, Paul tells us in this passage that those who have a relationship of faith with Jesus as their Savior are so connected to him that HIS story becomes THEIR story. The flow of his life becomes the flow of THEIR lives.
Jesus went to a cross. He went to that cross for the sake of sin’s power. Not because he was guilty, but because WE are guilty. Not because HE was trapped in the shame of addiction but because WE are trapped in the shame of addiction. He went to the cross so that sin’s power might be broken. On Calvary it wasn’t just Christ who was crucified, but our sinful selves, with all our incessant, never—ending patterns for living that shame our souls and destroy our joy.
And on Easter morning, Jesus stepped from the grave alive. He stepped forth into a life energized, empowered by the Spirit of God. He walked out of that tomb, not just for himself, but for us. So that connected by faith to his Spirit we ourselves might ‘live a new life.’
Here is the power to break addiction! It’s the resurrection power of Jesus Christ.
FALLING INTO THE ARMS OF JESUS
As you hear this message, I know that many of you are wrestling with the implications of all this for your life. You’re wondering whether you are really ready to turn your life over to Jesus.
Maybe you are comfortable with the idea that Jesus saves you from your guilt. You like the idea of a Savior who rescues you from hell to deliver you to heaven. But if that is all you want from Jesus today, it’s not enough. It isn’t enough in order to receive the kind of life you want for yourself—and that Jesus wants to give you. To receive that kind of life, you’ll need to know what it means to surrender your will to his. You’ll need to trust him as not just as your Savior but as your Lord.
Scary? Yes it is. Undoubtedly turning your life over to Jesus is the most scary thing you will ever do. But wonderful? Absolutely! No greater joy is found in the freedom he gives. No greater blessing is possible than to live life as it is meant to be lived. To live a life where we aren’t ashamed of ourselves! To live a life where we aren’t hiding our shames from others! To live a life that can be lived out in the open. Because Christ Jesus has filled the place in our lives that we had stuffed full of our addictions. Because Christ Jesus has filled life with true freedom! The greatest freedom is freedom to serve him and others.
’, ’, ’, ’, ’Romans 6:1—14’, ’, ’, ’, ’Lord,
Break into our lives with your amazing grace. May that grace give us the courage to confess to you today the ways in which we’ve messed up, ways we’ve tried to cope with life, but failed. Lord, we thought keeping you at arm’s length would give us personal freedom, but it hasn’t. All it has done is drive us into addictions that shame us, that destroy our sense of personal worth. Today, Lord, break the chains of our addictions and set us free. Set us free with resurrection power to truly love and be loved by you. Set us free to fulfill the purposes for which you created us. Set us free to enjoy your world as we have never enjoyed it before. Amen.
Robert Heerspink
Rev. Robert Heerspink is a native of west Michigan. He completed his undergraduate studies at Calvin College and holds the degrees of Master of Divinity and Master of Theology from Calvin Theological Seminary. He has also received a Doctor of Ministry degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Bob was ordained a minister of the Word in the Christian Reformed Church of North America in 1979, and has 26 years of parish experience, having served four churches throughout west Michigan. He was appointed the Director of The Back to God Hour in 2006. Bob has written several resources related to congregational stewardship, including the book, Becoming a Firstfruits Congregation. He is a regular contributor to TODAY, the monthly devotional of The Back to God Hour. Bob is married to Edith (Miedema) and they have three children. His hobbies include reading fictional and historical works, watersports, and occassional golfing.
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