Addict Christian Quotes

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.

My request today is simple. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Find somebody, anybody, that’s different than you. Somebody that has made you feel ill-will or even hateful. Somebody whose life decisions have made you uncomfortable. Somebody who practices a different religion than you do. Somebody who has been lost to addiction. Somebody with a criminal past. Somebody who dresses “below” you. Somebody with disabilities. Somebody who lives an alternative lifestyle. Somebody without a home. Somebody that you, until now, would always avoid, always look down on, and always be disgusted by. Reach your arm out and put it around them. And then, tell them they’re all right. Tell them they have a friend. Tell them you love them. If you or I wanna make a change in this world, that’s where we’re gonna be able to do it. That’s where we’ll start. Every. Single. Time.

The past does not define me, it ignites me. The past is not a piece of me, it has placed me

Don’t we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be… doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right. It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.

The thing about new things is you feel new when you buy them, you feel as though you are somebody different because you own something different. We are our possessions, you know. There are people who get addicted to buying new stuff. Things. Piles and piles of things. But the new things become old things so quickly. We need new things to replace the old things.

Don’t ever forget you are beautiful, although your life, your past and your present situation may be ugly. You are beautiful.

Change is inevitable. Progression is a choice. We all move, but are you going to move forward?

Can you dream about anything? can you really be sure you are not dreaming? can you dream - are you dreaming - have you pinched yourself - to see that weren’t dreaming?

Stop looking back when your future is ahead of you

We've invented a thousand shades of gray, devising a comfortable Christian existence we can all live with—super awesome, except the Bible doesn't support it. According to Scripture, no real disciple serves God while addicted to the dollar. There is no sheep/goat hybrid. There is no middle road. There is no true believer who hates his brother. Grayed-down discipleship is an easier sell, but it created pretend Christians, obsessing over Scriptures we like while conspicuously ignoring the rest. Until God asks for everything and we answer, "It's yours," we don't yet have ears to hear or eyes to see.

Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it’s just better form.

Less extreme is the simple costliness in time and convenience and money and effort to replace excessive and addictive leisure with acts of servant love.

By the time my fortieth birthday came around I’d been dry for almost six months. I was sober as a judge and just about as boring.

The good news is that there is one kind of food you can never have too much of. The best way to fully recover from a food addiction or body-image problem is to fill up on the Lord.

It is only the Creator that can set thy soul free from every struggle.

Knowing who we are in Christ sets us free from the need to impress others.

Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to climb to the tops of mountains, and so had built themselves a philosophy claiming that their bases were delightful. Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have. Powerlessness became ‘goodness’, baseness ‘humility’, submission to people one hated ‘obedience’ and, in Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘not-being-able-to-take-revenge’ turned into ‘forgiveness’. Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem ‘a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment’. Addicted to ‘the religion of comfortableness’, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.

Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism. Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower than all that. He's not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief. You know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience very long winter nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies requires whole spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and He is ready to come to us, if we'll open the door and let him.

I carried a bravado about my drinking like I was a hero of debauchery. But on that Christmas Day, I felt like shit. I had a vague realisation that I was just trying to keep up with some version of myself that I had decided was accurate.

Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes a Christian, among a general confusion of becomings—becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic—just as he was also an antichrist, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestuous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite. Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are stained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead, or in some other way inhuman. It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a reservoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated by lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference.

With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana —the fear of Fear itself.

Join me for a moment in trying to imagine a life so rich and varied that you cannot remember shooting an actress at a sci-fi convention while wearing a tribble costume and then being wrestled to the ground by a security team.

While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power.

We are all hungry for genuine connection and caring, and we will not get this unless we find our Soul's tribe. If we don't find this, we'll kill ourselves, either by finding an addiction to mask the pain or by ignoring what we need to stay healthy.

We are facing forces that are not in the business of making bargains--forces that do not know the meaning of compassion or empathy. The enemy will never feel sorry for you. Kicking you while you are down is his extreme pleasure. Never, ever forget it.

First, contrary to popular belief, Buddhists can actually be very anxious people. That’s often why they become Buddhists in the first place. Buddhism was made for the anxious like Christianity was made for the downtrodden or AA for the addicted. Its entire purpose is to foster equanimity, to tame excesses of thought and emotion. The Buddhists have a great term for these excesses. They refer to them as the condition of “monkey mind.” A person in the throes of monkey mind suffers from a consciousness whose constituent parts will not stop bouncing from skull-side to skull-side, which keep flipping and jumping and flinging feces at the walls and swinging from loose neurons like howlers from vines. Buddhist practices are designed explicitly to collar these monkeys of the mind and bring them down to earth—to pacify them. Is it any wonder that Buddhism has had such tremendous success in the bastions of American nervousness, on the West Coast and in the New York metro area?

Take one sexually inept wage-slave,’” she went on, “‘one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television-addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.

Well, Espen, you're no drug addict, so why do you beg?" "Because it's my mission to be mirror for mankind so that they can see which actions are great and which are small." "And which are great?" Espen sighed in despair, as though weary of repeating the obvious. "Charity. Sharing and helping your neighbor. The Bible deals with nothing else. In fact, you have to search extremely hard to find anything about sex before marriage, abortion, homosexuality, or a woman's right to speak in public. But, of course, it is easier for Pharisees to talk aloud about subordinate clauses than to describe and perform the great actions the Bible leaves us in no doubt about: You have to give half of what you own to someone who has nothing. Thousands of people are dying every day without hearing the words of God because these Christians will not let go of their earthly goods. I'm giving them a chance to reflect.

Indeed, our sins—hate, fear, greed, jealousy, lust, materialism, pride—can at times take such distinct forms in our lives that we recognize them in the faces of the gargoyles and grotesques that guard our cathedral doors. And these sins join in a chorus—you might even say a legion—of voices locked in an ongoing battle with God to lay claim over our identity, to convince us we belong to them, that they have the right to name us. Where God calls the baptized beloved, demons call her addict, slut, sinner, failure, fat, worthless, faker, screwup. Where God calls her child, the demons beckon with rich, powerful, pretty, important, religious, esteemed, accomplished, right. It is no coincidence that when Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism, he began his entreaties with, “If you are the Son of God . . .” We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.

Yes the fact was that, coincidentally or not, this change of heart was happening among conservatives just as opiate addiction was spreading among both rural and middle-class white kids across the country, though perhaps most notably in the deepest red counties and states. Drug enslavement and death, so close at hand, were touching the lives, and softening the hearts, of many Republican lawmakers and constituents. I’ll count this as a national moment of Christian forgiveness. But I also know that it was a forgiveness that many of these lawmakers didn’t warm to when urban crack users were the defendants. Let’s just say that firsthand exposure to opiate addiction can change a person’s mind about a lot of things. Many of their constituents were no longer so enamored with that “tough on crime” talk now that it was their kids who were involved. So a new euphemism emerged—“smart on crime”—to allow these politicians to support the kind of rehabilitation programs that many of them had used to attack others not so long ago.

Why do the greatest miracle stories seem to come from mission fields, either overseas or among the destitute here at home (the Teen Challenge outreach to drug addicts, for example)? Because the need is there. Christians are taking their sound doctrine and extending it to lives in chaos, which is what God has called us all to do. Without this extension of compassion it is all too easy for Bible teachers and authors to grow haughty. We become proud of what we know. We are so impressed with our doctrinal orderliness that we become intellectually arrogant. We have the rules and theories all figured out while the rest of the world is befuddled and confused about God’s truth … poor souls.

Take one sexually inept wage slave,” she went on, “one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice. Our recipe is rather different: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.

If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.

What these professing Christians are saying is that the reason for addiction is early childhood deprivation, not simply a sinful nature successfully tempted to sin.

If exercise was sold in the pill form, it would be the number pill sold throughout the world because the benefits are endless.

A Christianity filled with well-intended good advice, severed from the good news, is bad news and bad advice.

Let’s strive to become as protective over our time with God as we are with our daily cup of brew. Let’s become addicted to our “spiritual caffeine fix.

The reason 12-step programs can be so helpful is that, very often, empaths become addicted to their vampire partners.

Sadly, what crack cocaine is to a drug addict, “repentance” has become to conservative Evangelical Christianity.

Je haatte je eigen goorheid en kankerde op dezelfde goorheid van de ander omdat je jezelf waarschijnlijk wilde bewijzen dat jij er nog niet zo erg aan toe was.

All addictions make us slaves, but each time we confess openly our dependencies and express our trust that God can truly set us free, the source of our suffering becomes the source of our hope.

And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost, forever.

All that Hell shit,” she said, unzipping my hoodie and handing it back, “isn’t afterlife panic. It’s excuses to abuse people now, like addicts and victims need more bad shit. Let’s create middle-school self-haters! Then call them sluts who’ll get boys damned! Because we’re the only way outta Hell, everyone better agree with us on everything. Hell is a world without God? Hell is a Christian president bombing Iraqi babies!

Veganism is merely the continuation of Christianity by other means. It’s the Sermon on the Mount extended from the poor, weak and meek to animals. It gives every vegan the opportunity to posture as a Messiah, saving the poor little animals from Leviathan. Vegans are addicted to having a Messiah Complex. The powerless often posture as activists on behalf of the even more powerless. It makes them feel better about themselves.

