I am an addict and a sinner saved by grace through faith.
One of the strangest aspects of an addicted life is doing the same thing over and over while each time hoping for a better or different outcome. When I finally get tired of this, I blame someone else for the reason things aren’t going the way I want them to go. I feel entitled, as if because I know so much and I am me, “Don’t you know!” There can’t be anything greater than me!
The common perception most people have about addicts is that they are using needles with drugs or are alcoholics stumbling about and blurring their speech! However, addictions are far more common than these narrow perceptions. One can be addicted to having to be right, or addicted to a person or relationship that is unhealthy. One can also be addicted to false ideas or beliefs! These all come under the heading of “Mind-Altering.” Whichever one you are familiar with there is a good chance that holding to this belief, relationship, or activity genders within some the feeling of being special, unique, and superior—usually toward others. Reality is their worst enemy. We will do whatever it takes to appear perfect, and to look “good” on the outside no matter the chaos erupting on the inside. Addiction is all about self and pride—all about us feeling better in the moment, no matter the cost or who is hurt in the process. Family, children, careers, marriages, homes, property, and reputation are sacrificed outright for our own selfishness.
I was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and had a long history with methamphetamines and then crack. I wanted to stop. I would pray, “God help me to stop!” but nothing would happen and for a good reason. I was the problem—self and pride were the true addiction. God requires all glory; helping me would be inconsistent with me dying to self.
Finally one day as I was smoking a large quantity of crack in a desert wash, I began to cry, then to weep, and then it was like a prayer was squeezed from my lungs. “O God, this is me at my best—me using my best thinking! My best efforts will be to get more crack. I am powerless and weaker than weak—O God, have mercy on me! You know that I cannot stop, but you can come right through this crack smoke and deliver me.”
He did. If any man tries to tell you that Jesus is too pure to be with a sinner smoking crack, never believe him again—he is a liar and illiterate in the things pertaining to God.
Because I was still smoking, I avoided the verse in 1 Corinthians 3:16, 17 which says, “Surely you know that you are God’s temple, where the Spirit of God dwells. Anyone who destroys God’s temple will himself be destroyed by God, because the temple of God is holy; and you are that temple” (REB). It condemned me, and so by avoiding it “I wasn’t condemned any more”!
One of the greatest principles that came from the 1888 messengers, A. T. Jones, E. J. Waggoner, and E. G. White, was to take the Bible as it reads and to depend wholly upon the Word to accomplish that which it says. So let us explore a few statements and texts.