All of us are slaves to sin before we become Christians,
and even after our salvation we may think we are no longer sinning and
living a nice, sweet, kind life, but we are wrong. If we say that we do not
sin we are liars (1 John 1:8). Our sins are almost all denied so most of us
regard them pharisaically. Jesus described their attitude when he told this
parable. "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the
other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God,
I thank you that I am not like other men--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or
even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I
get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up
to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner’"
(Luke 18:10-13). Jesus said that the tax collector went home
justified because he was humble before God and did not exalt himself. Sadly,
too many of us exalt ourselves.
Theoretically, we are all set free of our sin at the time
of our salvation, and it is true that many are. Five weeks ago I had a young
man in his 20’s consult with me about the profound feelings of depression
that he was suffering. In the past he had been a heavy user of ecstasy, and
had been a long time user of marijuana. He also smoked cigarettes and
occasionally used large quantities of alcohol. He could not stop any of
these activities. His habits and poor judgment had gotten him into serious
financial difficulties. He was accompanied by his female domestic partner
and their three month old child. As I ended the interview before I told him
what I was going to do, he wistfully looked at me and plaintively said,
"Doctor, please help me!" My heart went out to him at that moment. It did
not matter to me that he had what looked like diamond earrings in both ears,
a gold chain around his neck, tattoos all over both arms and clothes that
were extremely mod. He was in agony and more than anything else at that
moment I wanted to help him. I knew he was a rank sinner and he could not
stop sinning, and I had to help him find a way out. I started him on an
antidepressant and told him to come back the next week so I could get more
information about his early life and understand his problem better.
He and his domestic partner and child came back the next
week and he was improved, but still in agony. After I collected the rest of
the information I needed, I told him that I could help him. I plainly told
him I thought his problem was for the most part spiritual. My treatment for
that was to offer him Christ as a way of relieving his depression and his
addictions. After I explained what Christianity was all about both he of
them eagerly accepted the Lord. His child who had been quiet during the time
we were together went, "goo, goo, goo" just as his mother finished her
prayer for salvation. I don’t know if the baby was like John the Baptist
when he leaped in his mother’s womb when Mary came to visit Elizabeth, but
it seemed like he wanted to participate in the great event too.
Five weeks later they were in my office and he had used
no marijuana, quit smoking and drunk no alcohol. They have begun to get
their finances straightened out, and he has no more depression. They are
planning to get married in the next few weeks. He has been set free of his
slavery to his most obvious sins and become a new person. God sets men free
if they surrender to him.
But there are many who are not set free, and I spend most
of my time working with them to find out why, and then free them. It is a
tough job, though. There are some of them that are afraid of letting God run
their lives. This is true because the human will does not tolerate the
imposition of another will above their will. It will only submit if an
appeal is made to it that promises freedom. Most people want to stay in
control of their lives, so they will not submit to anyone if they cannot
retain control. These persons have usually been dominated and controlled by
their father throughout their childhood and when they think they are free
they want to keep their freedom. Persons who have been reared like this
usually have a distorted image of God and see him as a tyrant who will
punish them if they get out of line, or he will withdraw love. Others see
God as absent. They do not believe that He will not do anything even if they
commit their life to Him. This group is hard to help too. There are many
distorted images of God because we usually view God as we view our earthly
father. Interestingly, the church does not really teach us what God is like.
Years ago I tried to learn what God’s attributes were, but I only found them
described in theological terms that did not help me. It was only after I
read the first volume of Thomas Oden’s systematic theology book entitled
The Living God that I finally had a good view of what God was like. To
get some people to surrender I have to teach them that we have a loving
Father who provides us with an understanding of who we are, a loving Father
who provides us with security, and a loving Father who will come and live
within us and will never leave us. Our God gives real meaning to our lives,
and guides and directs us in a dangerous and hostile world. Our God provides
us with every need and a few of our wants. He gives us the kind of freedom
that we all desire.
Persons who are afraid to surrender to God may surrender
most of their lives, but many of them will not surrender some part. This is
particularly true of persons who have sexual problems. In my last newsletter
I quoted John Oswalt about pagan religions, but there was another
significant statement in his book, Called to be Holy, that was
illuminated by the Holy Spirit as I read it. It stated that many people
surrender to God, but they do not surrender some part of their being. He
specifically mentioned sex as an area that is held back. The end result is
that those who do not surrender their sexuality continue to sin in that area
of their life.
But sexual activity that arises out of lust is not the
entire problem. Greed is so rampant in our society today that we can
truthfully say it, too, is an addiction. Greed is excessive or
reprehensible acquisitiveness. For example, I recently read a long
article about Warren Buffett. This man is one of the richest men in the
world and even in his 70’s he desires to get richer. He decided recently
that he wants to own only big corporations instead of medium and small ones.
