Addiction

 

How long can we play with something that might not be good for us before we become addicted? Stay tuned and I’ll tell you.

INTRO

How long does it take before we become addicted to something that’s not good for us? Well, to understand that, it might be helpful to know what addiction really means.

I checked dictionary.com and there I learned that it does talk about the idea of losing control. But what also goes with it is the fact that when it gets so far that to reverse it or to get out of it would cause, as it said, physical or psychological severe trauma. Yeah, that seems to be the case. You take a person who’s addicted to alcohol and you suddenly take it away from them, they get the DTs. You take the cigarettes away from a heavy smoker, well, we call it a nicotine fit, don’t we? Yeah, it’s just not meant to be that way.

But at what point do we go from little bit of a habit till it becomes an addiction? And that’s the real question, isn’t it? Because you see, we’re trying to live on the edge. We’re trying to get as close to the edge without falling off.

And addiction is kind of where you’ve actually fallen off, isn’t it? You may have gone too far or dabbled too long. I mean, how many oxycodone pills do you need to take before you become addicted? Or how many cigarettes do you smoke? Or drinks do you take? How many women do you need to mess around with before you become a womanizer? How much playing around must you do before you become a fornicator? At what point does your drive for being a good provider for your family and making lots of money turn into greed? Those are the kind of questions we’re looking at, isn’t it?

And you may have noticed that some of those things I just mentioned are sins that are listed in the Bible in places like Galatians 5:19-21. In all of these cases, though, there has been a loss of self-control.

That is the key behind it all. You see, self-control is when I determine how much I do, right? I know how to drive my car or ride my motorcycle or drive my school bus. But sometimes when we start messing around with these things, we’re tempted to lose control.

And that’s where the problem may lie. Yet self-control is one of those things that is spoken of over in 2 Peter 1:5-10, that Christians, people who are trying to be like Jesus, are trying to grow in. Self-control needs to be increasing, not being sold, not being relinquished.

So when, or how far do we go before we’re in trouble? There are many answers that I could give you. And then as surely as I give you one answer as to you have to take 20 oxycodones before you’re addicted, well, then somebody’s going to say, well, I got addicted at 4. And somebody else says, well, I took 30.

Look, it’s not about how close to the edge you can go before you fall off the cliff. What’s really needed here is self-control. When we lose self-control on some of these things, it’s not because it was ripped from us or taken away forcefully.

No, it’s something we, by choice, relinquished. We gave it away. We sold out.

That’s where it comes from, isn’t it? I mean, back when I was younger, there was a great temptation to smoke cigarettes. And if you smoked, the people that you were with would think that’s pretty cool, and that you were sharp, and you were powerful, and you was in control, and you can do what you want to do. And yeah, I did my time of dabbling with it, I did.

I was blessed enough to not go too far. And I’m glad I did put those things aside.

The same kind of things happen with alcohol, too. But those are all gone. I’m not going to be having that around my house anymore. Not even around the house.

Why? Because at that point is when I lose control.

The point is this for you and I. If you don’t want to lose control, if you want to be in control, if you don’t want to become addicted to anything, anything sinful or just anything bad at all, the one thing you need to do is this: Don’t start.

Stay in control the entire time. Do not relinquish it to look cool or to be accepted by others.

You don’t know where your point is. Neither do I. Only God would know. And he’s basically told us, stay away from those self-destructive things.

So what’s the good news in this for today? What makes this talk timeless? Timelessness is that based on the Bible that we shouldn’t do things that are sinful because in doing so, we give up the very things God wants us to grow in.

We’re going the wrong direction. The good news is that you can stop doing any of those things. You can overcome addictions.

Now, it took you a while to get in. It may take you an even longer time to get out, but it’s possible. And that’s part of the things that makes this talk timeless for you.

You can succeed in getting out of the problems and you can get back to serving God better than ever before. And let your self-control grow and become great.

I thank you for watching. Hope that your day is going wonderful.

Until next time, goodbye for now.