Breaking Habits - Christians in Recovery

You would be surprised at the number of people who have broken the chain of crippling habits by turning their life over to God.

There is only one higher power and that is God. One person relates:
"When I got up from my knees, I was a different person. He delivered me from alcohol, nail-biting, bad language, fear, and probably things I don’t even know about. It wasn’t as if I said to myself, ‘Well, I have had this talk with God, so now I have to clean up my act’. I could not have done that on my own. All of it was just GONE. I thought, oh, there really is a God, and I’m probably the only person this has ever happened to. (I am still amazed at thinking those thoughts.)”

This is just the beginning. Unfortunately some of us suffer multiple addictions that leave us scarred for life. It reminds me of the story I once heard about an individual that was asked to hammer a nail into a piece of lumber each time he sinned, for one year. Needless to say that peace of lumber was full of hard driven nails. He was then asked to pull each one of those nails out of that board. When he finished those the board was scared and pitted. The sadness of it was that it left vivid reminders of the destruction left by those nails/sins.

The Power that did this is no mindless machine, however, there is no guarantee that your experience will be identical to any mentioned in this article. God is too exciting for that sort of dull predictability. But there is a guarantee that God will work powerfully in your life, if you let Him.

Expressing love for the most wonderful Person in the universe is the key to being liberated from powerful habits. We rightly reject a religion that’s a list of dos and don’ts. To fill the holes left by our mistakes, we will need the exhilaration of a never-ending love affair.

Without having our deepest needs satisfied, we will be forever tempted to step over the boundaries, lured by lesser things in an attempt to dull the gnawing ache of those scars. The things we unconsciously turn to could be overwork, overeating, compulsive behaviors, and chemicals, inappropriate use of sex, the list seems endless. Many of these things have a legitimate place, but they were never designed to meet our deepest spiritual needs.

When we are forced into the unnatural role that temptation has for us, we are as unsatisfactory as cardboard to a starving man, with nothing better to fill the emptiness, we often embrace that feeling to experience just a little bit of relief.

I can remember when the dangers of smoking were less publicized, psychologists tested a group of smokers and then convincingly explained why it was in their best interest to quit smoking. The researchers later tested those who still smoked, and found they reported enjoying smoking more than they had before they were so aware of the dangers. This was apparently how their mind coped with knowing that they should give up smoking but finding that they couldn’t quit.