Let's begin with Word of Prayer. Lord God, we come tonight to a topic that is a grievous one. Sin is bad enough. Sins that enslave us and dominate our lives are especially troublesome. And they bring us such heartache. We think of how many times we fail and fall. And so we pray, Lord, that You would use Your Word through Your Spirit tonight Teach us how to help one another, how to find a way out of enslaving sins ourselves and also to help others that we counsel that there might be victory in this troublesome area. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Alright, we come tonight to addiction, chapter 12 in the book. For the person who struggles with addiction, the first step is going to be taken through chapters four through six. Everything that we've covered about sin, addressing the problem of sin in your life, applies to the sins connected with addictions just as well. So those same principles will help. So you begin there. The material in this chapter is specifically targeted towards what's unique about helping somebody with an addiction. So we'll start with defining in the word, which is a slippery thing to do with the word addiction. If you go online and try and find a definition for addiction, you'll be reading a long time and you'll read a lot of different definitions. It's a thing that the world struggles to define. Usually they come up with something like this. It's a condition involving tolerance and dependence, which are technical terms meaning tolerance refers to when it requires an ever-increasing dose to give you the same result. You know, when somebody's on drugs and they start out small and then pretty soon that doesn't do anything for them, they have to take twice as much and then they keep... That's called tolerance. Your body is building up a tolerance. Dependence is when you get withdrawal symptoms when you quit. So they've coined a term that encompasses both tolerance and dependence. You put those two together and the word they come up with is neuroadaptation. It means your brain is adapting. So, predictably, they locate the whole problem in the brain, the physical organ. And it's no surprise then that most people end up believing, or many people end up believing, that substances cause addiction. Nicotine, alcohol, whatever, the chemical is the cause. Now it is possible, I will acknowledge it's possible, for a substance to have properties that create an intense craving for more of that substance. I don't know exactly how that works. I know that McDonald's french fries are like that, so I know it's like that. I know it exists. And it's also possible, I would acknowledge that some people are born with a predisposition toward being particularly weak in regard to certain kinds of sins. There's some people, they taste alcohol and then it's like, hmm, I could live without that. There's other people, from the first drink, they're hooked, just like that. And so there are, that seems to be born into people. However, it's important that we realize no substance can cause an addiction because Addiction involves a decision of the will, and an act of the will is always a function of your spirit. It's your will. No drug can make someone decide to take it. It can make someone want to take it, but it can't make someone decide to take it. No activity has the power to make someone decide to engage in it. If it did, nobody would ever be freed from any addiction. For the believer, slavery to sin is voluntary. We know that from Romans 6.16. Don't you know that when you offer yourself to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey? So when you offer yourself to a sin to obey it, your will is still intact. Even after you're enslaved, your will is still intact. Your life becomes dominated by whatever you allow to influence your will. And believers, according to Romans, have been freed from the bondage of sin. There is no sin that's impossible for us to resist. Philippians 4.13, 1 Corinthians 10.13, there's no such thing as a sin that can overpower your will as a Christian. However, it is possible for us as Christians to voluntarily re-enslave ourselves to a defeated foe. 2 Peter 2.19, a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. We let anything master us, we become a slave to that, even if it's a voluntary slavery. And so the world's terms are decidedly unhelpful once again. The biblical term, if we want to look at God's definition for this phenomenon, is not addiction but rather bondage or enslavement. That's what you find, those are the terms you see in scripture. Titus 2.3 speaks of the problem of being addicted to much wine, as the NIV translates as addicted. The word addicted is dedulaminas. It's a participle form, a verb made out of the word dulas, which is the word slave. So it means enslavement, literally means enslavement. A person is enslaved to a behavior when that behavior becomes seemingly impossible to quit. Usually, If you're engaging in some behavior and it has a lot of really negative consequences on your life, you quit that thing, right? You quit. But enslavement is when a person has all these negative consequences and it's not enough to make them quit. They try to quit and can't, or can't seem to. They resolve to quit, they desire to quit, but they fail in their effort to quit. And we need to understand right up front that enslavement to anything besides righteousness is sin. It's forbidden. We're not to be mastered or controlled by anything, 1 Corinthians 6.12, 2 Peter 2.19. Paul went to great lengths to make sure he wasn't mastered or controlled by anything. He wanted to get his body under control so that after he preached to others he himself would not be cast aside. So part of the fruit of the Spirit is self-control. Any failure to exercise self-control is sin and that's true whether it's a forbidden behavior like sexual immorality or A neutral behavior like shopping or drinking coffee, anything that controls you is sin. So, instead of using the unhelpful and inaccurate psychological terms like neuroadaptation and tolerance and dependence, we'll stick with the more biblical definition which I'll offer this. Addiction is when any person keeps deciding to do something they wish they wouldn't do. In other words, it's a bad habit. That's all it is. It's a bad habit. And that's tough to communicate to people who are addicted because in our culture that doesn't compute. There's a lot of people, you can ask them, do you have an addiction? Oh, no, no, no, I don't have an addiction. Do you have a bad habit? Yeah, bad habit, definitely. Do you have something that you keep doing and you wish you could quit but you can't seem to quit? Yeah, yeah, I got that. Addiction? No, no, I don't have an addiction. So if we put it in these terms, we can catch some of the people who don't want to attach the word addiction to themselves, which is fine with me because it's not a biblical term. Now, when you counsel somebody with this problem, don't tell them, don't assume that the problem is a lack of resolve. Don't say, well, if you really wanted to quit, you could quit. If you're really serious, you just stop doing this. That's the way it seems if you're not addicted to something. But it's not a valid assumption because it's possible to want to quit something and also have powerful impulses that make it seemingly impossible to resist those impulses. Galatians 5.17, the flesh desires what is contrary to the spirit, the spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They're in conflict with each other so that you do not do what you want. So Paul acknowledges such a thing as conflicting desires. You really do want to do what's right but you find yourself not doing it. Matthew 26.41, Jesus said, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. So we all have conflicting desires. And in most cases, people who are addicted really do want to be rid of their addiction. It ruins their lives. They want to be rid of it because of negative consequences. They find themselves still being compelled by their craving. They're kind of like the guy in Proverbs 23, the drunk, who has got a horrible life. He's getting beaten and he's