The Puzzle Of Addictions – Part 1 of 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Some marriages are short-circuited by an addiction to debt or to pornography. No matter what we're addicted to, addiction is the blinding absorption of sin. Today, advice from 1 John chapter 1 on making the move from walking in darkness to walking in the light.

From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, is it fair to say that addictions can develop well into a marriage and that there might have been no way to see them coming before saying, I do? Dave, the obvious answer to your question is yes. But also your question makes me think back to the first message in this series, which has to do with red flags and how many times there are those who in the dating relationship missed red flags.

But either way, addictions can destroy a marriage and the impact upon children is huge. That's why these messages are so critical. I want to ask you a question today. Are you blessed as a result of the ministry of Running to Win? Did you know that if you answer yes, it's because other people just like you made an investment in this ministry?

Would you consider becoming what we call an endurance partner? That's someone who stands with us regularly with their prayers and their gifts. Of course you need info. So I hope that you can write this down. Go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com. And when you're there, you click on the endurance partner button.

At the end of this message, I'm going to be giving you this contact info again. Meanwhile, pray and ask the Lord whether he would have you become a member of the Running to Win family. Today's topic is the topic of addictions. Addictions are tearing our families apart. Let me list just a few. First of all, at the top of the list, I put alcoholism.

Think of the destruction that has happened because of alcoholism, the family beatings, the family secrets, the family poverty. I was in Coors Stadium a couple of years ago. Somebody took us to a baseball game there. It was in Denver, I believe.

Gorgeous stadium. In fact, we ate and we could watch the game as we ate and it dawned on me later that this whole thing was built basically on the backs of alcoholics. Oh, I know there's some people who drink and they're not alcoholics, but it's the alcoholics that are selling their homes and pushing their families into poverty to get that drink. I list also gambling. Oh, you say it's not an addiction.

Oh yes it is. We don't have time for the stories. I must hurry on. Drugs. Cocaine addict in New York chained himself to a radiator because he said to himself, I can't get another fix. And yet he was able to somehow get that radiator loose with his free hand and eventually took the thing and carried it out on the street for more drugs. And then he says cocaine has a voice when it calls me.

I must go. Think about that. And then I suppose the one that we are most conscious of is sexual addictions of various kinds, compulsions, too many to list. But I do want to speak about pornography and the internet just in passing.

I told you many years ago that when we got onto the internet in our home, AOL, I always remember it, America online. The day we hooked up that night, God gave me a demonic dream. It was horrible. I've only had three in my lifetime and one was that evening. It was a dream in black and white that I can still describe today. Three evil spirits had me up against a corner in the house and I was totally paralyzed and they were destroying me. You imagine how I felt when I woke up and oh, thank God, that was only a dream. I interpreted it as a gift from God. What God was saying is you now have something in your home that demons can use to destroy you. And whenever I've been tempted to go to the other side of the website and type in some of those other words where sexual material would come up, I think of that dream and that warning from God.

And I thank God for that warning. If you're a parent today and you don't have filters on your computer and you have children in the home because you trust them, could I ask you a question? Tell me later, which planet do you live on? Which one?

Or are you just orbiting somewhere close to Pluto? What do you mean you trust your children? I've met children who were trusted by their parents who are hooked on pornography.

It's power is great and when young people discover it as they do now at about the age of 11 and 12, it is a horrendous burden that continues to dog them unless they're intercepted. So what you need to do is before you eat, you don't need to eat, you could survive without eating. Before you eat, go to the Moody Church website and there we have a link that will help you to identify various software programs that can help your computer have a filter. It's more important that you do that than eating.

But I do need to give you a parenthesis. If you find your children into pornography, don't shame them. There isn't a child in the world who said, you know, my parents found out and they shamed me and therefore my appetite for pornography no longer exists.

Are you kidding me? Shame becomes the fuel of this addiction, even though it will become more secret, of course, to avoid the shame. What you do is you talk to them and you confess your own struggles with purity.