The sad truth is that many of us are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation. The fear we feel in our hearts when we are engaged online is the impulse that drives our "highly selective self-representations." We want to be loved and accepted by others, so we wash away our scars and defects. When we put this scrubbed-down representation of ourselves online, we tabulate the human approval in a commodity index of likes and shares. We post an image, then watch the immediate response. We refresh. We watch the stats climb-or stall. We gauge the immediate responses from friends, family members, and strangers. Did what we posted gain the immediate approval of others? We know within minutes. Even the promise of religious approval and the affirmations of other Christians is a gravitational pull that draws us toward our phones.

St. Teresa of Avila once said: “We can only learn to know ourselves and do what we can—namely, surrender our will and fulfill God’s will in us.” For Christians not of the prosperity persuasion, surrender is a virtue; the writings of the saints are full of commands to “let go” and to submit yourself to what seems to be the will of the Almighty. All of American culture and pop psychology scream against that. Never give up on your dreams! Just keep knocking, that door is about to open! Think positively! Self-improvement guaranteed!! The entire motivational-speaking industry rests on the assumption that you can have what you want, you can be what you want. Just do it. When prosperity believers live out their daily struggles with smiles on their faces, sometimes I want to applaud. They confront the impossible and joyfully insist that God make a way. They obediently put miracle oil on their failing bodies. They give large offerings to the church and expect great things. They stubbornly get out of their hospital beds and declare themselves healed, and every now and then, it works. They are addicted to self-rule, and so am I.

We must strive to make the good news the core message we put forth, the chief model we emulate, the leading motivation in obedience, and the proprietary means of growth in the Christian life. Anything else falls dreadfully, woefully short.

Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.

Technology has an addictive nature. It is very easy to become hooked on it, almost like a narcotic. Entertainment is often used for the same reasons that most people use drugs or any addictive substance: to pursue pleasure and to relieve pain.

This, in turn, can result in addictive tendencies and often leads to codependency in romantic relationships—especially for Evangelical Christian women who have had the learned-helplessness of submissive and subservient roles instilled into them for so long.

But what if worse is a husband who enjoys forcing his wife to do sex acts she doesn’t want to do? What if worse is the husband loses his job and decides it’s easier to become a drug addict than to reinvent himself? What if worse is beatings? Controlling food? Sexual assault? Abusive words? Emotional manipulation? Abandonment? Neglect? Abusing the kids? What if worse is constant criticism? Years of disinterest? This is the man who promised to protect and cherish? To love and honor and treat his wife’s body as his own?

We Christians don’t get to send our lives through the rinse cycle before showing up to church. We come as we are—no hiding, no acting, no fear. We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbors, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church next door. We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent doubts, our preoccupation with status and image. We come with our addictions—to substances, to work, to affirmation, to control, to food. We come with our differences, be they political, theological, racial, or socioeconomic. We come in search of sanctuary, a safe place to shed the masks and exhale. We come to air our dirty laundry before God and everybody because when we do it together we don’t have to be afraid.

Shallow Christian identities explain why professing Christians can be racists and greedy materialists, addicted to beauty and pleasure, or filled with anxiety and prone to overwork. All this comes because it is not Christ’s love but the world’s power, approval, comfort, and control that are the real roots of our self-identity.

How We Approach the New Testament We Christians have been taught to approach the Bible in one of eight ways: • You look for verses that inspire you. Upon finding such verses, you either highlight, memorize, meditate upon, or put them on your refrigerator door. • You look for verses that tell you what God has promised so that you can confess it in faith and thereby obligate the Lord to do what you want. • You look for verses that tell you what God commands you to do. • You look for verses that you can quote to scare the devil out of his wits or resist him in the hour of temptation. • You look for verses that will prove your particular doctrine so that you can slice-and-dice your theological sparring partner into biblical ribbons. (Because of the proof-texting method, a vast wasteland of Christianity behaves as if the mere citation of some random, decontextualized verse of Scripture ends all discussion on virtually any subject.) • You look for verses in the Bible to control and/or correct others. • You look for verses that “preach” well and make good sermon material. (This is an ongoing addiction for many who preach and teach.) • You sometimes close your eyes, flip open the Bible randomly, stick your finger on a page, read what the text says, and then take what you have read as a personal “word” from the Lord. Now look at this list again. Which of these approaches have you used? Look again: Notice how each is highly individualistic. All of them put you, the individual Christian, at the center. Each approach ignores the fact that most of the New Testament was written to corporate bodies of people (churches), not to individuals.

She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab an unshriveled and thickened with age. She kept damp cash in her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian breasts, Her kunukku earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry-go-(not all the way)-round. Her right lobe had split open once and was sewn together by Dr. Verghese Verghese. Kochu Maria couldn't stop wearing her kunukku because if she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook's job (seventy-five rupees a month) she was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan. But a Touchable, upper-caste Christian (into whom Christianity had seeped like tea from a teabag). Split lobes stitched back were a better option by far. Kochu Maria hadn't yet made her acquaintance with the television addict waiting inside her. The Hulk Hogan addict. She hadn't yet seen a television set...

We must be honest here, and not defensive; the issues are now too grave and too urgent. Our inability to see our personal failures is paralleled by our inability to see our institutional and national sins too. It is the identical and same pattern of addiction and denial. Thank God that Pope John Paul II introduced into our vocabulary words like “structural sin” and “institutional evil.” It was not even part of the conversation in most of Christian history up to now, as we exclusively concentrated on “personal” sins. The three sources of evil were traditionally called “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” We so concentrated on the flesh that we let the world and “the devil” get off scot-free.8

The role of the Old Testament is to give an inspired telling of how we get to Jesus. But once we get to Jesus we don’t build multiple tabernacles and grant an equivalency to Jesus and the Old Testament. This was Peter’s mistake on Tabor. Jesus is greater than Moses. Jesus is greater than Elijah. Jesus is greater than the Bible. Jesus is the Savior of all that is to be saved… including the Bible. Jesus saves the Bible from itself! Jesus shows us how to read the Bible and not be harmed by it. Jesus delivers the Bible from its addiction to violent retaliation. Moses may stone sinners and Elijah may kill idolaters. And so violent holiness can be justified as biblical. But for a Christian that doesn’t matter. We follow Jesus!

The thing about Dostoevsky's characters is that they are alive. By which I don't just mean that they're successfully realized or developed or "rounded". The best of them live inside us, forever, once we've met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot, the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel; C&P's ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of The Gambler; the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive-retain what Frank calls their "immense vitality"-not because they're just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting withing plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious-the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky's characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860's intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death's inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth....

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag.

Privilege, in this moral framework, isn’t something you experience as an individual. It is wholly associated with group identity. If you are a white male, you are, by definition, privileged. This is true regardless of your history or circumstances. If you were raised in a broken home, in a neighborhood rife with drug addiction, poverty, and violence, you are still privileged. Likewise, if you are a “person of color” or a female, or a “sexual minority” and were raised in an intact family, born into wealth, with all the benefits the best education can afford, you are still a victim. Bear in mind that privilege is indeed real. Some people do have more privilege than others, however the line of privilege should never be drawn exclusively on the basis of skin color.

Again: real love—the kind described by the God who created and is love (1 John 4:8)—always includes truth. The two are inextricably intertwined, since true love celebrates truth (1 Cor. 13:6). Christians are called to this kind of love regardless of whether we feel empathy or not. Christians love because Christ first loved us, not because we feel a certain way or have had a particular experience (1 John 4:19). That’s why empathy is different from love and why it also must be submissive to love. Putting yourself in someone’s shoes may help you feel their pain, but their pain isn’t determinative of what’s true or false, right or wrong. A person for whom you feel empathy may, in their pain, believe or demand things that are untrue, unhelpful, and even harmful. We can empathize with the pain of withdrawal for a drug addict, for example, but it would be cruel to give them the heroin they crave.

As a minister of the Lord in whatever way the Lord decides to use you and with the gifts he gives you for the work, there is the tendency to start idolizing the work itself or the gifts that you forget it is the father who gave it to you. Who picked you up and dusted you from nothing and adorned you. You forget and make the work a god before him. Exodus 20:3 "You shall have no other gods before me". ----- This can be very subtle especially for social media ministry. You begin to love your social image over the word of God. You begin to dampen and tweak the word of God to appeal to a wider audience. You're suddenly no longer about the raw truth of the gospel. As the followers and likes increase you begin to get more and more addicted to the fruit of the works and the response to YOUR messages and posts. If a post doesn't do too well and get many likes and comments you are not happy. It hurts you deeply. That is how you know It has become about you. ------ If this is you and this message has touched your heart, if this post is like a mirror to your face, go back to God and ask for forgiveness. Ask God to forgive you for elevating yourself and your work as a god before him and return back to when it was just about loving him and preaching the good news. You probably may have noticed you lost the fire of inspiration you used to have at the beginning. This is why.

By nature, man is a pilgrim who seeks God in everything as an answer to his questions. It is not good for him to permit himself to be imprisoned or stopped on the way by anything of this world. That is why, he must remain free. He must not permit himself to be imprisoned by the world to become an addict. When a Christian decides to, and does, fast he witnesses to his faith in the ultimate reality that lasts forever. To fast means to free himself from things of this world and not to permit worldly realities to cloud his sight of what is eternal.