dizzy and confused and messed up and everything. And yet he says, when will I wake up so I can get another drink? This is such a pathetic thing to read, but that's the way we are when we get caught up in an enslaving sin. We're like the guys in 2 Peter 2.22, it says of them the proverb is true, a dog returns to its vomit. What could be more foolish than re-ingesting something that your body has expelled as unsuitable, your body threw it up for a reason, and your body goes to extreme measures to get rid of something. What could be more foolish than eating it again, but that's what these kind of sins are like. They bring incredible pain and suffering into the person's life and yet they just keep going right back into it again and again. So there's a lot of people that are looking for a way out of addiction and that's why there's a lot of programs in the world. The world's main way of dealing with enslaving sins is 12-step programs, AA and all the other anonymous groups. And I think if you take those 12 steps you can really summarize them under four headings. Number one, admit you have no control over your habit. Number two, clean up your life morally. Number three, look to a higher power for help. And number four, try and make amends. That really sums up what those 12 steps are all about. And you can say a lot of really good things about the 12 steps. There's some excellent things in there. There's excellent things in those groups. And people who struggle with addictions are understandably drawn to the 12-step programs. Everyone in the group, you go to those programs, everyone in the group understands what you're going through. It's not like going in the church where some people just really raise their eyebrows and they understand. They know what it's like. You don't have to give a big explanation. You're not judged. You're not looked down upon. The people are compassionate and yet firm. They tend to be firm. They tend to see through lies. They tend to see through phoniness. They have very little tolerance and patience for a facade. And so it creates a very genuine, open, honest atmosphere in a 12-step group, which is a great thing. And also, another reason I think people are drawn to those is that instead of getting sermon-length discourses, Most of the advice is kept to very practical, very simple advice that's closer to bumper sticker length to the sermon length and it comes from human wisdom which makes it seem very reasonable and logical and no faith is required at all. That's the 12-step groups and many churches have modeled their program after the 12-step groups. There's a very popular one called Celebrate Recovery. that is a program that takes the principles of the twelve-step groups and attaches them to biblical principles and rewords them according to the Beatitudes and makes it an eight-step thing. For example, step two of the twelve steps says, believe that a higher power or a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. That's step two of the twelve steps. In Celebrate Recovery, that principle is attached to the second Beatitude, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. Matthew 5.4, so that's the approach of Celebrate Recovery. And I want to talk about that approach for a minute. If the world comes up with a principle that is biblical, I mean, even a blind squirrel comes across a nut once in a while, right? And sometimes they're going to stumble across, just through common sense, they're going to stumble across things that are actually biblical. They don't get them from the Bible, but they're actually a biblical principle. And when they do that, it makes sense for us to embrace that principle. And I'm sure that's what the creators of Celebrate Recovery are trying to do, just pick out what's biblical out of the twelve steps and embrace that. But there's a danger in taking human wisdom that's actually not biblical and adjusting it to use biblical terminology so that it sounds biblical, but it's still not from the Bible, it's still an unbiblical idea. That's really the error that's so common in the whole integrationist approach. They draw principles, most of the principles in the integrationist approach to counseling draws their principles from secular, naturalistic, humanistic reasoning and then attaches it to biblical language rather than drawing the principles directly out of scripture. And there's a great danger in that. Some of the principles in the 12-step programs, I think, are biblical and are very good and for that reason a lot of people have been helped through those programs. But there are some, I believe, that are unbiblical and they're so unbiblical that they undermine the rest of them and I'll explain why. Starting with the world's solutions and adjusting them to fit the Bible, I think, leads to error a lot of times because the underlying foundational assumptions behind those principles are incorrect and incompatible with Scripture. Let me show you what I mean. Step number one of the twelve steps. I'm not going to go through all twelve, but let me just give you some. Step one. We admitted we were powerless over our addiction. Okay, that's step one. Admit you're powerless. Celebrate Recovery embraces that as a biblical idea. They attach that to Romans 7.18. I know that nothing good lives in me that is in my flesh. I have the desire to do what is good. I cannot carry it out. In the Celebrate Recovery system that corresponds to the first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit. Now, step one of the twelve steps sounds similar to Romans 7.18 and Matthew 5.4 on the surface, but They're not the same principle. The principles are very, very different. The 12-step program is based on the whole assumption of what I'll call the disease model of addiction. That is, addiction is a disease. And that wasn't always the case. When the 12 steps began, they used disease language, but they kind of used it metaphorically. And I don't have any problem with that. If you just use disease as a metaphor for sin, Scripture does that. Now, in our time, it's not just a metaphor. They really believe that it actually is an organic physiological disease, a bodily disorder. I'll give you some examples. Here's an excerpt from Narcotics Anonymous literature. Quote, our first step is to admit powerlessness over it That admission is the foundation upon which our recovery is built. Our experience with addiction is that when we accept that it is a disease over which we are powerless, such surrender provides a basis for recovery through the 12 steps. So the key word there is just powerless. Dr. Howard Fields has written a lot on this. He's the director at the Wheeler Center for Neurobiology of Addiction, and he says this, quote, Most people tend to think of addiction as the result of a weakness of character or a moral failing, but as the biological mechanisms that produce drug dependence come to be better understood, researchers are learning to think of addiction as a brain disorder, not unlike chronic depression or anxiety. He says, I don't believe an addict is responsible for being addicted. I believe they've been victimized by the drug and by circumstances that are largely beyond their control. He says that in an interview, he said that if you take a drug addict and you put him in jail for his behavior, that is like taking a cancer patient and putting him in jail for having cancer. He says that alcoholics get drunk because, quote, Some unconscious force makes them take that fifth or sixth drink even when they know they shouldn't. This is a disease, not a crime." So that's the underlying assumption. It's a disease, you're not responsible, you don't have control. That's step one. Steps four through six all sound like they have the appearance of taking responsibility. You need to admit it's your fault, you need to admit your wrongdoings, all that stuff. But with that underlying assumption that this whole thing is a disease outside of the person's control, that assumption limits your culpability. When you're admitting to wrongdoing, it's an asterisk in front of it saying, well, you know, considering the disease. And so it undermines