Haven't we all had them? And so in humility you say, look, I want to help you through this because this is a quagmire. This is dangerous stuff that's going to dog you for the rest of your life. So let's work together as a family. Let's talk about these things. Open communication is one of the best ways to prevent addictions and it's one of the best ways to come out of it. Parents, please don't be so judgmental. Don't you have enough of your own sins to make you humble and broken?

I hope you do. What is an addiction? An addiction is a false promise. It promises you this sense of exhilaration that you can have whenever you want. I love the definition given by someone.

It can't be improved upon. No way. This is it. An addiction is nothing more than the self absorption of sin. It's the self absorption of sin, the blinding.

There's the word I forgot to mention. The blinding self absorption of sin. That's what an addiction is and what a prison it is. Addictions come along as our friend. Oh, you'll be there and whenever you need some exhilaration, I'll be there for you and you can manipulate me and this God, this idol is under your control and you can have it whenever you plan to have it.

Comes as a friend, but it ends up being a tremendous, tremendous tyrant and will control you and Jesus was so right that you commit sin and you become its servant and now you are taking orders from the voices that call you and you can't get out. What I'm going to do in the next 20 minutes with God's help is wander into Satan's territory and see if we can't win some victories today. You in favor of that? Anybody says, Pastor Lutzer, let's see if Jesus can win some victories today. But of course we can't do it. I've never felt more helpless than I am today preaching this message.

Who in the world is going to be able to go and untie the knots and deal with the shame and the forgiveness and the deliverance? I can't do it. My sermons can't do it. Wives, you can't do it for your husbands.

You probably can't even do it for yourself. God has to come. Father, I ask in Jesus name that you'll make every person listening to this sermon open. We pray that their mouths and their hearts would be attuned. I pray that no one will leave because of conviction and ask Lord Jesus that by your spirit you will do which we wouldn't even think of doing and that is to come to deliver your people from their sins.

That's your work. We trust the Holy Spirit because if the Holy Spirit doesn't do it, we're helpless. Help every man to pray here, every woman to pray here, every young person and every adult to call on you and say God help us in Jesus name. Amen. The Bible says in the book of Proverbs and it is so accurate, isn't it? Chapter 5 verse 22. Don't turn to it.

Just know that it's there. It says that the wicked man is bound by the cords of his sin. Don't you like the imagery?

And that's exactly true. Bound by the cords of his sin and what are some of those cords? Let me list them for you very quickly. First of all, the cord of euphoria. You see what the addict does is he goes into this other world that he can stimulate and that he can generate and he can leave the world of boredom behind and he can go into this exciting world. Just the idea of planning his next fix gives him an increase in heart rate as the sensation begins to pulse through his body.

Just the thought of it. And the thing is he can go from this false world to the real world and nobody even knows it. So nobody knows what he's doing on the weekends and he's able to function, he's able to hold a job, he's able to converse, but in the back all of those other things are going on and he can have it whenever he wants it or plans for it.

This sensation, this euphoria. Second chain that holds him bound is self-worship. Self-worship is known as narcissism.

Remember narcissists, they're very interesting people. They concern only themselves. They have no concern for anybody else. Does the alcoholic father who comes home and beats his kids, does he really have sympathy for those children? No, of course he doesn't or he'd stop doing it.

What he thinks is they have it coming. He can't enter into his wife's pain. He can't enter into the burdens that other people bear.

He is filled with self, self-worship and this self-worship causes him tremendous problems and he's totally unaware of the damage he's doing. Third, denial. I've told you before that denial isn't just a river in Egypt.

Denial exists in all families, but there's nowhere where it is found as much as in an alcoholic family, a drug infested family, a family where there's immorality or incest going on and the denial is this. First of all, the person who's doing it shifts responsibility. It's not my fault. It's somebody else's fault. It's my employer's fault. It's my wife's fault.