When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather VINDICTIVENESS. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.

And yet Christians celebrate Palm Sunday year after year. Don’t we believe that something monumental happened when the King of Kings eschewed the warhorse to ride a peace donkey? Don’t we at least believe Jesus offers us an alternative to all those dudes with their horses, tanks and ICBMs? We must believe it! The Palm Sunday shout is hosanna! It means “save now.” In a world married to war, now more than ever, we need to acclaim Christ as King and shout hosanna. But our hosanna must not be a plea for Jesus to join our side, bless our troops, and help us win our war—it must be a plea to save us from our addiction to war.

It was a newsmagazine she was reading, something she hadn’t done for quite a while—she turned one page quickly, because she couldn’t stand to look at the president’s face: His close-set eyes, the jut of his chin, the sight offended her viscerally. She had lived through a lot of things with this country, but she had never lived through the mess they were in now. Here was a man who looked retarded, Olive thought, remembering the remark made by the woman in Moody’s store. You could see it in his stupid little eyes. And the country had voted him in! A born-again Christian with a cocaine addiction. So they deserved to go to hell, and would.

God’s sexual ethic is first meant to reveal our sin as “utterly sinful” (Romans 7:13) and to devastate us into acknowledging our need for a Savior. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount reveals us all as sexual sinners: the virgins, the serial adulterers, the porn addicts. We all fall short of God’s command to see one another as brothers and sisters in all purity. The main point is not pursuing sexual purity but recognizing our impurity and our desperate need for Christ. So many of us walked right past the gospel on our way to a purity conference. Our parents and youth leaders were so concerned about our budding sexuality, scrambling for direction and wisdom, that some of us ended up signing abstinence pledges before falling on our knees in repentance.

There’s a story in Luke, where an apparently “good,” religious, and rich young man approaches Jesus, wondering what he must do to inherit eternal life. Ultimately, Jesus places a demand on him—sell everything and give to the poor—and we’re told the young man heard that and walked away, sad. I think for many of us who live in this society that is so riven with anger, even addicted to it, Jesus is giving us a similar demand: “Give up your anger. Because of what I’ve done for you, give it up, and forgive.” Sadly, our response is, “That’s not fair.” And we walk away too. One thing that strikes me about the rich young man story: Jesus doesn’t leave him with room to wriggle. The man will either do what Jesus says, or walk away. There’s no splitting the difference, paying lip service, or trying to split theological hairs. But we love to do this with forgiveness. Jesus tells His followers to forgive as we have been forgiven, yet we find reasons why this doesn’t quite apply in our situation. (Maybe He didn’t anticipate what I was going to have to endure . . . Does He realize what He’s asking?) But we don’t walk away sad, like the rich young man. Instead, we tell ourselves that we can live a Christian lifestyle, and integrate our own decisions about whom to forgive, and when. This is especially dangerous, because when we do that, we’re walking away. But we’re not aware we’ve walked away at all. We’ve just de-radicalized the very nature of following Jesus, because we think we know a better way.

What is stealing?When is it excusable? When is it a crime?' Thomas looked uncomfortable as he read. Christian perked up. Belle saw Christian listening with interest and looked down at her shoes. 'An action becomes stealing when one of two conditions are met. First, when there is harm to the victim. Second, when the act is done for personal gain.' Thomas looked up and smiled. He seemed happy with where the speech was going, and Belle breathed a sigh of relief. Christian's face had gone white. He stood frozen in his spot. Belle smiled as if to say that things were different with him. That stealing was different in their world. She was torn between excitement for Thomas and embarasment for Christian. 'If both these criteria are met, there is no question where society stands. When of two criteria is in question, society begins to debate. For example, is it wrong when someone takes something that has been thrown away? Perhaps not, since there is no detriment to the victim. Is it wrong when someone takes a loaf of bread to feed a starving baby or taxes the rich to help the poor? Perhaps not, since the motive is unselfish.' Victoria wasn't even looking at Thomas anymore. She was glaring at Belle. She looked like she was about to lunge at her. Belle signaled to her that perhaps she should take notes. But Victoria wasn't used to preparing rebuttals without advanced notice. 'When neither of the criteria is met, however, I propose that there is no crime against ethics. Is it wrong to take a syringe from a drug addict? Of course not.

What if the energy and resources used to preserve and tweak the civil religion was rather spent feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, befriending the drug addict, and visiting the prisoner? What if our focus was on sacrificing our resources to help inner-city schools and safety houses for battered women? What if our concern was to bridge the ungodly racial gap in our country by developing friendships and collaborating in endeavors with people whose ethnicity is different than our own? What if instead of trying to defend our religious rights, Christians concerned themselves with siding with others whose rights are routinely trampled? What if instead of trying to legally make life more difficult for gays, we worried only about how we could affirm their unsurpassable worth in service to them?

The thing about Dostoevsky's characters is that they are alive. By which I don't just mean that they're successfully realized or developed or "rounded". The best of them live inside us, forever, once we've met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot, the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel; C&P's ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of The Gambler; the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive-retain what Frank calls their "immense vitality"-not because they're just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting within plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious-the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky's characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860's intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death's inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth....

I find it understandable that people who have been destroying themselves in a drastic way might turn to a drastic cure, and adopt a harsh version of Christianity, every bit as rigid as the physical addiction that formerly held them in thrall. But they also reveal a basic and valuable truth about conversion - that we do not suddenly change in essence, magically become new people, with all our old faults left behind. What happens is more subtle, and to my mind, more revealing of God's great mercy. In the process of conversion, the detestable parts of our selves do not vanish so much as become transformed. We can't run from who we are, with our short tempers, our vanity, our sharp tongues, our talents for self-aggrandizement, self-delusion, or despair. But we can convert, in its root meaning of turn around, so that we are forced to face ourselves as we really are. We can pray that God will take our faults and use them for the good.

IT’S ONLY SOUND Let me ask you an honest question. Is your music subject to God’s approval? If you discovered that He desired for you to listen to a different kind of music, would you obey willingly and gladly? Or would you resist and cling to “what you like”? Recently in a counseling session, I was speaking with a teenage young man about the power of music. After some thought about how strongly his music was holding on to his heart, he lifted his head, sort of chuckled and said, “It’s kind of strange when you really think about it…it’s only music…it’s only sound.” Oh, but how powerful that sound is! Just try to take away or suggest danger in the favorite CD or the favorite CCM group of a supposedly “surrendered” Christian. You’ll get everything from rage to ridicule—real fruits of the Spirit—all qualities that are produced by just such “good, godly music.” I’m being intentionally sarcastic to cause you to think. If pop-styled Christian music is so spiritually effective, why aren’t we having revival? Why isn’t it producing more holy, more separated, more godly individuals? Why are young people leaving Christianity in record numbers? Why do we have to have the world’s music? Should music really be such a stronghold in the Christian heart or in the local church? Should such self-absorption be the guiding force of our choices in entertainment? Should we view our music as entertainment at all? Does God really like “all kinds” of music? Music has a much higher purpose than our pleasure. Reducing music to mere entertainment would be something like asking a brain surgeon to roast marshmallows for a living. No, music is much too powerful and spiritually significant to reduce it to a petty place of pleasure. First Corinthians 10:14 admonishes us, “Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry.” Again in Colossians 3:5 we’re told to, “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” God commands us to “mortify” or “put to death” our “members.” Anything less than full surrender of our bodies (including our ears) to God is a subtle form of idolatry. Is music an idol in your life? Is it a stronghold? Are you addicted to your style, your group, your sound? Do you find yourself putting up a wall of defense in your heart, even as you read these words? Is your primary concern that it “makes you feel good” or that you listen to “what you like”? Think about it. It’s only sound.

While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics today because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power.

If you haven’t done it in a while, pray and talk to Jesus. Ask Him to become real to you. Ask Him to forgive you of self-addiction, ask Him to put a song in your heart. I can’t think of anything better that could happen to you than this.

Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves.

The majority of Christian men are doing exactly the same thing as John Mayer, but keeping it a secret. They are lying to themselves and to their significant others. They have become two people in one… the outside man they wish to portray publicly, and the inside man they presume will be rejected if others meet him. Therefore, they must hide their inner man at all costs.

Joy is found in the mundane when you open the window of God, for He is the breath of life.

When grace-filled relationships are the greatest joy in life, the artificial high that addictions bring lose their pull. Grace is not just something “nice.” It is essential for a healthy brain and life-giving relationships.

Ever wonder where addictions are in the Bible? Check out Genesis 3! The first couple exploited the things God intended to be used for pleasure (trees, leaves, the garden and each other) and used them to hide, cover shame, and then blamed others for the problem. Things haven’t changed much in many thousands of years!

In most cases, the root of our problem as Christians is addiction to religion.

I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.

Sons, don't let the chains of inheritance bind you to a legacy of addiction and toxicity. Break free from the cycles of destructive patterns passed down from your fathers. Renounce the harmful habits and renounce the sins of your fathers. Choose to be a vessel for God's glory, not a victim of inherited bondage. Rise up and claim your rightful place as a son of the Most High, living a life that honors God and His kingdom.