those steps four through six, which otherwise would be good steps. Dr. Fields, he goes on to say something very telling. He says, quote, when we come up with effective treatments, then the public at large will begin to believe this. That's what happened with depression." See, what he's saying is, if you can get a drug that will solve the problem, then that'll be proof everyone will be convinced that the problem was caused by a physiological disease. Which is a huge logical fallacy that is not valid reasoning. The fact that a drug may have some effect on a problem is not proof that there was a physical cause. I mean, if a person becomes angry out of selfish pride and they have a temper problem because of selfish pride and then they take a sedative and suddenly they're not nearly as angry, is that proof that there was just only a chemical cause and there was no spiritual issue involved? No. No. It had a spiritual cause. The fact that a physical manifestation of a spiritual problem can be affected by a drug does not eliminate the spiritual cause. The message of the 12-step groups, I think, is a message of hopelessness. You have no control over this and it'll never go away. You are an alcoholic. If you were ever an alcoholic, you will always be an alcoholic. Even if you haven't had a drink for 30 years, you're still just as much an alcoholic as ever, according to them. Until the day you die, you're going to be susceptible just as susceptible as you are now. You should always refer to yourself as an alcoholic. That's not the gospel. Our message in the gospel is a message not of powerlessness, but of power, redemption and transformation. And Paul speaks to the drunks in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and he refers to them as former drunks. Do you not know verse 9? The wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God. Do not be deceived. Drunkards will not inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. Underline the word were. You're not that anymore. Is there such a thing as a former drunkard? Yes. Yes. Some of the Corinthians used to be alcoholics. They were no longer. And the solution was not just quitting. The solution was Transformation verse 12, but you were washed he said that's what you were but you were washed you were sanctified And you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Spirit of our God So if there's anything we're not it's powerless We have access to divine power that can do all things through Christ Philippians 4 13 So that's step one step two Says, we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Step three, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. And they got to throw that in. God, as you understand Him, higher power. Why don't they just come around and say Jesus Christ? Why do you suppose they don't say Jesus Christ? The reason they don't say Jesus Christ is because they don't want to limit it to Jesus Christ. Any God will do. Any higher power will do. Now, as Christians, do we believe that a higher, do we believe that technically that steps two and three? Yeah, we believe a higher power, greater than ourselves, can restore us to sanity and we should turn our lives over to Him. We believe all that. But there's a reason for the vague terminology that the Twelve Steps use, and the reason is the assumption that the power of transformation does not come from the object of your faith, it comes from the faith itself. This is the religion of Oprah. The act of believing is what has the power, not the object of your belief. It doesn't matter what the object of your belief is. Any god will do. Any higher power will do. It doesn't have to be Jesus Christ. It doesn't have to be the God of the Bible. God doesn't have to possess any particular power or any particular ability. It doesn't even have to actually exist. Because what changes you is your belief, your believing. That is not the Christian message. The Christian message is not that it doesn't matter whether you believe in some false god or a demon or Satan masquerading as an angel of light. The Christian message is it does matter. All that matters greatly. The only power comes from God, not from our own faith. So that's the problems of steps two and three. Step four, made a searching, fearless, moral inventory of our lives. Is that a good thing to do? Yeah, excellent thing to do, as long as the moral deficiencies are seen as sins against the Holy God and not an unfortunate disease that you happen to contract. So again, this would be a great step if it weren't for the earlier steps that undermine it. And basically, most people that go through the program, they see step four as just make an effort to clean up your act. But will a vague Belief in a random higher power and an effort to shore up moral weakness be enough to transform a sinful heart into holiness? No way! No. Now, steps 5 to 12, all the rest of the steps, I think are, as they stand, are good but are undermined by the problem of the disease model and vagueness about the higher power. For example, step five is to admit to God and ourselves and others the exact nature of our wrongs. Well, if you admit culpability, that's a crucial aspect of repentance, but how can you admit culpability while at the same time saying, well, that's a disease I don't have any control over? And what good is it to confess to a God who has no authority or power to forgive or cleanse your sins? No restoration can exist until there's true repentance, and true repentance is not just turning away from sin. True repentance is turning from sin to Christ. If you turn from sin to anything else, that's not repentance. It's certainly not turning from an addiction to some other false god, nor is it repentance to admit that you have a disease. That's not repentance. And where repentance lacks genuineness and thoroughness, then all the rest of these steps are going to be undermined. Step six and seven involve asking God to remove our shortcomings. It's a good thing to ask for, but apart from repentance, it's not going to happen. So thousands of people have escaped enslavement to alcohol and other things through the 12-step groups. Thousands of people have found success. I think though that that's more likely due to just the fact that they go to the meetings than it is the steps themselves. I don't think the steps themselves are what bring most people freedom. I think it's the fact that they just have a group, a support group of continual encouragement and accountability and obviously that's going to be helpful. Most participants know from experience that the people who continue to go to the meetings tend to have a smaller relapse rate than the people who don't keep going to the meetings. So I think it's the meetings really that really help. They help, but even the meetings, apart from biblical principles of transformation, can't change the heart. They can help control the behavior, modify the behavior, but they can't change the heart. That's why as soon as they go to the meetings, you revert back to your old habits. The 12 steps don't do anything about the problem of bondage to the flesh. In fact, very often all they do is enable you to exchange one bad habit for a not as bad habit. You get from enslavement to alcohol to enslavement to nicotine or caffeine or sugar or something else. You know, we had an AA group at our last facility. There was an AA group that they rented out in that building and they came on the night of youth group and we were all choking during youth group because of the smoke. I mean, they would have their break and every one of those people would go out and smoke and smoke and smoke. And they weren't allowed to smoke in the building, so they'd stand right in the doorway and the draft came in and just took all that smoke into the building. fill the whole place with smoke every week. When they get rid of enslavement to a sin that is just wreaking havoc in their life, to enslavement to something else that's a little bit more manageable, then that's an improvement for them. But the heart isn't transformed. So that's the world's solution. Let's talk about God's solution. In the war against