Tuesday, August 14th, 2018
On August 2nd, I gave chapel at the Minneapolis Adult and Teen Challenge to some 300 men and women. I’ve always felt I don’t have as close a connection with drug addicts as I would have if I’d been an addict at one time myself.
As I sat in a front chair listening to the last praise song, In Christ Alone, I realized I did have an addiction that I fight against as much as they do with drugs and alcohol. My addiction may be worse than theirs, in fact, but then they have the same addiction themselves in addition to drugs and alcohol.
You see, thanks to Adam and Eve, I am addicted to myself. I try as hard as I can to be addicted to Jesus Christ, but my old natural self sometimes takes over and I do it my way. Oh, I may go days or even weeks mostly doing things God’s way, but then seemingly out of the blue a temptation arrives that I allow to take hold of me. And then I assert my own rights and my own desires without asking God what He wants me to do. I don’t think that caving in on my part is all that much different than if I decided to have a snort of cocaine or a meth pill. I really don’t.
Try as I might, I can’t conquer my addiction, except In Christ Alone, the name of the song I sang with the others before stepping up on the stage to confess my addiction. And so it is with the alcoholics and drug addicts I talk to. They can only beat their addictions In Christ Alone. So now I have a common ground with them that I didn’t realize I had before.