This blog started out simple enough. As I do with most of the subjects God placed on my heart, the Holy Spirit led me to ask a simple question. Can you be addicted to addiction? I know that is a weird existential question not easily answered. As an addict I certainly haven’t even conceived of this. So, I can only conclude this is a question best left from the Holy Spirit.
What I found wasn’t the answer to that question. All research from the secular world of an addict doesn’t touch on that. The internet and society as a whole has coined a new way of disguising sinfulness called “toxic faith.” As you have correctly interpreted this is to say there is more than one article on how you can be “addicted to God.” This is quite sad considering this comes from 12step.com. Take their view of addiction: “Addiction is usually defined as: “The state of being enslaved to a habit, characterized by compulsive behavior that is damaging to the addict.”
Here is the natural problem with that as a believer in The Father, His Son, and the Holy Spirit. We know for a fact that there is nothing damaging about the Bible, and following Jesus Christ for our salvation. Don’t take my word for it. From 1 Peter 5:10: “But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.” The God we know and the Christ we follow will only make us more perfect. Scripture also tells us in “1 Thessalonians 5:6-8: Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation.
So, we see here that even the Scripture tells us how to be sober, although the differing interpretation is another topic for another time. Here though an addict can take this verse literally that Scripture warns us to be sober not drunken. The rest of this article delves deeper into the concept that addicts turn their lives over to a “higher power,” and that we can be addicted to God as a concept to escape our own lives. Don’t be fooled here, this is a false teaching if I have ever heard of one. It just tells you to switch for following “the program” instead of trusting God. Sounds to me like exchanging one addiction for another. However, trusting your life to the Holy Spirit, believing that Jesus dies for your sins and cares about us and our salvation, there is freedom in that. That is not damaging to us. This may be portrayed as toxic, but true believers who look to spread the Gospel know better.
As believers we can be addicted to protocol, tradition, rituals, and other man-made constructs that have nothing to do with God’s will. We make who we talk to, where we sit, what we listen to, who we don’t talk to, a part of our routine. This routine isn’t of God and isn’t God addiction. Its addiction to behavior, a sin from humanity that we inherited and practice all on our own.
