Addictive Sin

For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:19-25)

If you’ve ever been to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, you’ve seen that before anyone speaks he (or she) will say, “My name is ___, and I am an alcoholic.” When I was leading 12-step Bible studies, I would sometimes open up with, “My name is Tony and I am a sinner.”

Poet W.H. Auden once wrote –-

“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”

At its root, addiction is sin. And, sin is addictive. Addicts don’t have a choice to be a non-addict any more than we can choose to not be sinners. You can either be practicing or recovering. We can be practicing sinners – running away from God toward destruction. Or, we can be recovering sinners with help from the Spirit of Christ, who leads us to eternal life.

True Freedom

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. (Galatians 5:1)

Never are we less free than when we freely engage in sin. Sin enslaves us. We have less strength, less courage, less wisdom. Only when God claims us as His own are we truly set free to become who we were created to be. The process requires a surrendering to God’s will, not an exercise of personal freedom. Conversion is not our own doing, but the work of the Holy Spirit.

Evangelist Charles Haddon Spurgeon witnessed many conversions in his ministry. Reflecting on this, he wrote –

“Conversion is not, as some suppose, a violent opening of the heart by grace, in which will, reason and judgment are all ignored or crushed. The reason is not blinded, but enlightened; and the whole man is made to act with a glorious liberty which it never knew till it fell under the restraints of grace.”