It is striking that our fall from Paradise also revolved around food. There was only the fruit of one tree that we were not given by God. It was not blessed, and not provided as a means of communion with sacred love. To eat of this fruit, therefore, was to seek food for its own end. Adam and Eve's reach for it symbolizes our striving to make work, family, health, or money their own ends. This, then, is our original sin. That old doctrine of the church refers not just to our primal disobedience to God's command. It also means that by seeking the fruit of the garden for its own sake, we have pulled the spiritual out of it and made the world material. It's not only our original sin; it's our continued addiction.

A person who professes to be a Christian, yet is ensnared in habitual addictions, immodest behavior, and profane language, is a contradiction in terms. For a true follower of Christ is transformed by His power, and their life bears witness to the victory of His grace over sin and darkness. But one who justifies and indulges in such behaviors, despite claiming Christ's name, is merely a pretender, a counterfeit Christian, whose life testifies to the dominance of their demons and addictions, rather than the triumph of Christ's redeeming love.

A person consumed by arrogance, violence, and aggression, who lashes out like a wild animal at the slightest provocation, is a vessel for darkness, spreading toxicity and chaos wherever they go. Their addiction to harmful habits and behaviors only strengthens the grip of the enemy, making them a dangerous influence on those around them, and a total reminder of the destructive power of unchecked evil.

Rather than seek to numb the pain with addictive behaviour, you need to live with it an make friends with your brokenness. We can't expect to be perfect. Change does not usually happen instantaneously. There may be failures, but you when you know your brokenness it is no longer your hidden enemy. Rather, by God's grace, it can become the very means of your redemption.

In 1984, I started down the same road as Descartes. I did not know it was the same road at the time, and I am not claiming kinship with Descartes, who is rightly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But I was truly plagued with doubt. I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.

In testimonial meetings, new converts stress the contrast between their previous lives of sin and their new lives as Christians. The most moving stories are ones describing severe conditions of depravity and hopelessness — drug addiction, crime, suicidal depression, and other scenarios of desperation. If you were raised a Christian, you were led to believe that this is how your life would be without Christ. The world is an evil place that will eat you up. Even Christians with little life experience talk with fear about life outside the fold, about how horribly depressing or meaningless life would be. The group reinforces these imagined situations, making them seem more real and frightening.

If we have some good teachers, we will learn to develop a conscious nondual mind, a choiceful contemplation, some spiritual practices or disciplines that can return us to unitive consciousness on an ongoing and daily basis. Whatever practice it is, it must become our ‘daily bread.’ That is the consensus of spiritual masters through the ages. The general words for these many forms of practice (‘rewiring’) are ‘meditation,’ ‘contemplation,’ any ‘prayer of quiet,’ ‘centering prayer,’ ‘chosen solitude,’ but it is always some form of inner silence, symbolized by the Jewish Sabbath rest. Every world religion-at the mature levels-discovers some forms of practice to free us from our addictive mind, which we take as normal. No fast-food religion, or upward-bound Christianity, ever goes there and thus provides little real nutrition to sustain people through the hard times, infatuations, trials, idolatries, darkness, and obsessions that always eventually show themselves. Some of us call today’s form of climbing religion the ‘prosperity gospel,’ which is quite common among those who avoid great love and great suffering. It normally does not know what to do with darkness, and so it always projects darkness elsewhere.

Care should be taken to ensure that children, and even adults do not become so addicted to entertainment that they despise quiet contemplation.

Greed is an addiction to things—be it money, food, power, property, sex, beauty, or fame. We just never seem to have enough of it.

Care should be taken to ensure that children, and even adults, do not become so addicted to entertainment and activities that they despise quiet contemplation.

church that has assimilated the world cannot be a vibrant witness to that world. To adopt prevailing cultural values hardly gives the world a reason to believe that we are a viable alternative to lives of brokenness, greed, and addiction. To quote Sider once more, “We divorce, though doing so is contrary to his commands. We are the richest people in human history and know that tens of millions of brothers and sisters in Christ live in grinding poverty, and we give only a pittance, and almost all of that goes to our local congregation. Only a tiny fraction of what we do give ever reaches poor Christians in other places. Christ died to create one new multicultural body of believers, yet we display more racism than liberal Christians who doubt his deity.”4

He gave a puzzled look. ‘Doesn’t the Lord’s Prayer mention just that? “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The answer is staring them in the face, but we’ve ensured they ignore and deride it – and no, pay no heed to the English Standard Version, we’ve already begun to corrupt God’s word in the ESV, amongst others. We don’t just try to pervert Catholics, God, no, all Christians are fair game – the fools. All religions, for that matter. We’ve had particular fun demonising Jews and Muslims, and some entire countries have been cast into madness by pornography alone. Papua, New Guinea, is a particularly pleasing example. But I digress. Did you know there’s a whole raft of trauma release therapies that work amazingly well at curing virtually all mental disorders and addictions? They can even reverse some diseases and prevent the manifestation of others. It’s not very well known, but that’s because we can’t make money out of healthy people, we need them sick and disorientated and thinking they need drugs to cure themselves, when the cure is within them all along!

Gratitude is the balm for bitterness, the healing wand of all life’s miseries.

Christian psychologist is called in; if it’s a spiritual problem, the pastor gets the call. We assume that our depression, panic, guilt, or addictions have little or nothing to do with our spirituality; they are two separate issues. But separating our problems into “emotional” problems and “spiritual” problems is part of the problem. All of our problems stem from our failure to reflect the image of God. Because of Adam and Eve’s fall into sin in the Garden of Eden, we have not developed the “likeness” of God in the vital areas of our person, and we are not functioning as we were created to function. Thus, we are in pain. In the course of my own spiritual and professional journey, I have identified four aspects of the personality of God that, if we would cultivate them, would greatly improve our day-to-day functioning. God is able to do four things that we, his children, have difficulty doing: 1. Bond with others. 2. Separate from others. 3. Sort out issues of good and bad 4. Take charge as an adult Without the ability to perform these basic God-like functions, we can literally remain stuck for years, and growth and change can elude our grasp. In this book I will explain these four developmental tasks, the barriers that get in the way of our achieving them, and the skills we need for completing them. Because we live in a fallen world, we all have deficits in all four areas. Transforming the effects of the fall and growing in the image of God is not an easy task. But God has promised that the “good work”he began in us, he will carry “on to completion until the day of

We’ve invented a thousand shades of gray, devising a comfortable Christian existence we can all live with—super awesome, except the Bible doesn’t support it. According to Scripture, no real disciple serves God while addicted to the dollar. There

The glories of Calvary ignite in Christians a mad dash away from sin, but not simply to avoid getting in trouble—also to enjoy God and glorify Jesus forever.

The good news for Christian growth is the Good News. The very truth that saved you is the same truth that sanctifies you, grows you, forms you. You grow not by a new method or revelation but by the old, old story. You don’t need new tricks and tactics but the truth of Jesus, his person, and his work—the gospel.

I’m Temple Claybourne, an upright, warm-blooded hairy mammal, Caucasian, skidding into my fourth decade of existence, the progeny of meat-eating Anglo-Saxon tribal chieftains, left-handed, flat of foot, with low cholesterol and a predictably receding hairline, carrying a zero debt load, a nervous driver, nervous in crowds, nervous around women, hungry with curiosity, a collector of comforting, unnecessary things.

They were convinced that many people were living in fear, sensing that they were in bondage to demons. “For many years Satan had bound us and held us captive,” preaches Origen. But, he says, Jesus came to set us free! And people were captive not simply to generalized demons but to specific ills that manifested demonic power. For example, people were captive to “greed, which is a more subtle worship of idols”; for such people “the word and proclamation” of Christ brings release. 81 Justin provided a list of four specific addictions by which, in his view, the demons especially enslaved people: sexual compulsions, the magic arts, the desire to increase wealth and property, and hatred and violence. 82 But when humans set out to “attack the demons,” Christ acted to free those who were enslaved. As we shall see in chapter 6, by the third century the church had well-developed processes of catechesis and baptism to liberate people for a life that is free in Christ. Exorcisms were integral to these processes.

Soon I began to realize that cultural camouflage also obscured the universality of emotional process in institutions. For example, frequently, the leaders of a church would come to me seeking techniques for dealing with a member of the staff or a member of the congregation who was acting obstreperously, who was ornery, and who intimidated everyone with his gruffness. I might say to them, “This is not a matter of technique; it’s a matter of taking a stand, telling this person he has to shape up or he cannot continue to remain a member of the community.” And the church leaders would respond, “But that’s not the Christian thing to do.” (Synagogue leaders also tolerate abusers for the same reason.) Overall, this long-range perspective brought me to the point of wondering if there were not some unwitting conspiracy within society itself to avoid recognizing the emotional variables that, for all their lack of concreteness, are far more influential in their effects on institutions than the more obvious data that society loves to measure. Perhaps data collection serves as a way of avoiding the emotional variables. After all, the denial of emotional process is evident in society at large. If, for example, we succeed in reducing the number of cigarettes smoked by our nation’s youth but do nothing to reduce the level of chronic anxiety throughout the nation, then the addiction will just take another form, and the same children who were vulnerable to one kind of addiction will become easy prey for the as-yet unimagined new temptation. It

Freedom from sin is only granted to Christians. Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 10:13 tells believers that they have not been seized by any temptation that cannot be overcome. He is not talking to non-Christians, who Paul establishes elsewhere are controlled by the sinful flesh and cannot do anything spiritually pleasing to God (Rom. 8:7-8)...."...walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh..."(Gal 5:16-17). Again, this command is to Christians. Unbelievers cannot "walk by the Spirit." However, believers walking by the Spirit have the ability to "not gratify the desires of the flesh ." If this is true, that no temptation has ever come across a Christian that is not common to all, and that sin is nothing more than a Christian yielding to his fleshly desires, then how can addiction as commonly understood (i.e., uncontrollable urges and impulses) actually exist for believers?......Granted, sin can certainly feel irresistible, but perhaps it feels that way because we capitulate to it far too readily. We have not built up the essential perseverance to repel it. We have repeatedly said yes, and like muscles that have atrophied from disuse, our spirit has become weak because we have not exercised the fortitude to resist temptation as we ought.

