Freedom From Drug & Alcohol Addiction

5 views

October 26, 2017

There is freedom from addiction! Watch this powerful message in which Jeff Durbin gives his testimony of addiction to drugs and alcohol and the freedom he gained in Christ. Don't miss it. Share this message of hope with someone who is hurting. For more, go to http://apologiastudios.com.

00:12: Well, it's been amazing being here in Ireland, and yes, it is very, very different climate wise.
00:21: I think right now in Phoenix, it is 95 degrees Fahrenheit, which I don't know and don't care what that means for you.
00:28: No, I haven't been able to figure it out yet, Celsius. I don't know. Maybe it's, what is 95?
00:34: What is? Okay. There you go. Good. So it's pretty hot.
00:40: It's pretty hot. So I've enjoyed my time here so far. I'm going to come back about 20 pounds heavier, I think, which would be a big surprise for my wife.
00:48: And I've learned all the different foods you have. And I've gotten a chance to eat black pudding, which
00:54: I learned is actually not pudding. At all. And in light of our subject for this evening,
01:02: I get to go home and say in a very righteous kind of way, they had good crack in Ireland.
01:11: That was some good crack. Very different from where I'm from. That means a whole different thing.
01:17: So I just want to tell you how grateful I am to be here with you guys, and it really is an honor. And I don't usually like to talk about myself very much in messages and talks, but in light of the conversation and what the topic is,
01:31: I think it would be a little bit helpful. And so I'll talk a little bit about my own story. I wasn't raised in a
01:37: Christian home. My parents were, well, my dad was really, I think, atheistic mildly.
01:45: And when I ended up turning to Christ, he became more of a hostile atheist to my own faith.
01:51: And my mother was mildly spiritual. Here's what I knew growing up.
01:56: There was a book that sat on top of our stereo and my dad was in the Air Force, United States Air Force.
02:02: So we traveled all around the world, grew up in Holland, grew up in Japan, Washington, D .C.
02:08: And this book always sat in the same place, no matter where we were in the world. And it always carried with it about an inch of dust.
02:16: And here's what I knew about that book. There was a person named Jesus. People claimed that he died and rose again.
02:23: And that was his book. That's what I knew. And I remember, I think, during one
02:29: Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday weekend, there was a movie about Jesus on television and I saw that.
02:36: And so, again, my mom was mildly spiritual. So if things were going really, really bad, she would talk about God and there's a
02:44: God who's in control of things and things like that. But non -Christian home, wasn't raised, going to church, under the hearing of the gospel, those sorts of things.
02:52: I began martial arts training when I was four years old in Holland. I did judo. And when
02:59: I got a little bit older and moved to Japan, I started training in martial arts religiously.
03:05: It was six days a week, about four hours a day, two different martial arts systems. It was my whole entire life.
03:10: It's really what identified me was martial arts. And so, throughout the years, moved back to Washington, D .C.
03:18: and I began to train and to compete professionally. By God's grace, I went pro at 13 years old and I was competing across the
03:26: United States every single weekend. I don't know how I passed high school. I never was there, but I did somehow.
03:34: And so, I became national champion and a world champion and was competing constantly.
03:40: I ended up, through all of that, doing a lot of different things, like video games and some movie stuff and television stuff.
03:46: I played Michelangelo and Donatello for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television franchise.
03:53: I ended up playing Johnny Cage in Nightwolf for Mortal Kombat, the live tour. And all of that came from the martial arts background.
04:00: The reason why I share that with you is it was really my whole life, martial arts, and that whole crowd and competition and all that stuff.
04:09: And so, when I was around 16 years old, I came home from teaching karate at my own karate school that I had started at 16.
04:18: It was about 10 o 'clock at night and I turned on the television, I was by myself downstairs and flipped through the channels and I saw
04:24: Billy Graham. And here's what I heard. I heard that there was a person named
04:30: Jesus who lived perfectly and died for sinners and rose from the dead. And I heard that if you wanted to go to heaven, then you needed to pray this prayer and you would be promised heaven one day.
04:43: And so, to this day, I'm not quite sure if my conversion was legitimate then, if I fully understood the gospel and I grasped it, if God had truly opened my eyes at that time.
04:54: But I had a profession of faith. I remember I called the 1 -800 number on television, I got my first Bible and some cassette tapes.
05:02: Children, that's these things that were... You'll never know the struggle.
05:09: You'll never know the struggle. And I remember, I do remember feeling different.
05:16: I remember that I had a love for God's word that I had never had before. And I actually did find a church to go to.
05:23: I started going to a church and I was growing, I thought, in my faith. But there was a real problem within me, is
05:30: I had a profession of faith in Jesus and I had what looked like parts of my life turned over to Christ.
05:36: If you would have asked me, or really anybody that knew me, are you a Christian or is
05:42: Jeff a Christian? I think I would have said, of course, yes. How dare you suggest otherwise? And everybody who knew me would have said, yeah,
05:49: Jeff is, he's a Christian. And so, after a period of time, I ended up moving out of the house a little earlier than I graduated and I moved across the country to Phoenix, to Arizona.
06:02: I moved out to be closer to Los Angeles to do stuff with Hollywood, movies and things like that, and to go to Bible college.
06:10: And so, it was interesting because there was my life where I would have professed faith in Jesus Christ, that I love
06:16: God. I was growing in my faith. And yet I also had another part of myself where when believers weren't around or I wasn't around a