the flesh, there's two parts to it. One part is gaining an overall advantage in the war, a position of strength in the overall war, and then the specific advice on fighting the individual battles, resisting temptations. I think most people lose battles because they put all their attention on how can I win the individual battle? How can I resist the temptation? Next time a temptation pops up, how can I resist it? And they're looking for advice on how to resist temptation. But they've got themselves in such a weak position in the overall war that when the battles come up, they don't have a chance. And so the rest of the chapter, what I want to talk about is how to gain a position of strength in the overall war. And then maybe we'll talk next time about the individual battles of temptation. The attraction of sin It comes from the soul's belief that happiness and satisfaction will come from that sin. We got that from chapter 4 when we were diagnosing desires. And so this essential part of worship, worshiping God, is looking to God as the only source of joy and the only source of satisfaction and looking to anything else for that is idolatry because it's an act of worship. So looking to something for your joy and satisfaction, the reason it's worship is because it places the object of your desire where only God belongs because He's supposed to be the only fountain from which we drink. So the first step in taking care of an enslavement to a sin is to depose the idol, whatever the idol is in the person's heart. And doing that is accomplished by convincing your soul of two things. The pleasure of sin is temporary, fleeting, and unsatisfying and leaves you with emptiness and depression, not joy. The experience of God's presence will be thoroughly satisfying and more delightful to the soul than the pleasure of sin. Your soul has to be convinced of that. And when the soul sees a particular sin as a source of satisfaction and joy, then every time that sin is resisted, It'll feel like a loss. Maybe you can drum up the willpower to say no, but then you walk away feeling like you're missing out. And it's a loss. It just feels like a loss. And as long as that's the case, there's not going to be lasting victory. When it feels like a loss to say no, there's not going to be lasting, because your soul is not convinced yet that God's presence is preferable to the pleasure of that sin, and it'll just be drawn like a magnet, and you'll be able to say no a few times, but eventually it's just going to pull you in like a tractor beam. And the only way to break the power of that tractor beam is to convince the soul that it's not a loss, it's a gain. When you resist, it's a gain, and there's more joy and more satisfaction. In the book, What's So Great About God, in the devotional book, the first 20 meditations are designed to retrain the soul to think about the presence of God as being gain and to actually prefer the presence of God over the pleasure of sin. So one of the things you could do is take the counselee, have him go through those meditations, maybe one a day, for three weeks and then when you get together discuss it with them and just help them go through the process of breaking that tractor beam. Now there's still some other steps. After you break the tractor beam there's still some just habitual behavior that's going to want to go back to that sin, but it's very important to break the tractor beam and just to jump to another metaphor besides a tractor beam. John Piper uses gravity. He gave this illustration about the solar system. He says the massive sun stands at the center of the solar system and holds all the planets in their proper courses. Even Pluto, 3.6 billion miles away, is held in orbit by the powerful gravitational pull of the sun. So it is with the supremacy of Christ in your life. All the planets of your life, your sexuality and desires, your commitments and beliefs, your aspirations and dreams, your attitudes and convictions, your habits and disciplines, your solitude and relationships, your labor and leisure, your thinking and feeling, all the planets of your life are held in orbit by the greatness and gravity and blazing brightness of the supremacy of Jesus Christ at the center of your life. And if he ceases to be the bright, blazing, satisfying beauty at the center of your life, the planets will fly into confusion and a hundred things will be out of control and sooner or later they will crash into destruction. I think it's a great illustration. In our struggle against sin, love for God has to be at the center. If love for God is lacking, then in effect the sun is removed from the solar system and all the little tricks and strategies we have for resisting temptation will be like little rockets trying to nudge Jupiter back into orbit and it's just not going to happen. The pull of an addiction on a heart can just feel inescapable. to pull it back into line is with a greater force, a more powerful force and only love for God can do that. Love for God, desire for the presence of God fueled by past delightful experiences of His presence. So you've just got to help the person begin to have those delightful experiences of His presence so that their soul can be convinced. And that's what the sermon series, Loving God with All Your Heart, has been all about and it may be good to take you constantly through that series. You've got to fight desire with desire. You override desire for sin by greater desire for something better. That's the way we fight. Thomas Chalmers called that the expulsive power of a new affection. I love that phrase. A new affection, a desire for a better thing, shoves that old desire out. So, how do we do that? First step, increase faith. 1 Corinthians 6, 9 to 11, you know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God. I read this before. You were drunkards and all that. That's what you were, but you were washed, you were sanctified. So those former addicts were transformed through sanctification. Sanctification is the process of becoming more holy through the work of the Spirit, through the normal progression of spiritual growth, which is by grace through faith. So it's living the normal Christian life, growing, progressing spiritually. This is step one for the addict. And when you're dealing with somebody who's addicted, Before you dive down deep into the nuts and bolts of their particular situation and what's going wrong in their heart and all that stuff, it's good to just back up and hit the basics. Are you growing? Are you doing the typical things that you need to do in order to grow spiritually, which is Scripture and fellowship and prayer? Those are the things that build our faith, strengthen our faith. Everywhere you look in the New Testament, the solution to any sin, any kind of sin, is always faith, right? Faith. We live by faith. We conquer sin by faith. That's how you grow. It's always by faith. And that makes sense because God is promising, this way will be more satisfying. Satan is promising, no, this way will be more satisfying. This sin, the pleasure of this sin will be worth whatever the consequence is. God is saying, no, it won't be worth it. This is better over here. Whichever way you go shows which one you believe. God is preaching a message to you, Satan is preaching a message to you, and you're just going to believe one or the other and that will decide which way you go. And so it's all about faith. It's who you believe, whose message you believe. The solution to every sin is to increase faith in the great and precious promises of God and everything that God has said. So it always comes back to faith. And the way to increase your faith is through scripture and fellowship and prayer. And I've expanded that out to the little class we did on the basics. We called it the basics of the Christian life. That was just a little four week class that we did. And we have that. It's on the website. There's videos and everything. And that class basically just went through how do you just have a routine, a daily routine, of Scripture, prayer and fellowship that will over time build your faith. And it might be good to take