Mark is a walking dilemma, one of those people who’s hard to figure out. He is an unmarried Christian professional man with no “horrible” problems like drugs, sex, or compulsive addictions. He’s intelligent, athletic, and good-looking. He’s responsible and loves God. Mark is forty-five years old. And he has no friends, safe or otherwise. He is very, very alone. How does that picture come together? On the outside, it doesn’t make sense. A guy with Mark’s qualities should have a rich, active relational life. But when you understand the power of perfectionism, it makes “perfect” sense. For Mark is a perfectionist and has only recently seen the devastating consequences of this trait. Sometimes we make jokes about our perfectionism: “I looked in the mirror and got depressed about being three pounds overweight.” The genuine article, however, can be much more serious. Perfectionism can be a major cause of depression, destructive behaviors, and divorce. What is perfectionism? Simply put, it’s an inability to tolerate faults. Perfectionists have a phobia about imperfections and blemishes in themselves, in other people, and in the world. They spend enormous amounts of time trying to create a perfect world, running in futility from the realities of sin, age, loss, and cellulite. The perfectionist tries to live in the land of ideals. He sees life the way “it should be.” People should treat each other right. I should be a productive, successful person. Fairness and equality should rule. Then he sees the huge chasm between the land of ideals and the land of the real. For example, he cannot live up to his expectations of himself. Or he is let down by someone important to him. And he has great difficulty accepting where he lives—the land of the real. So he tries to change his permanent address to ideal-land again.

This is the sense in which Augustine says "freedom of choice is not made void but established by grace, since grace heals the will whereby righteousness may freely be loved."" Freedom is something received, not merely exercised. Therefore, in order to determine whether a person is acting freely, we need to know much more than whether or not that person is acting on his or her desires without the interference of others. In Augustine's view, others are in fact crucial to one's freedom. A slave or an addict, by definition, cannot free himself or herself. Others from outside the self - the ultimate Other being God - are necessary to break through the bonds that enclose the self in itself. Humans need a community of virtue in which to learn to desire rightly.

When an addict chooses to enter a recovery program, they must be prepared to change. Developing Christ like characteristics with a willingness to serve others becomes a proven foundation for a successful recovery.

Liberal politics is based on the idea that the voters know best, and there is no need for Big Brother to tell us what is good for us. Liberal economics is based on the idea that the customer is always right. Liberal art declares that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Students in liberal schools and universities are taught to think for themselves. Commercials urge us to ‘Just do it.’ Action films, stage dramas, soap operas, novels and catchy pop songs indoctrinate us constantly: ‘Be true to yourself’, ‘Listen to yourself’, ‘Follow your heart’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this view most classically: ‘What I feel to be good – is good. What I feel to be bad – is bad.’ People who have been raised from infancy on a diet of such slogans are prone to believe that happiness is a subjective feeling and that each individual best knows whether she is happy or miserable. Yet this view is unique to liberalism. Most religions and ideologies throughout history stated that there are objective yardsticks for goodness and beauty, and for how things ought to be. They were suspicious of the feelings and preferences of the ordinary person. At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, pilgrims were greeted by the inscription: ‘Know thyself!’ The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self, and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness. Freud would probably concur.fn1 And so would Christian theologians. St Paul and St Augustine knew perfectly well that if you asked people about it, most of them would prefer to have sex than pray to God. Does that prove that having sex is the key to happiness? Not according to Paul and Augustine. It proves only that humankind is sinful by nature, and that people are easily seduced by Satan. From a Christian viewpoint, the vast majority of people are in more or less the same situation as heroin addicts. Imagine that a psychologist embarks on a study of happiness among drug users. He polls them and finds that they declare, every single one of them, that they are only happy when they shoot up. Would the psychologist publish a paper declaring that heroin is the key to happiness? The idea that feelings are not to be trusted is not restricted to Christianity. At least when it comes to the value of feelings, even Darwin and Dawkins might find common ground with St Paul and St Augustine. According to the selfish gene theory, natural selection makes people, like other organisms, choose what is good for the reproduction of their genes, even if it is bad for them as individuals. Most males spend their lives toiling, worrying, competing and fighting, instead of enjoying peaceful bliss, because their DNA manipulates them for its own selfish aims. Like Satan, DNA uses fleeting pleasures to tempt people and place them in its power.

In the Bible, Ham finds Noah drunk and naked in Noah's tent. He tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who proceed to cover their father without gazing at him. When Noah finds out what happened, he curses Ham's son Canaan, saying he shall be “a servant of servants.” Yet, in the earlier biblical account, Noah and his family are not described in racial terms. Before the 16th or 17th century, the racial interpretation of Ham is absent or contradictory. But as the story echoed through the centuries and around the world, variously interpreted by Islamic, Christian and Jewish scholars, Ham came to be widely portrayed as black; blackness, servitude, and the idea of racial hierarchy became inextricably linked. The racist interpretation of scripture was never adopted by the African Coptic Churches, and in Europe, some of the earlier representations of Jesus Christ, Mary, etc. depicted them as being dark-skinned. By the early nineteenth century, many supposed scholars in America supported the belief that African-Americans were descendants of Ham, who were cursed and consequently blackened by their sins, was a primary justification for their enslavement.

An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to think about a presently felt pain is to step inside it. And in a very real sense, we’ve already got them in Hell.

If God could make a carpenter into a Savior, a slave trader into a reverend, why not an opium addict into an earl?

The Bible does not deny that we were various things—addicts, homosexuals, hateful, prideful, pornographic masturbators—but that is what we were (past tense) (1 Cor. 6:9-11; Titus 3:3-5). The emphasis in Scripture is on what we are and what we are called to be. The Christian does not say, Hello, my name is _____ and I am an X Y or Z.” The Christian says I was dead, but now I am alive. The Christian says I am a struggling sinner, yet I am a saint. The Christians says I am a new creation; I am transformed.

Christians have seldom been less appealing than when acting in the name of “Christendom.” But when the faithful have ignored political power, they have sometimes again brought discredit on their ideals. Sins of omission can be as deadly as sins of commission. So the exercise of politics requires walking a tightrope. It is both a temptation and a responsibility; it can act like an addictive drug or a healing medicine.

To salvage the genuine love he was deprived of in childhood, Rimbaud turned to the idea of love embodied in Christian charity and in understanding and compassion for others. He set out to give others what he himself had never received. He tried to understand his friend and to help Verlaine understand himself, but the repressed emotions from his childhood repeatedly interfered with this attempt. He sought redemption in Christian charity, but his implacably perspicacious intelligence would allow him no self-deception. Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very early age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. He experienced himself as a monster, his homosexuality as a vice (this was easy to do given Victorian attitudes toward homosexuality), his despair as a sin. But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinately shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her. Rimbaud’s biography is a telling instance of how the body cannot but seek desperately for the early nourishment it has been denied. Rimbaud was driven to assuage a deficiency, a hunger that could never be stilled. His drug addiction, his compulsive travels, and his friendship with Verlaine can be interpreted not merely as attempts to flee from his mother, but also as a quest for the nourishment she had withheld from him. As his internal reality inevitably remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition.

The most colorful (and color-conscious) opinions were voiced by the southern wing of the Democratic Party. Here are some choice words on the floor of the US Senate from Senator William B. Bate (D-TN), who had served as a major general in the Confederate Army: What is to become of the Philippines and Porto Rico? Are they to become States with representation here from those countries, from that heterogeneous mass of mongrels that make up their citizenship? That is objectionable to the people of this country, as it ought to be, and they will call a halt to it before it is done. Jefferson was the greatest expansionist. But neither his example nor his precedent affords any justification for expansion over territory in distant seas, over peoples incapable of self-government, over religions hostile to Christianity, and over savages addicted to head-hunting and cannibalism, as some of these islanders are.27

It’s fitting that slave is from a group of words meaning “bonded,” which is the same root word used in Titus 2:3 about women “addicted to much wine.” In other words, as slaves to our neighbors, our cities, the people of the nations, we are addicted to them. We cannot get enough of them in our homes, in our lives. The more we love them, the more we want to love them. We are addicts for mission, bonded to people for the dream of the gospel in their lives.

What you continually choose to do will eventually become a habit, and when it does, it does not feel like a big effort anymore.

Without studying and absorbing God’s Word we might not die physically, but it’s easy to be spiritually dead. This is especially true when we fill ourselves with so much stuff that glorifies the complete opposite of God’s kingdom. It’s difficult to live holy if we constantly fill ourselves with junk.