He really does not need to own anything. What will he do with all the money
he has accumulated? There are no U-Haul-Its that can be pulled along behind
a hearse. Oh, to be sure he can leave it in a foundation for some charitable
purpose, but it is highly likely that the purpose he leaves it for will be
perverted and will not do what he wanted it to do. If he leaves it to his
children (if he has any) they will either blow it in living a life of
luxury, or will hoard it. They are not certain to be happy because their
wealth keeps them from becoming vocationally creative.
Then there were the people involved in the Enron scandal.
Not only were they greedy, but they had to lie to make it appear that they
were making more money than they really were. The same is true of the people
in the World Com mess. To top it all off, Arthur Anderson also was accused
of complicity (lying) in the accounting scandal at Enron, and this led to
the eventual demise of their company, too.
Greed is also the basis for a gambling addiction. Not all
people who gamble do so compulsively. Those who are compulsive gamblers may
spend all of their income on gambling while their families go without food,
clothes and housing. Years ago my wife and I were in Reno and went to the
casinos to see what was going on. There were little old ladies there who
were mindlessly standing in front of slot machines putting quarter after
quarter in the machines. Their hands were black with silver salts. (This was
when coins were still silver.). They spent hours putting money in the
machines. As we went through Harrah’s and other casinos, we saw person after
person who were losing large sums at the Black-Jack tables or Roulette
Wheels. What motivated these persons? It was greed. They hoped to strike it
rich at games where you cannot possibly win.
Why do people spend large amounts of money on lottery
tickets? The answer is that they, too, hope to get rich. When I lived in
Panama they had the Lotteria Nacional. Old women sat on every corner of the
streets selling tickets that cost 50 cents apiece. The people who bought
them were usually the poor. They hoped to win enough to escape the poverty
they lived in, but the number who achieved their purpose was few, for only
one ticket could win the jackpot. Many of the persons who bought tickets
bought a large number of them from different vendors in the hope that they
would win, but they really could not afford to buy those tickets. Most of
these people were not compulsive gamblers. Instead, they were looking for a
way out of poverty. Even so, they are motivated by greed.
Gluttony is another addiction. It is also a sin! In our
society we have an abundance of food at all levels of society. God has
provided abundance. And most people have too much of it available to them.
Poverty is said to cause people to lack food. I am, though, bothered by the
fact that there are enormous numbers of obese people among the poor.
Wherever I have gone in the world it seems that there is more than enough
food. Even in the poorest areas of the third world you will find obese
people. Why are they obese? The reason is that they are gluttonous. In our
society we are trying to blame obesity on junk and fast food. Obesity is not
related to the availability of these foods, it is related to the fact that
people eat more than they need. There is no difference in a Big Mac cooked
at McDonald’s and a big hamburger cooked in my home. If I put all the
condiments out that we do when we have guests in our home and they put them
on their hamburgers, the calorie count is the same. If they eat two
hamburgers in either place they really "pig out."
It is easy for people to overeat. Almost all restaurants
give you too much food in a serving. You do not get four or six ounces of
steak, instead you get eight or twelve ounces. Then there is a baked potato
that is the biggest they can buy. You put lots of butter and sour cream on
it, and eat a piece of Texas toast with butter and have a salad with lots of
dressing and you have had too much food. But you will not stop there, for
you may have some obscene dessert like a giant brownie topped with lots of
ice cream smothered with chocolate sauce and you will really have pigged
out. Since the meal is going to cost $25.00 you are going to eat it all. If
you do this often enough you will slowly get into the habit of eating too
much at every meal and you have become a glutton.
It does not take long to get obese. I have witnessed some
real gluttons at a local restaurant that has a breakfast buffet. One morning
I was eating there and three men all weighing more than 300 pounds were
sitting at the next table. I watched as each one of them ate three heaping
plates of food. Their plates were not filled, they were stacked.
Still, we cannot blame McDonald’s or the Outback Steak
House or even our homes for our sin. We alone are responsible particularly
if we respond to Satan’s temptations. God has told us how to deal with this
and that is to eat to live and fast from time to time. Still we sin. Just
observe the people coming in and out of church.
The answer to our sin is rather simple. It is to be
absolutely surrendered to the Lord. Now the thing that I learned from John
Oswalt is that if I am sinning I have to surrender that part of my life to
Him. The interesting thing is that I do not easily do this. The reason it is
not easy to do is that we have strongholds that are indelibly engraved in
our souls and it is very difficult for us to eradicate them. The genesis of
a stronghold often can be traced back to early life. Let us use gluttony as
an example. If you were like me you grew up in a home where there was plenty
of food. As a child your mother and/or father wanted to make sure you ate
enough food. Therefore, they gave you adult helpings of food and told you to
clean your plates. (If this did not happen to you, you were blessed.) If you
resisted you were not allowed to leave the table till you ate it all.
