You Say You're Not Addicted - To Anything?

An addiction is an enslaving, destructive dependency. Addictions raise many questions. Are they moral weaknesses, diseases, habits, or sins? Are they physical dependencies, or complicated spiritual cycles? What’s needed for change? Is it medical treatment, family intervention, daily group accountability, or spiritual transformation? Can behaviors be changed quickly, or will recovery be the process of a lifetime? If our answer to these questions is yes, or at least maybe, we are being honest about the complexity of addiction.

Nancy is obsessed with food. For years she has overeaten and has become extremely overweight. Her compulsive eating routine seems to have a life of its own.

Dorothy is also obsessed with food. She constantly thinks that she is overweight but she isn’t. For years she has binged and purged, sometimes 10 times a day. She is a classic case of anorexia.

Peter has a love his wife knows nothing about. As a curious teen he discovered Playboy and Penthouse. Fifteen years later, he finds the 900 numbers on late-night TV irresistible. His computer modem gives him easy access to the pornography of cyberspace and the Internet.

Rose is dependent on alcohol. She isn’t down at the local bar slugging down beers. She is a closet drinker. No one in her family suspects her problem. She only drinks while her husband is at work and while the kids are at school. Nothing too serious, she thinks, until she became pregnant again and tried to stop for the sake of the baby.

As these examples suggest, addictions are not limited to illegal, mood-altering substances. Nancy and Dorothy are addicted to a food problem. Peter is a slave to his own sexuality. Rose is controlled by a substance freely sold from the shelves of her family supermarket.

Because a person can be congenitally predisposed to addiction by inheritance of genes, and because of the likelihood of medical complications, addictions are often viewed as a disease. It would be a mistake, however, to think only in terms of the physical dimensions. Most addictions are also rooted in moral choices and spiritual needs.

What is most important is not whether we are predisposed to an enslaving habit but whether we are willing to do whatever it takes to bring this desire, habit, or idol under the control of reason and faith.

Let me give a personal testimony and example of a form of addiction which at one time controlled me. This addiction of mine is one that would probably not pop up first in your mind. I was addicted to GOLF! You may laugh, but I am serious. My addiction was enslaving and it was destructive.

A year after my wife and I were married in 1954, I served a two-year hitch in the Air Force as a dentist. I was stationed at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Miss. on the Gulf coast. The weather was perfect year round for golf.

I began work in the dental clinic at 6:30 in the morning and went off-duty at 3 PM. This gave the rest of the afternoon off and I discovered golf! I became intoxicated by all the fine points of the game and couldn’t get enough of it. I began to play every weekday and most weekends.

I neglected my wife, I neglected my newborn son - I just had to play golf. When I wasn’t playing, I was analyzing my previ­ous game to find corrections. And the more I played, the better I got. I shot near even par on most days. And, of course, there was the inevitable betting among my golf buddies (I must say I won more often than I lost.)

My wife needed me around her for love and support with the new baby, but I just had to play golf. I was young and foolish. And I had an addiction.

My wife was a loving person and treated my addiction tenderly - more tenderly than I ever deserved. In this day and age of easy divorce, my marriage might not have lasted. But with my wife’s love and understanding, I made a commitment to my family. (My wife died two years ago after 50 years of our marriage.)

I quit golf cold-turkey! I didn’t lift a golf club for 10 years. And when I did play again, there was no addiction - just normal enjoyment like any other person.

I was not a praying person in those days but I did recognize God in my life. How I had the ability to quit my addiction I do not know for sure, but God must have had His part.

Remember this about addictions: they cause us to either feel good or feel nothing. Those who work with people caught in addictions identify at least five telltale signs, which when found together indicate the presence of an enslaving, destructive dependency.

1. Absorbing Focus. All addictions consume time, thought, and energy. They are not mere pastimes. They are obsessions that demand more and more from us.

2. Increasing Tolerance. The pattern of diminishing returns is also common. We need increasing amounts to maintain the same effect.

3. Growing Denial. To protect the sacred moments of our pleasure, we deny that our “interest” is ruining us. Because there is so much to lose, we hide from others the ex­tent of our addiction. We convince ourselves that we can stop whenever we want. We learn to live in two worlds at the same time.

4. Damaging Consequences. There is no such thing as a harmless addiction. All addictions are destructive to ourselves and those we love. They damage our relationships with family, friendships and God.

5. Painful Withdrawal. Anything we habitually use to give us an artificial sense of well-being results in pain when it’s taken away. There are always “withdrawal symptoms” as we feel that we have lost something essential to our life.

Addictions are attractive because they appear to provide predictable doses of either pleasure or relief - now. What we find out too late is that in exchange for pleasure or relief, our addictions master us. Even though we tell ourselves we have everything under control, experience tells us otherwise. At some point, we are forced to choose between our addiction and those who love us. We know what we desperately want: we don’t want to lose those we love. But we want to keep our addiction so badly.

Addiction involves our spiritual inner being. We have needs that cannot be met by filling them with food, alcohol, drugs, work or golf. Physical obsessions cannot satisfy our deep longings for satisfaction, security, and significance. Because these needs are spiritual rather than physical, most addiction treatment centers now recognize the need for more than medical or social therapy.

Everyone is born with a God-shaped need within. But most need time and addictions to attempt to fill that God-shaped vacuum. God uses the disillusionment of addictions to draw people to Himself by trial and error.

But don’t Christians suffer from addictions? Yes. People can struggle with addictions before and after coming to Christ for forgiveness and eternal salvation. That’s one reason Paul had to write to Christians in Corinth (see 1 Cor. 6:9-11). Some were still living under the influence of alcohol and unmanaged sexual desires even after coming to Christ. People bought, paid for, and owned by God can still struggle with any of the addictions that afflict others.

But what about those who experience dramatic, lasting deliverance on the day of their salvation? Some do report a “miracle cure” when they first believe in Christ as Lord and Savior. But their story is not the norm. What their experience does is demonstrate to others that God can break the chains of bondage. Their dramatic cures remind all of us that God can empower His people to live under the influence and control of His Spirit.

But dramatic “cold-turkey” deliverances are only part of the picture. Even those who experience such freedom in the first days of faith must spend the rest of their lives facing the dangers of countless other possible addictions just like everyone else.

WHEN FEELING GOOD OR FEELING NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN DOING GOOD, LOVING OTHERS, OR KNOWING GOD, WE ARE RIPE FOR ADDICTION.

When we Christians finally invite Christ into our mess, we discover that He has not come to condemn us. Neither does He demand that we work harder to fix our addicted broken lives. All He asks of us is faith and trust in Him. And He will empower us in our weakness to overcome.
When we first came to the end of ourselves, hit bottom, and admitted that our lives were a series of minor or major addictions, our surrender to God was not complete. In some ways it was a forced surrender. We had been broken by the tyranny of our own choices. We finally admitted that we were beaten, and that if we didn’t surrender we would die. We surrendered TO SAVE OUR OWN LIVES.

What we didn’t realize at the time is that this attitude of brokenness COULD BECOME A WAY OF LIFE. The surrender we feared became a way of inviting the help and mercy of the One who had made us to find our pleasure, security, and fulfillment in Him.

All of us have the seeds of addiction within our souls. We all want to maximize our pleasure. We all want to minimize our pain. But we must understand the reality of addictions and how they can come between us and God.

[Back to Home]