It's circumstances. It's God's fault. And so he fails to take responsibility. He doesn't own what he's doing because he's blind to it. Remember the blinding self-absorption of sin.

What a description. So you see, he lives in this cocoon and the cocoon isolates him and insulates him from all of the lies that he has so willingly believed. He loves these lies.

He tells himself lies and he keeps believing these lies. You know, in the New Testament, there is the light darkness motif. Jesus used it.

Someday I want to study this even in more detail. You know, Jesus said, men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. You know that he said that. Imagine that men love darkness because he says they don't want to come to the light list.

Their deeds be exposed. Come with me to Mexico more than 40 years ago. I had a sister and brother-in-law who were missionaries there and so I went to visit them and we stayed in a motel and this motel had a kitchenette in it with two or three bedrooms. We went out one evening, we came back, we flipped on the light. There must have been a hundred roaches with all of their aunts and their uncles and their kids. All of them were on that kitchen counter and they just scattered like that. In two seconds you couldn't see a roach. They knew exactly where the cracks were.

They knew where the holes were and everybody was running for cover. Maybe some of you are feeling like that today. You may be listening on the internet.

You may be listening by radio and you say this is going to get very difficult for me and you'd like to bail out. There's a big difference though between you and a roach. Let me tell you that you my friend are created in God's image. You are important.

You're going to live somewhere forever. You are a human being in the image of God and you are loved by God. Would you let God put his arms around you today and pull you close and say come to me. Don't let your addiction draw you away from me but may it be the means by which you are brought to me.

Now with that background of light and darkness let's go into the characteristics of darkness. Now we're in first John. I could have used many different passages to preach this because the whole storyline of the Bible has to do with sin and redemption and once we understand you know that an addiction is the self-absorption of sin then there's hope.

If it's just a sickness we have no guarantee that God always heals sicknesses but sin that's another matter. He's got a good cure for that but notice it says in first John this is first John now chapter one and it would be on page 1021 I believe in your pew bibles there you should be following. This is the message that we heard from him and proclaim to you that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness we lie and do not practice the truth but if we walk in the light as he is in the light we have fellowship one with another.

Now folks I can't go any farther than that without making a comment. Are your bibles open? Do you see the text? Do you remember some grammar? Kid said to another who made a grammatical error where's your grammar?

He said she's up there with a grandpa. Do you remember the meaning of the word antecedent? Doesn't it refer when you have a pronoun it refers to the antecedent?

Now listen let's read this again. If we walk in the light verse seven as God is in the light that's the he very clearly. If we walk in the light as God is in the light you'll notice it says we have fellowship with one another. Most interpreters say oh that means I have fellowship with you and you have fellowship with me but that's not the antecedent.

The antecedent is God. If we walk in the light and light here refers to God's purity and his holiness. If we walk in the light as God is in the light guess what we have fellowship one with another. We have fellowship with God and God has fellowship with us.

Can it get any better than that? If you were to die what would you like to have on your tombstone? I think the greatest honor and it won't be on mine because I don't think I'm worthy of it but could you imagine a tombstone that says he or she walked with God?

I can't believe it. Last night I was outside praying in the evening and there were the stars and I thought wow to walk with God. If I accomplish nothing if I don't preach any sermons if I don't write any books if I can just walk with God and he has fellowship with me and I with him that's the end of it.

I mean there's nothing more. Now notice though what are the characteristics of darkness? I'm going to give you some characteristics of darkness there in verse six and then we're going to go into characteristics of light and then I'm going to paint the picture of how you go from darkness to light.

Aren't you glad you joined us today? First of all characteristics of walking in darkness. What are those characteristics? Shame. Some of you were brought up in what could be called a shame-based home. A shame-based home where there was alcoholism and drugs and you had to keep the secret for the rest of the family and you've lived with shame and that shame dogs you and that is all false shame by the way it's shame imposed upon you. Parents have so much power to impose false shame on children. I could give examples but there's some things that you and I have done that we should be ashamed about.