Compulsive overeating only gives an illusion of comfort. To believe it is true is to believe a lie. What begins as an attempt to cover unmet needs becomes an addiction. It takes on a life of its own, and makes you feel stupid. True joy comes from asking God’s help and trusting the messages he gives you in your heart,

It is Biblical. It is similar to a twelve-step program,” said Alisa. “But it will cover six important Biblical steps to help set young women free from excess addictions that cause them to gain weight.” Martha was interested. “I didn’t grow up in a good home, and don’t even know how to eat right. I need guidance.

Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides  – at college, university or  community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in

pin. Christianity has to be walked out in a lifestyle that solves problems. We must learn to die to self and live like Christ. Another woman wrote to us saying: My husband had a gambling addiction. One night we had an argument because he was going to go out and gamble more of our money away. We were already in such a deep financial hole it was unbelievable. We were arguing, and he was going to leave. He came into the bedroom to grab the keys off the dresser. I reached out and turned on the television. There you were and said, “You with the gambling addiction …” He stopped dead in his tracks. We film these shows to be aired months later, so only God could orchestrate something like that. Isn’t God powerful? The woman said her husband it still working through some things, but he’s been attending Gambler’s Anonymous and has made a real commitment to conquer his addiction. One

For the love of money, Christian leaders have become addicted to the path to hell. Money is not a blessing from God; the path to righteousness is what God considers a blessing. Luke 16:13

God prepared a table before me in the presence of my insecurity, in the presence of my deficits, in the presence of my addictions, in the presence of my confusions, in the presence of what I have lost, in the presence of the threat that I won't make it, in the presence of my enemies, I am looking straight ahead.

The increasing lawlessness and the fact that love has grown cold - signs that Jesus specifically named for the end times (Matthew 24:12) - are put aside by the Church as being of no great importance, although the unprecedented facts and examples are alarming. We need to call to mind certain trends in the past years. The soaring crime rate. The glorification of brutality and perverse forms of sex. The increase in drugs, which have already claimed millions of addicts. The alarming growth of involvement in occult activities, and in spiritism and even satanic cults. And all this is taking place in "Christian" nations, yes, mainly in these countries, and even in their churches. Who takes this as a challenge to pray, fast and repent?

Christian, you must consider your ties with sin to be forever severed by the blood of Jesus.

The early church braved the sword to gather with God’s people, and Christians in our day will hardly brave the rain. That’s a problem—one that’s bigger than church attendance. This is a love-for-Jesus problem. How we treat his bride equals how we treat him.

If you do not cultivate your life's environment, you will not captivate the worlds enlightenment.

Where God calls the baptized beloved, demons call her addict, slut, sinner, failure, fat, worthless, faker, screwup. Where God calls her child, the demons beckon with rich, powerful, pretty, important, religious, esteemed, accomplished, right. It is no coincidence that when Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism, he began his entreaties with, “If you are the Son of God . . .” We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough. Whether

Christians are thankful people, or at least we should be. We can resist the temptation to forget the Giver for the lure of more and more powerful gifts, to neglect the Creator for the control of our own little worlds. We show our gratitude to the Giver by refusing to become addicts to his gifts. Instead, we pray for the wisdom to use his gifts in a spirit of Godward gratitude and restraint as the precious things he has blessed us with--like the smartphone and the potent digital access we have to one another.

Rev. David Wilkerson Warned that Former Witches Have Infiltrated Many Christian Churches: David Wilkerson exposed the current efforts of false teachers to infiltrate Christianity. Rev. Wilkerson was the pastor at Times Square Church in New York City, where he founded Teen Challenge, an addiction recovery program. He wrote, The Cross and the Switchblade, and he served as an evangelist for over 50 years (1). Throughout his ministry, Rev. Wilkerson preached against apostasy, including dominionism and the teaching that there is no literal return of Jesus (2). Shortly before his death, he stated that several former witches warned him that occultists were infiltrating the Church. They said witches are penetrating congregations and masquerading as super-spiritual Christians (3). Today, it is difficult to find a Christian Church that has not been transformed by this occult revival. References: 1. Wilkerson, David. The Cross and the Switchblade. Jove Publications. 1962. 2. Wilkerson, David, Rev. “Witchcraft in the Church.” Believers Web.org, 3. IBID.

That is the agony of addiction. The person is two beings, and despite not wanting to, you find yourself loving one and hating the other. And since you never know which one you're going to get, it seems only right to protect yourself against both.

I learned much from the experience. The responses, for one, were intriguing. Generally, people asked me two main questions. The first was “What do I do on the Sabbath?” Such a question is very American, isn’t it? What do I do? We are addicted to doing. Being is not even a category we are able to entertain. The second was “How do I make time for the Sabbath?” Again, we cannot make time. We are human. God makes time. And the assumption that we can make time is dangerously hurtful to our well-being. I have come to the conclusion that the topic of Sabbath-keeping is so hostile to American Christianity because Americans often worship their time. We think time is ours.

With "anything people do but shouldn't" labeled "disease," those who oppose Christianity may very well call prayer, worship, reading the Bible, faith in Jesus Christ, and obeying the Lord 'diseases" or symptoms of a religious "disease." The organization Fundamentalists Anonymous is based upon the idea that conservative Christianity (believing that Jesus is the only way and that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God) is a serious, debilitating addiction. Unfortunately, the three Christian authors of 'Love Is a Choice' have listed this anti-Christian organization at the end of their book with this recommendation: "Seek them out locally.

Christians become friends with the world when they follow its psychological theories to understand themselves and others and to change behavior. They are friends of the world when they call sinful behavior "mental illness" and sinful habits "diseases.

Many of us have a habit of bonding with the food itself instead of the One who provided the food or the person who prepared it. Bonding with food leads to food addictions and unhealthy eating habits. When we bond with the food, we do not build our attachment with others at the table and God who provided the meal. For food to act as a bonding agent, we need good teaching and training in the community. Learning how to use food and drink to build our love for each other should be part of every church’s discipleship program.

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until they get to any real issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often gave them a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self. The result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else—and often more so, I am afraid.

A group of Christian Bale doppelgängers, The Machinist Bales, not the Batman Bales, lounge on the corner of the street. Drug addicts. Drug fiends sit with noon and needles. The noon, the “bread” is naked, there in the middle for mere show.

The search for truth looks backward and not forward. Be warned, adventuring is addictive. Extraordinary things are waiting to be discovered. As water eventually wears down stone, the glorious turning of Heaven continues, and even the new priestly caste is powerless before it.

Addiction occurs through choices, but somehow it also happens behind our backs. No one consciously sets out to devote themselves to the machine, to become its addict. Its veto power over all other possible attentions takes place, cumulatively, through every apparently free choice made as a user. We drop into the dead zone, the ‘ticker trance’ of feed addiction, by increment. The way the chronophagic machine fights for our attention recalls what Eastern Christianity used to call the demon of acedia. This was a predecessor of the modern concept of melancholia, and it was used in monasteries (those ancient writing machines) to describe an affliction of the devoted. In the original Greek, ‘akedia’ meant ‘lack of care’. In the Latinized Christian use propagated by Evagrius of Pontus, it described a lack of care about one’s life; a listless, restless spiritual lethargy. The condition left one yearning for distraction and continual novelty, exploiting one’s petty hates and hungers. It dissolved one’s capacity for attending, for living as if living mattered, into a series of itches demanding to be scratched. Ultimately, it was dehumanizing, corrosive of meaning: it was spiritual death.

God literally looks down on us, sees us suffering, and He suffers too. He is deeply concerned about our suffering through addiction. He knows we are powerless & can’t change... He is reaching out His hand to you with compassion to help pull you out of the lifestyle you have created.

Are you ready to Level UP?

As you read this, He is reaching out His hand to you with compassion to help pull you out of the lifestyle you have created.

nearly fifty percent of Christian men view pornography on a regular basis, and what is worse that nearly the same percentage of Pastors also succumb to that addiction.

If I’ve been right with everything else, will you please just hear me out on this one? I’m not talking about religion, and I’m not talking about how much you think you know. There’s a big difference between knowing something and doing (or living) something. You might know about Christianity, but you’re living for yourself. You are your own Lord, you might use God to get you out of trouble, you might use the name of Jesus when you’re overwhelmed, but He is not your Lord. Even if you say you believe in Him, even if you call Him your savior, it’s just lip service. You aren’t living for or with God, you are living for yourself.

It would take me decades of research and study to find out that Christianity, the religion based on charity and love, was the very belief system that created what we call hospitality. Not only that but Christians created hospitals as well. So much of the good that we take for granted in our culture and world is rooted in Christianity. Where would we be if this movement centered around loving, serving, and praying not only for our neighbors and friends, but also our enemies, had not come into and impacted our crumbling world?

I suddenly realized the goal of Christianity was not merely to implement God into my life and schedule, but to give Him my life. To be a Christian means I willingly surrender my identity to Him. To belong to Him means that my life does not belong to me any longer. If I wanted to reap the benefits of belonging to Him, He needed to come first now, not me. His words, His decisions, His guidance, His person, and my relationship with Him needed to be placed above all else. I needed to stop demanding my own way and start following His.