the counseling through that series and make sure that they're just on a track of growing spiritually. Because you're going to be banging your head against the wall. If they're missing Scripture, they're not learning from God's Word, or their prayer life is kaput, or they're isolated if there's no fellowship. If there's one of those three legs that's missing and they're just not growing spiritually, then you can tinker with all the nuts and bolts all you want in your counseling and you're not going to get the spiritual strength they need. They're not going to have the grace they need to have victory. So start with the basics. Make sure they're growing. And for the person who's caught in an enslaving sin, one of those three that tends to be neglected the most is fellowship. They might be reading their Bible, they might be praying and praying and asking God for, but fellowship. Sin just always has the tendency to push us toward privacy and away from intimacy. Church is all about intimacy. God wants us to deal with one another in close intimate relationships. The world is all about privacy. They worship privacy. They love privacy. They even found a right to privacy in the Constitution. They're all about privacy. Privacy and intimacy can't coexist. Adam and Eve, they had intimacy in the garden until sin came and then they went to privacy. They put on the fig leaves and they reverted to privacy. Sin pushes away from intimacy towards privacy because exposure is painful. Where there's sin, sin is ugly, and to have that exposed is a terrifying thought. There are people who will say, I'll do anything, just don't make me confess this, don't make me admit this to people, don't make me be exposed. And they're willing to do absolutely anything they can think of except make themselves accountable to others, expose their sin to others, but without help from other people, the battle will be lost. Attempting to win this war against the flesh by yourself is like a single soldier attempting to win World War II by himself. It is absolute folly. It will never work. In fact, you can point out to the person who has an enslaving sin that he's already proven that he doesn't have enough strength to win this war on his own, obviously, because he's enslaved. It's hard enough to win a war if you start out on equal footing, but the person enslaved, he's starting out behind bars in an enemy prison camp. Clearly, the enemy has the upper hand. And if there's powerful forces out there who are willing to be your ally and help you, and you refuse that help and cut yourself off from them, then you're cutting yourself off from a very important means of grace and you're going to be doomed to failure. And so you need to call your consulate to expose the sin to people who will help. And of all the things that you're going to call them to do, this is probably going to be the hardest. Because they'll say, I'm not ready for that. Give me electric shock therapy. I'll pay money. I'll do anything. Just don't make me expose what's in my heart to other people. and what they end up deciding at this point will very often determine whether it is success or failure. No Christian has the option of privacy. Whether you have an enslaving sin or not, you do not have the option of privacy. And I just want to shout this as loud as I can because it's a problem that is big in our culture and it's infected the church. In the church, everybody wants to be private. Everyone wants to function as his own personal PR firm so he can control how everybody thinks about him and everybody sees him and it's too risky to just open up and be seen. But the church as Christ designed it is no place for privacy. God calls us to love one another with intimacy and intimacy can't coexist with privacy. If a person's only interaction with the body of Christ is at a surface level, then he's sinning against God, he's sinning against the church, and he's sinning against himself. If he doesn't have close relationships with people in the church, exhort him to join a small group. not just to gain victory over his enslaving sin, but to be obedient to God's Word. He needs to be in close relationships. You can confront him with one another commands and just show him, look, you can't obey these commands without having close relationships, right? For example, Romans 12.15, rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. How are you going to do that without being in close relationship with those people? That requires knowledge of people, layers of knowledge. It first requires that If you're going to rejoice with those who rejoice, first of all, you have to know what's going on in their life, right? You've got to find out whether they just got fired or whether they just finally found a job. You've got to know that if you're going to rejoice with them or mourn with them. And when someone's really sad, you're not going to... I mean, if they're broken on the inside, you're not going to necessarily know that just from sitting three rows behind them in a worship service. people can manufacture a pretty good smile for a couple hours on Sunday mornings. And you're not going to find out about it in a 60 second conversation in the parking lot necessarily either. And the same goes for the rejoicing side. When people have special things that happen and they're really excited about them, you're not going to just get that through osmosis. You need to know what's going on in that person's life. We all know how hard it is to endure some terrible sorrow alone, right? I mean, have you ever done that? You've ever just had some horrible thing happen and you're all alone? Nobody there to carry it with you? That's a horrible thing. It's also actually somewhat of a painful thing to endure a blessing alone. Have you ever had to do that? Something you're just so excited about and there's nobody to tell. You know, you just want to tell somebody. I think it can be a very lonely thing when that happens. And so this verse requires us to know each other with a level of knowing that involves details of life so that we know when they're happy and sad. And that's one layer. And then another layer, even if you know the details of my life and you go on my Facebook page and you find out, oh yeah, this great thing finally happened or whatever, just knowing that information isn't going to automatically necessarily affect your emotions. You might be aware that I'm happy or sad and that doesn't necessarily make you rejoice or grieve. You grieve when someone you really love grieves. When you hear on the news that somebody won the lottery, you're not jumping up and down for joy to some random person that you don't know. You're full of joy when someone you really know well gets some great benefit. So it requires that command. You cannot obey that command without close relationships. James 5.16, here's another example, confession of sin. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. That's not a command that only applies to a few people in the church who have been there a long time and have developed relationships. This is for everybody, right? Everybody confess your sins to one another, every single Christian. Now, in order to have the kind of friendship with someone where you can confess your sins, it requires some time and effort, doesn't it? It requires a lot of time and effort and energy to develop a close enough friendship if it's going to be the kind of friendship that can handle real honesty. So much of the power behind enslaving sins is the secrecy. Look at what it did for David. He was so desperate to keep it secret that it ended up driving him to murder. Committed murder just to cover it up. And then it still didn't remain secret. It didn't even work. Satan, when a person is devoted to secrecy, Satan can use that devotion and drag them around by the nose and get them to do pretty much anything. And so once that secrecy is given up, once they confess, Satan just loses so much of his power. It's amazing the sense of relief people have. Very often, when people will finally come out and just confess, they'll say, it's such a load off. It's a relief. Satan can't control me