Choosing Our Addictions
Romans 6:12-23
by Jim Westmoreland
This morning I want to talk about two kinds of people, sinners who think they are saints, and saints, who know they are sinners. "Sin" is a word that many people don't like to use or hear used. "We all make mistakes." "No one is perfect." "Hey, I'm only human." We have many phrases that are intended to explain, to deflect the bright light of truth and to excuse our bad behavior. "Sin" is a word that cuts to the bone. It bypasses all of our excuses and convoluted explanations and rationalizations. To talk of "Sin" implies the eyes and ears of a divine audience, not just the observations of those around us.
We try to be sophisticated in our glossing and covering up about the nature of our short-comings. We are like the drunk husband who quietly snuck up the stairs late one night. He looked in the bathroom mirror and bandaged the bumps and bruises he'd received in a fight earlier that evening. He then proceeded to climb into bed, smiling at the thought that he'd pulled one over on his wife. When morning came, he opened his eyes, and there stood his wife. "You were drunk last night weren't you!" "No, honey." "Well, if you weren't, then who put all the band-aids on the bathroom mirror?"
If we are not careful, our desire to be religious can lead to great dishonesty. We know what is on the inside, but we deny it to ourselves as much as possible and pretend it is not there. God sees our efforts as futile and comically sad, like the drunk putting band-aids on the bathroom mirror.
Paul used the image of slavery to talk about how sin controls our lives. When Paul uses terms such as slavery and bondage to sin, he is drawing upon the experience of the ancient exodus, when Israel was delivered from slavery into the freedom of the promised land. Everything that Paul writes about the experience of freedom in Jesus Christ is grounded in this exodus story.
If discipleship and Christian growth are a journey, then it means that we like Israel, must recognize that our journey toward freedom and maturity in Christ is a journey that always begins with the places in our lives where we struggle with images and sounds of bondage. They are distorted images of us and others, distortions of success and wholeness. They are the feelings of failure and worthlessness, and the empty hollowness of pretended success.
Slavery, like sin, is not a word that we relate easily to. Though unpleasant and always a word used to describe someone else's problem is the word "addiction." It is a more modern word that describes the slavery of spirit that we fall victim to.
We are all too familiar with the addictions to drugs that are described in the news, in movies and the circle of our friends and families. There are many. They are not made up, but are all too real. According to federal drug officials, just 10 years ago, more than 27,000 people visited hospital emergency rooms because of heroin-related emergencies in 1994. Compare that to 1,250 such admissions just 6 years earlier, and the explosiveness of the tragedy becomes even clearer.
Heroin use has continued to increase. In fact, use of all drugs by young people between the ages of 12 and 17 rose 105 percent between 1992 and 1995. Every week we read about that behavior of people who have become enslaved to "meth" use, people who eventually risk and give up everything that is of value to them for drug use.
Why would people who know the harmful effect of drugs use them anyway? Because we were all born with a tendency to give in to sin. All sin can be described in terms of bondage, slavery or addiction.
Our addictions may be more subtle than drug or substance abuse. The temptation to abuse prescription drugs, alcohol and food are easy addictions to target. Our addictions to bad choices and wrongdoing, to the wrong use of the internet for pornography and for unhealthy conversations in chat rooms, to intemperate living and to selfish lifestyles catch us up in a downward spiral away from God. Shall we continue to offer our minds, hearts and bodies in ways that lead nowhere beyond self-acclaim and worse, misery? Shall we give ourselves to pursuits that enhance the ways of death?(1) In Romans 6:21 Paul writes, "What advantage did you get from the things of which you not are ashamed? The end of those things is death."
Paul described our helplessness toward sin's power. Even this dynamic apostle recognized his inability, apart from God's power, to fight sin's demand for control. So what did Paul do? Proclaim himself a helpless victim and feed his addiction? Far from it. Knowing his weakness, Paul sought spiritual freedom through Jesus Christ.(2)
As much as Paul talked about freedom in Christ, he also recognized that we would find something to be enslaved to. We would find something to give ourselves to. Would it be "not god", or would it be God? Paul's notion of freedom is radically different from the way we normally think of it. For Paul, we are set free to be servants of God. "Set free in order to be a servant?" Now that is quite an assertion.
