Thinking Our Way to Freedom

 

Addiction is a problem that has many dimensions. It is a sickness that manifests itself in every aspect of our beings, it impacts the body, the will, and the emotions. It is a spiritual poison that spreads through our entire person making us sick and threatening to kill us. Because it attacks on so many fronts we must fight on multiple fronts, and one of the most important, if not the most important is our mind.

We have been looking at the different aspects of our identity in Christ and what this means for our addiction. In Christ we are dead to sin and alive to God. Sin and Satan have lost their power and cannot control us unless we allow them to. We have been resurrected with Christ and now have his power abiding in us and there is no sin or addiction that can overcome us. In Christ we have already overcome. We are already victorious in Christ. All the strength and power we need is found through our relationship with Christ. These are powerful truths, and understanding them is a first, important step, but this is only the beginning. We may know as a fact that Christ has given us power to overcome, but we still struggle, fight, and fail in the addiction. This is often because even though we know the truth, we have not appropriated it, we are not living it out. We have the theoretical knowledge, but not the practical.

So how do we move from theory to practice? How do we take these important ideas and apply them to our lives?

There is an old proverb that has been stated different ways, "Thoughts become actions. Actions become habits. Habits become destiny."  If we want to secure our destiny, then we must harness our thoughts.

Paul wrote about our identity in Christ and the power of controlling our thoughts in Romans 6:

"9 Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.

10 For in that he died, he died unto sin once, but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.

11 Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord."

I am seeing two important steps here, "knowing" and "reckoning."  We already know that we have been delivered from sin and addiction through Christ. Now we need to "reckon."  That old, King James word, "reckon," means "to consider, to think or ponder, to meditate."  Remember, the conflict with addiction is not a power struggle, but a truth struggle. The more we ponder the truth, the more power we will have to oppose the temptations that assault us. We know that sin, death, and addiction have no power over us, what we need to do now is practice the truth. We practice the truth by thinking. When lies press into our mind from the world, the flesh and devil, we pull out the sword of truth and cut them down. But just as a soldier would want to practice and train with his sword to be ready to face his enemies, we also need to practice with the truth to be ready to face our enemies. This practice most often looks like meditation.

Memorizing Scripture has been a powerful tool for me in my practice of meditation. When lustful thoughts come up, I can quote Scripture and use it to knock them back. Memorizing may seem daunting for some of us, but it need not be. All it takes is repetition. We can write down a verse in a notebook, journal or notecard and review them every day, or many times a day. Back in the day, I used to put Bible verses as my lock screen on my cell phone. We read it over and over again, out loud if possible. This helps to reinforce it since we have multiple senses involved. We can focus on one phrase, and once we have that one memorized, move on to the second. Once the second phrase is locked in, we merge the first and second together. Then we start on the third and so on. It is a simple step by step process. It may take some time, but it is well worth the effort. Once the verse is in our memory we will want to go back and review it every day, repeating it several times. This process does not need to take more than fifteen minutes a day.

Along with memorization, journaling has been helpful for me. This helps me to take the truth of the Scripture and make it personal. I dig into what it means, and more importantly, what it means for me personally. My practice lately has been to journal for about fifteen minutes a day on a particular verse and focus on a single verse for five days. Prayer is part of this process as well; we should be asking the Holy Spirit to teach us and open up our understanding to the truth.

Affirmations are another tool we write about frequently here. Writing affirmations based on the truth of Scripture and meditating on them, that is, repeating them over and over again in my head, has been effective in reckoning myself to be dead to sin and alive in Christ.

Keep in mind that many of the lies we have believed about ourselves and the addiction have been engrained in us since the time we were children. We were trained to believe falsehood upon falsehood. Often these patterns in our thinking become physically engrained into the circuitry of our brains, so our brains become wired to act out. Fortunately, our brains can change along with our patterns of thinking, but it takes time and work. This will take months, if not years of effort. Even after years of praying and meditating we will most likely still find troublesome thoughts bothering us from time to time, but we will find they have much less power over us.

We are fortunate in that we have the power to change our minds, to change our thinking, this allows us to break free.

The Christian life is a life of freedom. God's never intended for anyone to become enslaved to sin, sex or porn. He wants us to know abundance of liberty and joy. Through the work of the Cross the power of sin has been broken. We have been set free. Sin has no power. Now we just need to appropriate that freedom, to accept it, believe it and live it out. This happens as we reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God.