One day I heard a friend tell how she came to the understanding that she was powerless over her addictions. She said she would go to bed every night swearing that she would not drink or drug the next day, and then she would get up the next morning and say that she would not drink and drug as much. Light bulb moment. This woman had just told my story. I had done that for years. I had gotten up and swore not to indulge that day and then changed my mind before lunch.
Then I tried to think of a single day that I had said, "today I'm not going to use" and actually didn't. How many times did I not change my mind? I couldn't remember any. I couldn't pretend any more. If every time you make a certain decision you later go back on it, you're not changing your mind. You're a slave. That's not a choice. That's programming, an order to be obeyed or an instinct or drive that I can't overcome. I can make a show of fighting. I can argue against it. I can mask the failure by changing my mind, setting a quit date goal in the future, after all tomorrow is another day. I can find an excuse to give in without it being because I'm weak and powerless and in chains. And the beast does not care. I don't care what you tell yourself as you do my bidding, if you always do what I want you to instead of what you want, I'm the one in control.
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.
That's how Paul put it in Romans 7:19-20. It's sin in me doing it. But that's not an excuse that makes it OK. It's not just sin that makes us do things, like saying the Devil made me do it. It is sin that lives within us. It's living in us and making us do what we don't want to do, which is just a different way to say that he is powerless over his life and over those areas of his life that he finds himself incapable of willing himself to rightness. It's like me saying I'm a drunk and drunks drink, so there's nothing that can be done. I might as well get drunk today. No!
As long as I am fighting that battle, I am lost. As long as I keep changing my mind, I am a slave. Call it being a slave to sin or being an addict or tending toward dependency on the unhealthy and unhelpful or call it duck sauce ice cream for all I care. Nomenclature is not the issue. The issue is I'm killing myself and putting every good thing in my life on the funeral pyre because I can not will and determine myself to change. I need to be set free or made free.
I found that freedom, finally. Jesus said, "I am the way the truth and the life," and that, "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." Jesus came to set us free from the bondage of sin and death. He came to conquer sin and destroy the works of the devil and the curse. If we submit ourselves to His care, and hide beneath His wings, we find that sin, our flesh, our old nature, what have you, has no power there. Sin can't make me. The devil can't make me. Old habits can't make me. Triggers can't make me. I can go through a day without changing my mind and picking the chains back up.
And the better news is that He didn't just come to set us free, to kick us from our prison and wish us peace and good luck as we stumble into the future. You're free but still helpless and black marked to boot. No. He came to heal the brokenhearted as well as to set the captives free. He's all about the healing and the restoration and the making new. So today, if you're struggling against changing your mind in some area where you always seem to flip flop, don't try to slip your shackles. Reach out to and get to know the One who holds the key and let Him free you and carry you to a place of refuge within where He can minister to your wounds and make beauty from the ashes of brokenness.
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