anymore. I have nothing to lose. There's no threat that people are going to find out. And the shame and humiliation that they so dreaded It turns out not to be as unbearable as they thought it was going to be. It's still painful, but it's not as bad as you fear. In fact, a lot of times when you are open and you confess a sin, the reaction of the saints around you will be respect. I don't know how many times I hear people say that. I really respect that guy. He confessed that thing. I don't know how he had the courage to do that, but he's an honest man. That's a man of integrity. I respect him. even though he did some terrible sin. It happens all the time. And it opens up ministry to other people who are struggling with that sin. Ministry to others is another reason why close relationships is important. You need to impress this on the counselee too. It's not all about them escaping their sin, it's also about them helping other people escape their sins. There are people in the church who need your help to get out of sin, the counselee's help, and they're not going to have victory over their sin problem until they confess it. And in many cases they're not going to have the courage to confess it until they see you confess yours. And so confession can do a whole lot to benefit the whole church. We're not doing anybody any favors by putting up a facade of holiness and we come to the church pretending that our sin, we don't have any sin or our sin is really tiny and we hide everything. We're not doing anybody any favors. We think it makes people impressed with our holiness. They're not impressed with us. They're just either suspicious of us or intimidated by us but usually not impressed. What it will do is make them so they'll never be comfortable opening up to you, Mr. Perfect. Most people understand the importance of accountability in escaping enslaving sin. However, I want to say something just for a minute about accountability, because accountability is not all it's cracked up to be. It's not enough to just ask your friend, keep me accountable, hold me accountable. I want you to hold me accountable on this. You know, really, when you do that, you're kind of passing the buck, putting the responsibility on them that should be on you. Nobody can hold you accountable. Nobody can keep you accountable. It's impossible. If you don't make yourself accountable, then they can't keep you accountable. If you tell them, call me once a week and ask me this question, if your heart isn't willing to make it, to expose itself and to make itself accountable, then they'll call you every week and you'll find a way to be vague or to give an answer or to just flat out lie or something. It's not going to, them asking, they can't force it. It has to be you. You have to make yourself accountable. And one of the ways to do that is just develop a lifestyle of exposure, just an open lifestyle that can be seen, just no secrets. Ephesians 5.11, I have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them, for it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret, that everything exposed by the light becomes visible. Paul said, We have renounced secret and shameful ways. We do not use deception. By setting forth the truth plainly, we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. Nothing to hide. It's just wide open. We've made ourselves open. Even when there's a pattern of honest accountability with one trusted accountability partner, that's not enough because after a while, the effect that that has on your motivation kind of diminishes. At first, You don't want to have to confess, oh, I did this thing again, and so it's a motive for you. But after a while, you stumble, you confess it, they're really understanding, and then you stumble again and they're understanding again, and then after that happens enough time, pretty soon, you're not even afraid to have to confess it to them again. It's like, oh, they'll be understanding. And so that diminishes. So on top of the direct accountability, I'm not saying it's worthless. I'm just saying it's limited. And you should have a direct accountability, but on top of the direct accountability, there should be just a general exposed lifestyle. As much as possible, open up your lifestyle to exposure. You see, accountability, one of the problems with accountability is it requires a little bit too much rational thinking at the moment of temptation. It requires that you think, oh, if I commit this sin, then I'm going to have to confess to so-and-so. That'll be unpleasant, so I'm not going to confess. If you had that much rational presence of mind, you probably wouldn't be involved in this sin in the first place. The problem with sin is it makes us momentarily insane, and so the more open your lifestyle, the more exposed your lifestyle, the more It, even at the moment of temptation, gives you help from others. So it is foolish for an addict to have long segments of time when nobody knows where he is or what he's doing. It's just dumb if it can be avoided. His credit card statements and his bank statements should be an open book to his spouse or friend or whatever. Somebody should see that. How are you spending your money? How are you spending your time? Where are you? It should just be, you know, Tracy and I, we have the way we interact with each other. If somebody's leaving, you know, if I'm walking out of the door, I'll say, I'm going somewhere and I'm doing this thing and it'll take me this long. And I don't just have routinely long segments of time where she doesn't know where I am, what I'm doing. And that's healthy. That's a good thing. It's not that she's trying to, you know, police my life or monitor. interested in each other's lives enough to where we're one flesh. We're exposed to each other. We're open to each other. We know what we're doing, what we're thinking, where we're at. So if a man struggles with looking at pornography on his computer, he should have a window on his office door and have the monitor face the window if possible. And he should utilize monitoring software like Covenant Eyes that sends an email to his spouse or whoever showing what websites he's visited. Just as much exposure as possible. Alright, another command that requires close relationships, carry one another's burdens and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. Again, God didn't design you with enough strength to be able to carry your burdens by yourself. You can't live the Christian life on your own like Joshua Harris says, lone rangers are dead rangers. God didn't make us able to do that. without the encouragement and rebuke and reproof and exhortation and prayers and spiritual gifts of others feeding into your life, the burden is just going to be too much for you to bear, it'll be too heavy. And their burdens will be too heavy for them, too, because you're not going to be there to help carry their burdens either. So again, it requires close friendships. You can't bear a person's burdens If you don't even know them well enough to know what their burdens are, nor will they be able to help you until you've built a deep enough friendship so that they know not only what your burdens are, but what are your points of vulnerability? What are your points of weakness? At what times of day are you vulnerable? Things like that so they can really help you. What personality type do you have? Are you the type that needs, right now, you just need lots of tenderness and lots of compassion? Or are you the type that needs a good swift kick in the seat of the pants right now? And boy, it takes a good friend to know when one and when the other, right? Sometimes they know better than you. It takes a close friend and it takes time to, you know, that tailor-made grace takes some knowledge and that takes some effort building those kinds of friendships. So all of that is under the heading of fellowship. This is part of fellowship. You've got to have fellowship in order to increase your faith. Scripture, prayer, fellowship. Another principle for overcoming the flesh is walking by the Spirit, Galatians 5.16. So I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. That's