Some shame is good it should lead us to God but imagine living your whole life and shame. Secondly fear. Fear of being discovered. Fear of giving up your addiction. I've talked to people who said I am my addiction.

The thought of me doing without this bottle is unthinkable. It is there when I'm rich and when I'm poor and usually it makes me poor when I'm rich but it is there for me and so this addiction becomes you see the basis of our identity. Some of you are into sexuality various forms.

You say the sexuality is who I am how do you expect me to give that up and so you fear what would happen if God were to invade your life. Let me give you a third characteristic of darkness and that is huge self-deception. Self-deception. In fact the Bible says here if we say that we have no sin we make him a liar that's in verse 10 and elsewhere it says we deceive ourselves.

In fact verse 6 we have fellowship with him if we say we do while we walk in darkness we lie. Huge self-deception. How does an addict live with self-deception?

Couple of suggestions that he lives with. First of all self-deceptions I should say a couple of them number one I can quit whenever I want I'm in charge that's a lie of course you're not in charge. The addiction is.

You're like Mark Twain who said of course I can give up smoking I've done it a thousand times sure. The self-deception that you are in charge when you're not. Let me give you another and that is consequences. I can handle the consequences. I'll follow the devil today and I'll deal with God tomorrow and handle the consequences. Somebody said a man who is committing adultery who is being unfaithful to his wife is like somebody who chooses to jump out of the 60th floor of a high-rise and after he gets enough nerve to jump out of the 60th floor he says to himself as he passes the 25th floor ah this is great the exhilaration really is wonderful.

But he's on the 25th floor and you know where he's going onto the street. So you see addicts they rationalize it all. I can take care of it and so what you have is shame fear and huge massive self-deception. Well if that's what walking in darkness is what does walking in light mean? You'll notice it says God is light and him is no darkness at all if we say that we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness. If we deny that part of us if we deny that part of us that is dark we can't have fellowship with him.

We lie we do not practice the truth but if we walk in the light as he is in the light. So what does it mean to walk in the light? First of all light reveals to us who we are. You've had the experience and we used to as children when we used to go to a town you realize that I was born on a farm six miles from a town of 75 people.

Going to town was great it had a store where we could buy some candy and gum but it also had a street light and you know as kids you could you could go away from the street light and you'd have this long shadow. In fact you couldn't even see the end of the shadow but as you came closer the shadow became shorter and shorter and then when you stood right under the street lamp basically there was no shadow. You see light reveals who we are because it's not who I say I am it's who God says I am. Light comes you see and darkness is what I think of myself and light is what God thinks of me he sees me in the light so as I come to the light with my darkness the shadows become shorter and suddenly I'm revealed as to who I am but I stand there and I finally acknowledge that God was right about me. Well my friend today have you come to the light? Christ is the light of the world and I want you to come to him I urge you to do that. We here at Running to Win are very gospel centered and I want you to realize that this ministry goes to 50 different countries in seven different languages and every time we hear from an Arabic listener my own heart is blessed. I'm holding in my hands a letter from someone who says I didn't know anything about Christianity when I first contacted your ministry so I asked if they could tell me more about Jesus. As I learned more I began absorbing the information eagerly your ministry has given me a sense of hope let's keep walking this path together. You my friend have a part in testimonies just like this. Would you consider becoming an endurance partner?

That's someone who stands with us regularly with their prayers and their gifts I like to think of it as becoming a member of the Running to Win family. Very quickly hope that you have a pen or pencil handy here's what you can do go to rtwoffer.com that's rtwoffer.com and when you're there you click on the endurance partner button or pick up the phone right now and call us at 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard Chicago Illinois 60614. Running to Win comes to you from the Moody Church in Chicago. Next time more on the self-deception that addicts use to justify their behavior and how to break free. Don't miss our next program. Thanks for listening for Pastor Erwin Lutzer this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.