Desperate Joy

  One of the most important aspects of recovery is learning what exactly it is we are trying to get out of our addictive behavior. Addiction is never just about the acting out behavior or the pleasure we gain from it. There are deeper reasons as to why we go back to the addiction time and time again despite so many negative consequences. We have been exploring these ideas over the last few weeks. We started looking at triggers and have gotten down to the root, the false beliefs that are built into the foundation of the addiction. A few years back I did group therapy, and they offered me many useful tools to help me in this process of identifying those false beliefs. One of the most helpful was what they called a " Relapse PreventionSheet " [https://familystrategies.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Relapse-Prevention-Sheet.pdf] or RPS for short. If we felt triggered or in danger of acting out, we were encouraged to fill one out. For a long while, I mostly used it after I had sli...

  In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, we find the story of David and Jonathan building a strong, intimate friendship, "...The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul." (1 Samuel 18:1) This is a powerful example for us. We all need a friend like that who we can love as our own soul, and who will love us the same. Someone we can knit our lives together with. Not a spouse, but a like-minded friend of the same gender. Men especially need other men in our lives to enrich us and strengthen us. Longfellow, in his epic poem, "The Song of Hiawatha," described this kind of friendship that Hiawatha had with two other men: "Two good friends had Hiawatha, Singled out from all the others, Bound to him in closest union, And to whom he gave the right hand Of his heart, in joy and sorrow; Chibiabos, the musician, And the very strong man, Kwasind. Straight between them ran the pathway, Never grew the grass u...

  The other day I tuned in to the pop radio station and I heard Katy Perry crooning about the dangers of falling in love, one of the lines said, "Make me your Aphrodite, make me your one and only, But don't make me your enemy, your enemy."  Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of love and beauty and was one of the many false gods people long ago worshiped in place of the one true God. I am amazed at the diversity of gods and goddesses people once worshiped.   There were gods for the sun and moon, gods for lightning and rain, gods of fortune and fertility, and gods for death.   Whatever you might want or need, there was a god for you. We moderns are more sophisticated in many ways than those ancient Greeks, we do not worship gods and goddesses after all.   But idolatry is still alive and well.   While Ms. Perry may not be looking for anyone to make a statue of her and worship her, the message in the song is that we often take romantic love, the people we love...

  We live in a culture that is saturated with lust. It seems everywhere we look we are inundated with images, songs and videos that are either explicitly sexual or are heavy with innuendo. It is like we cannot even tell a joke these days without making it into something sexual. This makes for a challenging environment for those of us who are committed to following the Lord with all our hearts. I have been a Christ follower from when I was a child, and since puberty fired my veins with sexual desire, controlling lust has been a daily challenge. One area of difficulty for me has always been masturbation. There have been a couple periods in my life when I resigned myself to thinking that there was nothing really wrong with masturbation, but for most of my life, I have believed that it was wrong and have fought to control it. In the previous post we looked at the connection between masturbation and fantasy. We saw that if we are indulging in lust in our hearts, even if we are not...

  We have been looking at four stepping stones we can take if we want to find our way to joy.  The first two we looked at last time were surrender and sanctification, in this post I want to look at service and silence. When I was a child in Sunday school I was taught an acronym for joy: Jesus, Others, Yourself.   If I want to find joy, I was told, I needed to put Jesus first, others second and myself last.   It is a simple, but profound truth.   Life is not meant to be about my self-fulfillment, self-satisfaction, and self-actualization, at least not as ends in and of themselves.   Life is about serving Jesus and serving others.   While I am busy serving others I find the fulfillment, satisfaction, and actualization I desire. Jesus acted this out in dramatic fashion in John 13, "3. Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God. 4. He riseth from supper and laid aside his garmen...

  As human beings we have a problem.  We want things.  We desire pleasurable experiences.  We enjoy nice things.  These desire in themselves are not bad, in fact they are good. God wants us to flourish and have a pleasurable, joy-filled life.   He gave us the capacity for pleasure so that we would be drawn to Him, since He is the ultimate source of pleasure and joy.   "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning."   (James 1:17) The question is, how do find pleasure and satisfaction in the presence of God?   The lights and rush of this world are in our faces constantly, how can we cut through the noise and find the greater pleasure God is offering?   There are four things that I believe should be active in our lives if we want to be filled with the joy of the Lord:   surrender, sanctification, service, and silence.   ...

  We saw in a previous post that pursuing pleasure at any cost can lead us into destruction, both physically and spiritually.  Pleasure is a dangerous thing.  But it is also a glorious thing.  God has placed the desire for pleasure in our hearts and He wants us to find it.  He is a good Father and delights when we are living a flourishing, soul-satisfying life.  He has tuned our hearts to seek pleasure. The American Founding Fathers tapped into this truth when they crafted the Declaration of Independence, they wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The Founders recognized that seeking fulfillment and satisfaction is a perfectly natural and even a good thing.   Every person who has ever lived has sought after happiness, even those who live lifestyles of extreme self-denial...

  One of the great things about the Bible is that it shows us characters, heroes, and villains, in all their nobility and vice.  It shows us their glory and it shows us their humiliation.  We see their weaknesses and we see their strengths.  There is no whitewashing here. One such character that I find myself identifying with is Samson.   Samson was a man of tremendous passions.   He followed his heart, not his head, and more often than not, his more primitive urges as well.   He had tremendous zeal for the Lord, but he let his desires lead him away from God all too often.   Samson was commissioned by God to do great things and he did accomplish some great things for the Lord, but that greatness was derailed by Samson's pursuit of pleasure. "And Samson went down to Timnath, and saw a woman in Timnath of the daughters of the Philistines.   And he came up, and told his father and his mother, and said, I have seen a woman in Timnath of the d...

  One of my favorite hymns is "The Love of God" by Frederick Martin Lehman, one of the verses says this: "Could we with ink the oceans fill And were the skies of parchment made, Were every stalk on earth a quill And every man a scribe by trade, To write the love of God above Would drain the oceans dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Though stretched from sky to sky." Wow!   God's love is truly vast and amazing.   It defies description and comparison.   No matter what any of us have done, no matter what our history, where we have come from, or where we are right now, God loves us with a deep, abiding, and passionate love. Because God loves us, He has given us guidance and instruction for how to live our lives here on earth so that we can find goodness, glory, and infinite joy. But this goodness, glory and infinite joy cannot be found down any path we choose.   They are only found as we chase down the will of God and strive to bring ...

  Have you ever been able to witness the birth of a child?  Or, perhaps, given birth yourself? A couple years back, my sister gave birth to a girl, Lilly.  It was a joyous and wonderful time for them and for all of us celebrating with them.  I have never been a father myself, so some of those feelings escape me, but I am a witness to my sister and brother-in-law's experience.  Really, with rare exception, every first-time mother and father testifies to a peculiar happiness when they hold their child for the first time.  The peculiar magnificence of childbearing is hard to miss. Bringing a child into the world is a time of maximum joy.  Seldom do people find that same level of happiness again. This makes me curious.  What is it about birth that makes it so special?  Why do mothers and fathers across the world and across history universally agree that it is a powerful, meaningful, and euphoric experience? There is something to this, something p...