pretty straightforward, right? You got a problem with the flesh? Walk by the Spirit. Problem solved. The power of the flesh is broken only when you walk by the Spirit. And the imagery of walking, and I've just been really, for many years now, just really trying to delve into what does it mean to walk by the Spirit? I mean, it's such a huge promise. You won't gratify the desires of the flesh if you do this. How do I walk by the Spirit? One thing that I know is that walking, the imagery of walking, it points to a progression of steps. Right? That's what walking is. And I think it's designed to underscore the moment-by-moment aspect of the Christian life. This is why I really don't like it when the NIV always translates walk with live. Because you just lose the whole image of that moment-by-moment, step-by-step thing. We need to be walking alongside the Spirit moment by moment. When people are caught up in enslaving sin, very often they get so focused on the sinful behavior that they kind of forget about the thought life. I don't want to get drunk again. I don't want to touch alcohol again. I'm not going to do it again. I'm not going to have to fall." And it's everything. Success or failure is 100% based on, did I drink? Did I not drink? Or whatever their addiction is. And they kind of forget about the importance of thoughts. And they think steps, walking, steps are all actions. Behaviors that are moving towards God or away from God. And they forget, no, steps are thoughts. Job 31.1, we talked about this before, "...I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl, for what is man's lot from God above and his heritage from Almighty on high? Is it not ruin for the wicked and disaster for those who do wrong? Does he not see all my ways and count my every step?" He's counting my every step, therefore I can't have lustful thoughts. See that? Thoughts. Lustful looks, thoughts, those are steps that God is seeing and counting. Every thought that you have is a step in some direction. And the addict needs to understand this. You know, the addict will resolve with all his heart, okay, I'm not going to do this behavior again. I'm never going to do this again. And then when temptation hits, he falls and he's mystified. What happened? Why did I fall? I was so resolved. And he doesn't realize that leading up to that temptation, he was allowing his mind to just run unhindered in the direction of that sin. And then he's shocked when he arrives at his destination that he's been walking towards. It shouldn't be any surprise. If you walk in a direction, you're going to end up there, right? And so, gaining control of the actions will never happen apart from gaining self-control of the thought life. That's why the sinner is called to repent, not only of his ways, but also of his thoughts. In Isaiah 55-7, let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the Lord and he will have mercy on him and to our God for he will freely pardon." So repentance has to be thorough and when there's a willingness to give up the behavior but an unwillingness to let go of those thoughts, that's not repentance. He has to forsake his thoughts. Counselee needs to learn that don't focus just on behavior. Focus on a step-by-step, moment-by-moment, second-by-second walking with the Holy Spirit. Your thoughts not departing from the path. Thinking what He wants you to think in His ways. Things that are revealed in His Word. Romans 13, 14. clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh. You see, wrong thoughts are like a snowball. I mean, if you just picture a big snowball bouncing on top of a steep hill, once you start it rolling in a certain direction, you just can't stop it. To stop a thought process from going in a certain direction, it has to be stopped at the very early stages. Otherwise, it's very hard to stop. So we covered that in a fair amount of detail in the section, Correcting Wrong Thoughts, back in chapter 6. So you can revert back to chapter 6, Correcting Wrong Thoughts, on how to get control, self-control of the thought life. So in summary, just real quick, what is the solution to these life-dominating or enslaving sins? Break the power of that Tractor beam, by loving God, convincing your soul that God's presence is preferable. Number two, increase your faith through scripture prayer and especially fellowship. And number three, walk by the Spirit. Step by step, walk by the Spirit. Now, a couple of resources I want to mention. One, for accountability, we have that accountability form on our website on treasuringgod.com in the resource library. If you go to the articles, page, then there's a form there, accountability. There's one for men, one for women. And what we do for the leadership of the church is we want all the leaders to be in an accountability relationship with somebody. We have them use that form and we tell them, take the form and just change it. Delete whatever you want to delete, add whatever you want to add, make it useful for you. Because remember, accountability is only as good as the person making themselves accountable. You can't hold anybody accountable. Tell them to tailor make the form to be the right kind of questions that they know they need to be asked each week. And then just have them fill out the form once a week and exchange it with you or another accountability partner. It's a very helpful tool, a very, very helpful tool. And then the monitoring software I already mentioned, Covenant Eyes. And then I also want to mention a Bible study called Setting Captives Free. This is an online study. It's a ministry devoted to helping people escape enslaving sins. It is outstanding. It's a Bible study that is designed not around little tricks of resisting temptation like most of them are, but rather it's based on this whole principle of breaking that tractor beam, learning to love God and delight in God and see Him as the fountain that will satisfy the thirst of the soul. They're very good about that. It's a good Bible study. I recommend the Bible study even if you're not addicted to anything, it's just a good Bible study. And there's a whole bunch of them. It started out just for pornography and sexual sin. And that's how it started, but then they started making more of them for different kinds of addictions. So the one for pornography and sexual sin is called The Way of Purity. There's one for homosexuality called The Door of Hope. There's another one for teens. It's a Teen Purity Challenge, a 31-day purity challenge. Most of them are 60 days. This purity challenge, one for teens, is 30. And there's a thing for spouses that are struggling with, if your spouse is struggling with sexual sin, this helps you. That one's called a united front. They've got one for overeating. They've got one for anorexia and bulimia. They got one for drinking and drunkenness. They got one for gambling, for smoking, for cutting and self-injury. They even have one for anxiety, depression and fear. It's a great program. What it does is each day that they do the Bible study, you log on, you do that day's study. You answer some questions and then they assign you a mentor. And the mentor communicates with you during the whole 60 days or however long you take to go through it. The mentor communicates via email with you. And each time at the end of the day when you complete your Bible study, you answer all the questions and then there's a few accountability questions at the bottom. You answer those and then it automatically sends an email to your mentor and then to anyone else you want it to be sent to. And then they send an email and encourage you and pray for you and all that. And it's free. The whole thing is free. So anyway, I recommend that. Okay, any questions? Yeah, oh yeah, I definitely acknowledge that there are substances that can cause dependence. And that term, I don't use the word dependence as a definition for addiction because it's not broad enough. But I do believe that that dependence is a reality. That is, there are substances where if you start taking them, you have to keep taking them, otherwise you'll undergo horrible withdrawal symptoms. In