Commenting on this notion of Christian freedom, N. T. Wright says, "freedom from the slavery to sin involves a new kind of 'liberated slavery,' obedience to God who loves us and seeks out our true freedom, our true humanness." Our freedom gives us choices to make with our lives.
While defending our freedom, Paul seems to say that slavery is a fact of human life. But he doesn't stop there and give up. He moves to the question, "To whom will one be enslaved? To sin with all its self-serving and self-destructive habits that lead ultimately to death . . . or to God, with the habits of life that display the grace of Christ and lead one to eternal life?"(3)
Will we be addicted to sin and its destructiveness or to God? There are good habits and bad habits. Addiction has to do with control. Whether it is called slavery, bondage or addictions, it has to do with power and control. Will our lives be empowered by an incomplete view of life that is limited by and filtered by sin? Or will we exercise our freedom and choose to be controlled by the goodness and love of God in Christ?
Everything has its costs and consequences. A man was reading about an "eat-all-you-want" diet, to a friend when he said, "I knew there'd be a catch to it. You have to run seven hundred miles a day!"(4) There is a catch to sin. It has consequences that often live on past the time we are forgiven for our sin. Like babies conceived during affairs, the results and consequences of our sins eventually grow and produce the fruit of what we did. We pray for forgiveness and for crop failure. We are assured of forgiveness, but we, our families, loved ones and children often live with the results of our sins.
Over and over the scriptures teach us about the law of the harvest. "Whatever a person plants, that is what we will harvest." It is not without our past that we experience the grace and forgiveness of God. It is with our past. Each of us has things in our lives where we have been enslaved by sin. Then, Jesus comes and we are set free! Our past is still there. That which we are so ashamed of is still there! Why? It is such an embarrassment. It is such a burden that reminds us and maybe others of some dark things about us. Our sinful past is a reminder to us and a testimony to others that eternal life is the free gift of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (v. 23).
Paul's answer to being a slave to sin is to choose something bigger and more powerful to be a slave to. Be a slave to God. We can be addicted to things that will bring us down and destroy us and damage our relationships with others. Or, we can choose to be addicted to God, addicted to the wonder and power of receiving and giving love to others, addicted to experiencing the liberating power of forgiveness and addicted to living a life that blesses others and gives joy and affirmation to every person that God gives us in our lives.
When we deny the deceitfulness of sin and rationalize why it is not really a sin for us we are like the woman who decided to raise a racoon as a pet. Gary Richmond, a former zoo keeper, had this to say: Raccoons go through a glandular change at about 24 months. After that they often attack their owners. Since a 30-pound raccoon can be equal to a 100-pound dog in a scrap, I felt compelled to mention the change coming to a pet raccoon owned by a young friend of mine, Julie. She listened politely as I explained the coming danger. I'll never forget her answer. "It will be different for me. . ." And she smiled as she added, "Bandit wouldn't hurt me. He just wouldn't." Three months later Julie underwent plastic surgery for facial lacerations sustained when her adult raccoon attacked her for no apparent reason. Bandit was released into the wild. Sin, too, often comes dressed in an adorable guise, and as we play with it, how easy it is to say, "It will be different for me." The results are predictable.(5)
God gives us the freedom to choose our addictions. There are many things that are clearly "not god." They will lead to death and destroy us. Or, we can choose to be addicted to the love and grace of God and choose to live our lives sharing the changes made in us with others. And so, this morning, I say, Let us choose our addictions carefully. Amen.
Century Christian Church, June 26, 2005 - Sermon by Jim Westmoreland
1. "Escape-a-date", Homiletics, May-June, 2005, p. 70.
2. "Why do we do it?" Campus Journal, Gospelcom.net.
3. Homiletics, p. 70.
4. Hoest in Parade.
5. Gary Richmond, View From The Zoo.