Eventually, you got to the point that you would eat it whether you wanted it
or not. If on the other hand you went out to eat, you were expected to eat
everything served to you especially if you went to a friend’s home. Of
course your hostess encouraged you to eat seconds so you continued the
process. In my day we were physically active because there was no television
and the radio had only soap operas so you expended a lot of energy in
physical activity; consequently we did not get fat. This continued until you
got to middle age and if your work did not keep you active, you slowly
decreased your physical activity and your waistline continued to expand. You
were now living to eat because you had become affluent and often went to
fine restaurants where you ate too much. You had long ago developed a
stronghold.
The stronghold you developed is comprised of your
mother’s repeated admonition to eat everything on your plate, plus the
memory of having to sit there until you eat it when your siblings and the
neighbor kids are out in the yard playing, the desire you have to please
your hostess when she asks you to have seconds, and the memories of the cost
of the food that you bought in a restaurant. It was interesting that after I
had written most of this I went out to dinner at a local seafood restaurant.
Even though I knew that I did not want to eat too much, I ordered a dish
that I knew had more food on it than I needed. I have a stronghold to be
sure. These strongholds are why over 50% of our population is obese. This is
compared to the 25% that were obese in 1960. Obesity has considerable
psychological impact, but it also shortens a person’s life, and causes a
morbidity and poorer quality of life than smoking, problem drinking, and
poverty. Obesity increases the probability of diabetes by eightfold, of
hypertension by sixfold, of arthritis fourfold, of asthma threefold, and the
probability of having fair to poor health by fourfold. Obesity is quite
clearly a major health problem for people in and out of the church.
God has, however, provided us with a way out. "The
weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary,
they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and
every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we
take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." God does not want
us to be obese. He knows that sampling everything on the table at a church
potluck supper is not good for us. He wants us to be in good health and an
obese person is not in good health or if not now, in time they will not be.
We should then marshal the weapons we have been given and do something about
it. (Physician, heal thyself.)
Our first weapon is to surrender our appetites to the
Lord. Jesus demanded absolute surrender and we need to include our
appetites. We need to surrender our appetites to Him whether they are for
food, drink or sex and let him control them. Now this is not an easy thing
to do. Remember that our stronghold is made up of multitudes of ideas and
accompanying emotions that are deeply ingrained into our soul. We do,
therefore, have to surrender our appetites over and over again before we can
get any degree of mastery of them. It is something that we have to do
several times a day if we hope to succeed. In dealing with our strongholds
we also have to repudiate the lies that were taught us in our childhood.
Our next step in management is to learn how to deal with
temptation. We live in a morally polluted environment, and it is easy to get
infected with sin. Temptation is the way we get infected. If we continue
using gluttony as an example, we will recognize that we are constantly
bombarded with pictures of gourmet foods, advertisements for fine wines, and
invitations to eat at restaurants that have delicious foods and, of course,
large helpings. Temptation arises out of our biological drives. When they
are channeled through our souls, the way we are going to satisfy them is
determined by the ways we have learned to satisfy them. If we have a
stronghold we will use it, for it has greater power than the knowledge we
have of the right way to satisfy it. "I know I should not eat that dessert,
but I eat it anyway." When I do, I sin and I cannot lose weight, or I get
more obese.
Next when we sin we have to repent and ask for
forgiveness. In the early church believers repented everyday. They confessed
their sin, told God they were sorry and asked for forgiveness. As I have
told you before, repentance is made up of two components. First, there is a
godly sorrow and second a resolve to amend our ways. A godly sorrow arises
out of a realization that our sin added to Jesus’ suffering on the cross and
our resolve to amend our ways means we will focus our will on changing.
To further overcome our sin we must develop and maintain
our spiritual immunity. Spiritual immunity is not something you hear much
about because we do not look at sin as disease, and believe that it is
infectious. Satan uses its infectious character to gain entry into our lives
and lead us into sin. Since sin is an infectious disease, we need to develop
an immunity to it. We do this in several ways. Our salvation provides us
with our primary vaccination, but we need to have boosters after that. To
get these boosters we first need to practice the means of grace regularly.
Oden in his book, The Living God, mentions this and Costa Deir
emphasized the concept in a series of lectures he gave at a conference I
attended. If we regularly pray, are into the Word, celebrate the Eucharist
and worship regularly we will maintain our spiritual immunity. Doing this
brings us into encounters with Christ and renews our power. We are thus
immunized against temptation and against Satan’s efforts to lead us astray.
Finally, we have other weapons to use when we are
tempted. These are the name of Jesus, the blood of Jesus, hymns and songs of
praise and thanksgiving. "Pop" prayers are also useful. There is one that is
attributed to a Russian monk that goes like this. "Jesus, Son of the living
God have mercy on me a sinner." When we feel tempted we can use any of these
to help us ward off infections or satanic attacks. We can be more righteous
if we work at it because we will be continuing our salvation.