fact, there are some substances where if you stop them cold turkey, you'll die. You can die. Alcohol can do that. If you get dependent on large doses of alcohol and then you just stop, it can kill you. And benzodiazepines can do that. Tranquilizers. You get on those and stop suddenly without the help of your doctor. It can kill you. So yeah, no question about it. There is such a thing as tolerance. There is such a thing as dependence. And I don't dispute that at all. However, tolerance and dependence cannot force you to decide to take a drug. If you are, you know, suppose you get on some pain medication that your doctor gave you, or whatever, and you take that and now you're trying to get off of it, and then you have these horrible withdrawal symptoms, those withdrawal symptoms can make you really, really, really want to take that drug, but they can't force you to take that drug. The decision to take more of the drug is always controlled by the will, never a function of just chemicals. And the decision to engage in the behavior is part of the problem of addiction. The reason I don't define addiction by neuroadaptation, just withdrawal symptoms, something that can cause withdrawal symptoms or something that involves tolerance, a couple of reasons. If that's all you have, then you're not necessarily addicted. I know they use that language in the hospital, but I wouldn't use the word addicted because it's possible to have that and to not continually choose to stay on that drug. The other thing is, if you just define addiction with those terms, it doesn't explain certain kinds of addictions. For example, gambling. There are people who are very addicted to gambling. I mean, to the point where it's destroying their life. And yet, there's no tolerance. It's not that they have to gamble more and more and more and more and more to get the same effect. And there's no withdrawal. If they stop gambling, there's no physical withdrawal symptoms. They don't end up in a hospital or, you know, cold sweats or anything like that. They're unhappy, but it's not withdrawal symptoms. And yet, it's a real addiction, right? And so this definition can't really handle things like that. So yeah, I didn't mean to say that there's no such thing as tolerance, no such thing as dependence. They're very, very real. I just wouldn't make that all there is to addiction. Addiction also has to have the component of deciding to continue with that behavior. Good clarification, thanks. Anything else? Okay, so I said it's a very, Romans 7, 18 is a very different principle than the one in the 12 steps. The 12 steps are saying that you can't, even if you're a believer, you cannot do anything about your addiction problem. What Romans 7 is saying is controversial. There are some who say that Romans 7 is talking about the life of an unbeliever. They can't overcome sin problem. Other people say it's talking about the life of a Christian. And if that's the case, if it's talking about a Christian, then it might be saying that there's no way to eliminate sin altogether from your life. But what it's definitely not saying, what Romans 7 and 18, regardless of which interpretation of Romans 7 you land on, it's definitely not a contradiction of 1 Corinthians 10 and Philippians 4. It's not saying that we're powerless. in the decision of whether or not to commit a particular sin. So I'm not totally sure on the Romans 7 thing. My take on Romans 7, my tentative view, is it's a minority view. In fact, I have yet to see anybody else that actually holds this view. But to me, it seems like Romans 7 is not talking about unbelievers in general or believers in general. If you're not familiar with Romans 7, the big problem with Romans 7 is this. There seems to be too much failure for it to be a Christian. And there seems to be too much love of God's Word for it to be a non-Christian. So if you hear anybody defending their view of Romans 7, it's going to sound compelling. Because if you hear somebody that says, no, this has got to be a non-Christian has to be a non-Christian because there's nothing but failure. Nothing but failure. 100% failure in that chapter. It's not that he lots of times fails or most of the time fails. He always, 100% of the time, fails in that chapter. There's no victory whatsoever. That just goes against Romans 6. And so, it doesn't seem to fit the Christian life. 100% failure. Now, people who will argue, no, no, no, no. He can't be a non-Christian. He's got to be a Christian. First of all, it's Paul. Why would he suddenly be a non-christian in chapter 8 of Romans? It's out of the blue. And secondly, he loves God's law. He longs to obey God's law. He loves it. That's not a non-christian. Non-christians don't love God's law. And so there's too much love of God's law for it to be a non-christian. So I acknowledge the weight of both of those. And so as I'm studying through Romans, and I just look at the context of the whole book of Romans, it seems to me that what Paul has been describing is when a person comes to the Lord, the way it works, the way the gospel works, is the law comes and crushes the person, kills the person. And it drives them to desperation and then they respond by faith and then they're regenerated or they're justified. So that's kind of the flow of Romans and I think what Romans 8 is, is a picture of that happening. It's a picture of a person who has been crushed by the law and is in the process of being enlightened by the Holy Spirit You see, there's a drawing of the Holy Spirit that takes place when a person becomes a Christian. They're dead. They're dead in their sins, right, to begin with. And then when they come to Christ, there's an opening in the eyes. There's an awakening. Back here, the law doesn't really crush them. They don't care about God's law. But then the Holy Spirit allows God's law to have a crushing, killing effect that makes them desperate for Christ and they respond in faith. That process, it's a mysterious process of how that all happens. And I think Romans 8 is a picture of it actually happening. This is what happens when a person becomes a Christian. And you've seen it, right? You've seen a person, when they're a non-Christian, they just don't care at all about God's Word. They don't care at all about God's law. And you share the gospel with them and it just bounces like a brick wall. But then there comes a point where it starts to have an effect on them. And they're starting to realize their guilt. And they're starting to be broken over their sin. And they're starting to be crushed. The law is starting to kill them and destroy them. And that's all the Holy Spirit working in them, right? But are they Christian yet? No. They haven't yet come to faith in Christ. It's part of this process of the Spirit drawing them. And then when they come to the desperation after being crushed by the law and they turn to Christ in faith, that's when they're saved. And so, to me, it seems like that's what Romans 7 is describing. that process, that mysterious process that's happening when a person is going from being a non-Christian to a Christian. Now, again, I don't know of anybody else that holds that view, and I hold it kind of loosely because nobody else holds it, but it's the only view that I can think of that doesn't have the serious problems that the other two views have. Anyway, all that aside, to answer your question, I think that whatever view you take of Romans 7, any of those now three views, We can't take the view that as a Christian, I have to say I'm powerless. Next time I have an impulse to drink or my enslavement to drinking, my enslavement to this sin or that sin is forever and I can't be transformed. That's what the twelve steps are saying and that is not what Romans 7 is saying. Finished six minutes early. After I pray, you can take the rest of the night off. All right, let's pray. Lord God, thank you for this time together. We pray that you would bring fruit from it and that you would make the principle stick in our minds and that you would free us, Lord, from the things that we have enslaved ourselves to. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.