After watching how eagerly my Christian friends studied the Bible, I realized I wasn’t going to have what they had unless I took it seriously as well. I saw the hope they derived from its pages and how much reliable guidance it gave them. I saw how much joy they got from applying it, and I realized it was the key

I never realized that Mormonism didn’t represent the whole of Christianity. I never realized that people are people; we all do stupid things whether we’re religious or non-religious. I never realized it’s not fair to judge a religion based on the actions of its teenagers, who are fallible and riddled with hormones and inconsistencies. Instead, I judged and rejected God, religion, and all of Christianity based on the sum of a few bad childhood experiences.

My trust and wellbeing aren’t placed in my own abilities any longer but in the God who fights on my behalf. He empowers me to stand each time I fall. I didn’t just win because I got to go to heaven when I died, I won because I got to bank on God being here with me in the rat race of life. I would still struggle and fail, but I would never be alone in the battle again. The shortcomings and insecurities could no longer define me in the way they once did. As a Christian, I may still lose as many battles as the next person, but I won’t lose hope.

The Christian worldview teaches that we are more than an accident and there is more to our existence than biology and self-satisfaction. It teaches that every human is a complex and dynamic physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual being who has been intentionally created for a purpose, and who is loved deeply by their Creator.

These Christians always seemed to consider long-term holistic wellbeing. None of their answers were easy or quick but took grit and determination. Every “do” and “don’t” had a reason and purpose behind it. I was finally beginning to understand the why behind things.

I wanted what my Christian friends had: a peace that wasn’t derived from a limited source, a joy that wasn’t dependent on circumstances. I knew it came from God, and that it was tangible and real, but I didn’t know how.

It all revolved around me. Everything I did was centered around my life, my goals, my plan, and my agenda. Even when I went to Bible studies or church, I did so in order to acquire new knowledge and friendships that would benefit me, help me do better, and make me feel better about myself. They said a Christian is someone who has deposed themselves from the throne of their lives and placed God there; a Christian is someone who has placed God at the center and the foundation of their lives.

I was always comparing myself to others and scorning those I thought I knew better than. First, I scorned religious people in favor of partying; now I was scorning partiers in favor of prosperity and education. It was not until I met the Christians that I learned how to love others and stop judging them. They taught me where true security comes from. They taught me to be satisfied in God so that I didn’t need to use other people or compare myself to them.

What did it mean to be a Christian? It did not mean to be a good person, to be more Christ-like or to get my act together. It meant the king of the universe was at the center of my life. I got to trust in His wisdom instead of my own. He was my Lord and I was His disciple, His chosen, His beloved.

pastors in churches with a strong evangelistic or innovative bent (among whom I count myself) to claim that they don’t like to be around Christians. One pastor recently told me that he didn’t want any Christians coming to his new church plant. He only wanted non-Christians searching for God, and new Christians who’d recently come to Christ. On one hand, I understand where he’s coming from. He’s tired of dealing with small-minded traditionalists who want to maintain a historical preservation society more than fulfill the mission. But on the other hand, I fear for the unintended consequences of his outlook. If he’s only going to reach out to non-Christians and nurture new Christians, what’s he going to do when those new Christians become plain ol’ Christians, the kind he hates to be around? His patience and compassion flow easily toward people caught in the addictive clutches of sin. He thinks the rough language and butchered theology of a new Christian is cool, sort of like the cute things little kids say and do. But two or three years later his patience runs thin and the compassion runs dry when he realizes that these cute new Christians are still dealing with the same old issues. At that point he leaves the “slow growers” to fend for themselves. Many quietly make their way out the back door, though he never seems to notice in the excitement of all the new folks coming through the front door.

created by Norman Rockwell and is titled The Golden Rule. Across the front are these words carved in gold: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The mosaic shows the faces of twenty-eight people who represent all the different people we must love: black, white, Asian, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, atheist, racist, addicted, imprisoned, gay, homeless, young, old, sick . . . the list goes on.

The more human beings get caught up in this addiction to commodity objects, the more they themselves tend to become objects valued solely for what they produce in the economic field - objects that will therefore be consigned to the scrapheap when they cannot perform, when they are scrap. In fact, neo-liberal subjectivation more and more openly institutes a relationship of compulsory pleasure with every other individual - a relationship that might be called a relationship of objectification.

We can—we must—seek treatment for and recovery from our addiction to instant, cheap, convenient innocence, so we can deprogram ourselves from the innocence cult.

The key thing to remember about quitting porn is that you don’t quit porn. Pornography isn’t something you leave behind, the way you leave one country to emigrate to another. The key to not looking at porn anymore is managing sexual temptation.

For me, drinking became a sin issue over a substance issue and it needed to go and be put back to its appropriate place in my life. I am somewhere on this journey. I can feel it as a weight slowing me down, holding me back, and making it so tough to endure and persevere. When I stopped abusing drinking, I experienced freedom in ways I cannot describe but would feel very similar to dropping dead weight when you are running. You get a second wind, you get a pop in your step, and you feel like you can run faster than you ever thought possible.

We have reached the stage in pluralization where choice is not just a state of affairs, it is a state of mind. Choice has become a value in itself, even a priority. To be modern is to be addicted to choice and change. Change becomes the very essence of life.16 In other words, the reality, empirical pluralism, has become “a value in itself, even a priority”: it is cherished.

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often gave them a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else—and often more so, I am afraid.

For the Christian, every man is homo viator, whose sole purpose (and soul’s purpose) is to travel through the adventure of life with the goal of getting to heaven, his ultimate and only true home, facing many perils and temptations along the way. The enemy of homo viator is homo superbus (proud man), who refuses the self-sacrifice that the adventure of life demands and seeks to build a home for himself within his “self.” Such a man becomes addicted to the sins that bind him, shriveling and shrinking to the pathetic size of his gollumized self. The drama of life revolves around this battle within each of us, between the homo viator we are called to be, and the homo superbus we are tempted to become. This drama is mirrored in Middle-earth in the struggles between selflessness and selfishness within the hearts of hobbits and men.

There is a war going on. All talk of a Christian’s right to live luxuriantly “as a child of the King” in this atmosphere sounds hollow—especially since the King Himself is stripped for battle. It is more helpful to think of a wartime lifestyle than a merely simple lifestyle. Simplicity can be very inwardly directed and may benefit no one else. A wartime lifestyle implies that there is a great and worthy cause for which to spend and be spent (2 Corinthians 12:15). Winter continues: America today is a “save yourself” society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves. How hard have we tried to save others? Consider the fact that the U.S. evangelical slogan, “Pray, give or go” allows people merely to pray, if that is their choice! By contrast the Friends Missionary Prayer Band of South India numbers 8,000 people in their prayer bands and supports 80 full-time missionaries in North India. If my denomination (with its unbelievably greater wealth per person) were to do that well, we would not be sending 500 missionaries, but 26,000. In spite of their true poverty, those poor people in South India are sending 50 times as many cross-cultural missionaries as we are!11

Review of my book Hope's Motel by Jacob Airey of LonestarInspirations. Men are enjoying it as much as women! "Hope’s Motel by Danyele Read is a Christian contemporary romance fiction first person narration. You can find it on Amazon. Hope Cassel is a Christian, single mother who inherits a motel from her uncle and aunt. After she renovates it and opens it, she encounters a series of characters that sometimes challenge her faith and other times, strengthens it. Within trials, tribulations, and victories, she finds courage, inspiration, and even romance. Hope’s Motel is not a genre I typically read and this goes to the “don’t judge a book by its cover” proverb. I found the story and narration very entertaining and inspiring. While the book is episodic in nature, dealing with issues like PTSD and drug addiction, it has an overarching storyline that keeps the book cohesive. I also enjoyed reading the perception of the main character: Hope. She was a very likable person who was easy to relate to. Bottom line, it is a perfect book to read while you’re sitting by the fire and sipping your warm tea. This review is based on a free copy from the author. All my views and opinions are my own.

Addiction is merely external behavior that is the "fruit" in a person's "tree" of life. If the fruit is cut off but the root left intact, the addict will be "changed" for the moment, but that seed will eventually regenerate the "plant" of addiction and produce similar fruit. Removing the fruit alone won't change the production cycle! This is one reason people often switch addictions. Recovery is about dealing with the seed and the roots. An addict will require an entirely new system change. In fact, all those "bad seeds" (lies) will need to be uprooted, and new seed sown in order to establish the production of God's fruit—fruit that leads to abundant life in Him.

Christian growth is not like a combo-lock. We don’t change by dialing in the right amount of Bible reading, prayer, Scripture memory, service, and community, and then click. By all means, do the spiritual disciplines, but know that the spiritual disciplines aren’t what change us. We are transformed, and idols are shattered, by what the disciplines are meant to show us: the glory of Jesus. The disciplines are vehicles of faith, means of grace to get us on the path of the Spirit so we can behold, see, and feel the wonder of Christ.

But people who've gotten that far into the faith never totally shake it. To be a former believer is to perpetually return to the scene of the crime. It's been ten years since I left Moody, and I still find myself stalling on the Christian radio station to hear a call-in debate, or lurking around the religion section of chain bookstores, perusing the titles on the Christianity shelves like a porn addict sneaking a glance at a Victoria's Secret Catalog.

