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 wordsaddiction andaddict 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 likeobsessed,too much