Someone once asked me, "How are Christians supposed to act?" Christianity is not an act; it is a real thing. We cannot be right with God and not be real.

In 1894, while attending to some legal matters, my lawyer, who noticed that I was suffering from a severe cold, advised me to try Birney’s Catarrh Remedy. He gave me a bottle and that started me on my downward course. From a well-balanced Christian woman, I became a haggard and wretched physical and mental wreck.

...some Christians are in bondage to alcohol, drug, sex, and tobacco addictions. Others struggle with compulsive eating, extramarital affairs, and lying. Any sin that can't be broke with ordinary 'willpower' can be termed a besetting sin. Scripture promises, 'No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man' (1 Cor. 10:13). Your temptation to sin is not unique; others face it as well. You, however, are chained to it like a compulsive slave. Yet Scripture promises 'a way out' (see 1 Cor. 10:13). The Disciple's Fast can be that very way of escape for you, as a disciple." (Chapter 2)

Hell is a condition of spiritual weakness in the mind, because when we are spiritually weak, the wickedness in this soul realm can overtake us. We can fall prey to drug addiction, alcoholism, sickness, prostitution, white slavery and any of the other horrors of this realm. When we are spiritually weak, we can easily be victimized.

One who ignores inner awareness and fails to perceive good reason is doomed to the dark days of yesteryear. - David E Love, Author, Dante's Eighth Circle

God is still in the blessing business and my prayer is that He continues to do business with you

that talked about loving either darkness or loving light, and how hard it is to love light and how easy it is to love darkness. I think that is true. Ultimately, we do what we love to do. I like to think that I do things for the right reasons, but I don’t, I do things because I do or don’t love doing them. Because of sin, because I am self-addicted, living in the wreckage of the fall, my body, my heart, and my affections are prone to love things that kill me.

Shallow Christian identities explain why professing Christians can be racists and greedy materialists, addicted to beauty and pleasure, or filled with anxiety and prone to overwork. All this comes because it is not Christ’s love but the world’s power, approval, comfort, and control that are the real roots of our self-identity. A

Rooting out bad habits is not enough. If we merely attack what is wrong, we create a vacuum that will inevitably be filled by some new behavior or addiction that does not shape our worldview according to the gospel. The solution, I believe, is discipleship, the process of becoming more like Christ.

Our laws are no longer based on Judeo-Christian morality, but on Kinsey’s immoral “morality”: an adulterous, fornicating, aborting, pornography-addicted, masturbating, impotent, sadistic, masochistic, bisexual, homosexual, exhibitionist, voyeuristic, and child-sexual-abusive world.

Brenna speaks from a place where most of us are currently living—the real world—a place where things don’t always seem to work out, where depression and anxiety and suicidal thoughts accompany our daily devotions. Yes, God is good. God is near to us. And God protects us and loves us and cares for us. But, for whatever reason, fathers still sexually assault their children; mothers abandon their kids; good people are addicted to porn; and believers in Christ are victims of genocide—sometimes by the hands of fellow Christians. And on and on it goes. This world is filled with evil, and sometimes it’s very difficult to believe that God is good. But He is good. It’s one thing for some theologian to tell you that and to quote all the verses at you that say God is good. It’s quite another for someone like Brenna, who has experienced—and continues to experience—depression, unwanted same-sex attraction, tendencies to self-harm, and ongoing suicidal thoughts—to say, with all honesty and with an earthy passion: God is good!

The Christian should be without any addiction.

Nothing should prevent us from seeing Jesus in other people—not differences in race, religion, politics, or trivial things like the way someone dresses or what they do for a living. Our Lady asks us to see Jesus in everyone. In the homeless man begging for spare change. In the Muslim and the Serb. In the atheist who doesn’t believe in Jesus and the Christian who doesn’t understand Him. In the newborn baby and in the unborn baby. In your priest, in your bishop, and in the pope. In those who have hurt you and those you have hurt. In the thief. In the drug addict. In the worst sinner you know. And, perhaps most importantly, in yourself. See Jesus in everyone.

Every addiction is a manifestation of gluttony; and perhaps among all our sinful propensities, gluttony is the one that is the most shameful to admit. Why?

Gluttony and addictions take varied and subtle forms during our adult years.

Name your malaise: political polarization, climate change, looming global war, the mental health epidemic, addiction, Christian nationalism, widespread hypocrisy among Christian leaders, our simple inability to be kind… There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.

Fasting is a practice that frees us from the chains of this world, allowing us to hunger more freely for God.

Meadows also received a text on December 20, 2020, from Mike Lindell, a mustachioed, self-described former crack addict who’d made a fortune as CEO of the bedding company My Pillow. Lindell, who was an infomercial star, major Trump rally fixture, and financial backer of various protests against the former president’s loss, implored Meadows to have federal agents seize voting machines in key states. He was famous for wearing a large cross necklace and his message was an overheated blend of Christian prayer and internet insanity. “Hey Mark, I felt I was suppose to text you this message … You being a man a faith and on the front line of the decisions that are going to be historical! I would ask that you pray for wisdom and discernment from God! You are one of the people the president trusts the most. That being said I want to add my input.… Everything Sidney has said is true!” Lindell wrote. “We have to get the machines and everything we already have proves the President won by millions of votes! I have read and not validated yet that you and others talked him out of seizing them … If true . I pray it is part of a bigger plan … I am grateful that on the night of the election the algorithms of the corrupt machines broke and they realized our president would win in spite of the historical fraud! I look for deviations every day in my business … when I find one I investigate relentlessly until I know why it happened and how it happened … (this is my gift from God that has made my business so successful) From 11:15 pm on the night of the election I have spent all my time running impossible deviations and numbers from this election … I also was blessed to be able to get info and help Sidney Lin General Flynn and everyone else out there gathering all the massive evidence! I have been sickened by politicians (especially republicans) judges, the media not wanting to see truth (no matter what the truth would be!) This is the biggest cover up of one of the worst crimes in history! I have spent over a million$to help uncover this fraud and used my platform so people can get the word not to give up! The people on both sides have to see the truth and when they do.… There will not be no civil war, people (including politicians!) are fearing! The only thing any of us should fear is fear of the Lord! Every person on this planet needs to know the truth and see the evidence!!! Mark . God has his hand in all of this and has put you on the front line … I will continue praying for you to have great wisdom and discernment! Blessings Mike.” Meadows seemed grateful

Marine spirits are believed to be demonic entities that operate in coastal or aquatic environments, seeking to influence and control individuals. They can manifest in various ways, including through dreams, visions, or supernatural experiences. The Bible warns against worshiping or seeking guidance from spirits other than God, emphasizing the importance of spiritual discernment. Marine spirits can bring chaos and destruction, and their influence can be seen in areas such as addiction, immorality, and spiritual oppression. To overcome the influence of marine spirits, one must seek God's power and protection, and cultivate a strong spiritual foundation. By putting on the armor of God and standing firm in faith, believers can resist the attacks of marine spirits and walk in spiritual victory.

Today, Jesus would be canceled. Called crazy. Too emotional. A threat. A man speaking of love in a world addicted to hate? Intolerable. Barabbas, on the other hand? He’d be trending. Verified. Launching a course: ‘How to Win Without a Conscience.

Many slave owners saw the benefit in introducing their slaves to Christianity because of its tenants of unquestioned obedience and the immeasurable rewards in the afterlife. These masters saw the Christian religion as a tool that could make their job easier in controlling their bondsmen. They realized the potential for even greater psychological control in those ideals of faithfulness, obedience, and total submission to ‘ordained authority’ that Christianity required of its believers. Therefore the slave masters used the religion as a stupendously powerful psychological tool for handling the slave.

The Christian Porn Problem It might come as no surprise that there is virtually no difference in monthly porn use among non-Christian men (65%) versus Christian men (64%).[32] In fact, it might even be worse than the published statistics indicate. The Freedom Fight recently conducted a survey of over 750 Christian college men from over thirty different campuses across the country. Each of the men we surveyed was involved in a campus ministry, and each considered their faith to be a vital element in their lives. Many of them were leaders in their ministries. What we found was alarming—89% of the growing Christian men we surveyed watch porn, at least occasionally. More than six in ten view it at least weekly. More than half of these practicing Christian men say they are addicted to pornography.[33] The Freedom Fight’s recent survey of over 550 Christian women from over thirty university campuses across the US showed that 51% are watching porn at least occasionally. These aren’t just any college women either. These women are practicing Christians, involved in campus ministry, and many of them are in leadership positions. Though their faith is important to them, pornography remains a part of their lives.[34]

When someone is in love, he cannot help but experience the world as meaningful even if he doesn't believe it is. While the one who does not love cannot help but experience the world as meaningless even inf he believes that the world is meaningful. Love then infuses the world with meaning regardless of what ones believes about it. By revealing God as love, the Christian tradition rejects the idea that God is a meaningful being in favor of the idea that God is that which lights up the world, rendering it meaningful to us. This means that unlike the Idol, which seems meaningful until grasped, the moment we lay down the idea of God as meaningful and find the world infused with meaning, we bear witness to the meaningfulness of the divine.

if you’ve wondered whether a Christian still needs to repent, the answer is yes. Not to earn forgiveness—that is already secured in Christ—but to walk in the fullness of freedom He intends.