06:24: Christian crowd, and I was with my old friends from Hollywood and things like that, I would do the things that they were doing.
06:31: I was living in relationships with women outside of marriage. I was getting drunk, really, whenever I pleased.
06:40: If there was an opportunity to go out and to party, that was what I did.
06:45: And I would have felt a little bit of grief over it, but it was nothing, there was nothing within me to say,
06:52: I don't want to do that, or I have a hatred for that, or I'm transformed and I don't want to be there, or I can't do that.
06:59: It was really a double life. There was Christian Jeff, and then there was the party
07:04: Jeff, the guy that did whatever he pleased. And so, my life continued down that path for some time.
07:09: I ended up getting married to my wife, Candy, about a week after she turned 18.
07:16: So it was legal. So, as soon as she turned 18, we got married, and about after the first year of marriage,
07:27: I got contacted from my friends who were in town. These were a bunch of my buddies, martial artists, and the
07:33: Hollywood crowd, and they asked me to go out with them to a club, and so it wasn't abnormal for me to do something like that, and so I ended up going out with my friends that night.
07:43: And I got really, really, really drunk. I got so drunk that I blacked out, and in my recollection, what
07:50: I can remember about this night is getting really, really blasted, and then I kind of came to at a different club than we were at before, and I remember that I was standing in a circle of people, and I was looking down at my hand, and I had a pill in my hand.
08:06: It was ecstasy. Now, before this time, I never would have done something like that. I think that if you would have talked to me about drugs at the time,
08:15: I would have had sort of a hypocrisy about myself. I would have gone and gotten drunk, really, with no problem at all, but I would have probably thought you were kind of sleazy if you were taking drugs, and I wouldn't have done something like that.
08:26: So I'm sitting here with a tab of ecstasy in my palm, surrounded by people that I really don't know except for one person, all with pills in our hands.
08:34: I'm half drunk, and I see security running over to us with their flashlights up, running over.
08:40: And in that moment, I thought, well, I can either drop the pill on the ground and get caught with it and go to jail, or I can put the pill in my mouth and make it disappear.
08:54: And so I made it disappear. And that night, I took one pill, and I ended up high for about 24 hours.
09:05: And that one night turned into the next weekend, where I was now looking for it, and I found somebody to deal me ecstasy.
09:12: And I got his number, and now I had a connection. And that next weekend turned into the next weekend, which turned into midweek, which turned into every single day.
09:21: I was doing ecstasy. I was smoking marijuana. I was getting drunk. I was taking bumps of cocaine.
09:28: I mean, if it was there, I was using it. And this led into a year of depravity in my life, of real depravity.
09:37: I abandoned my wife and my son for days at a time. I spent nearly $100 ,000 on partying and my addiction that first year.
09:47: And there were times where I left my wife at home with no money and no access to a vehicle, and I was vanished, gone.
09:57: She didn't know where I was, and I didn't call her and tell her. I did everything you can imagine that year in disappearing.
10:04: I would leave the state and go to a different city to party. I would stay out all night until the next morning, till the afternoon of the next day, using drugs and alcohol.
10:15: And that was my whole life. It identified me for that entire year. And what's interesting about my own experience then is that, listen closely to this, if I would have had the opportunity at any point that year while I was at a party with people to talk about God, to talk about Christ, to talk about salvation,
10:34: I assure you that I would have. That was the complexity of the situation, is that I had a profession of faith in Jesus.
10:45: And if you would have attacked the biblical faith or Christ at some of these after parties where I was using drugs and alcohol,
10:52: I would have fought for Christ while I was high, on ecstasy, with a bottle of booze in my hand.
10:59: It was a complete conflict within me, confusion, hypocrisy. That was my life.
11:04: I knew it was sin. And there were plenty of times during that year where I felt, I know this is sin.
11:11: I need to turn from it. And near the end of that year, one night
11:17: I went out with some friends again, and I ended up at an after party, this house was full of people, and that night
11:23: I was up to six tabs of ecstasy. Now the first night, you remember, I took ecstasy. I took one pill and I was high for about 24 hours.
11:31: By the end of the year, I was taking six tabs of ecstasy to feel anything at all. And if you know anything about ecstasy, which just looks like a crowd that does, okay.
11:44: If you know anything about ecstasy, ecstasy is a drug that will kill you because you overheat.
11:52: You almost cook yourself from the inside. If you watch videos of people overdosing from ecstasy, they are slithering around on the floor, they can't stop moving, and their temperature is through the roof, and you kill yourself because you overheat.
12:06: Well, I know that's how you die of ecstasy. I knew it then. Everybody who uses ecstasy knows that's how you die, and you have to make sure that you stay hydrated and you try to keep yourself cool.
12:14: Well, I had taken six tabs of ecstasy, and I was drinking a bottle of vodka. And I was at this after party.
12:21: It was really late, maybe three or four in the morning, and all of a sudden, my awareness came back because my heart was pounding so hard and so fast that it felt like someone had their foot on a gas pedal, and it was just revving up and it wasn't stopping.
12:37: It was just increasing and increasing and increasing, and I became immediately aware of the fact that my heart was out of control, and I couldn't stop it.
12:44: I couldn't catch my breath. I couldn't slow it down. I couldn't calm down. My heart was coming out of my chest, and I looked down at my arms, and I realized that my hands and my arms were blood red.
12:56: They were so red. They were just completely bright and lit up, and I recognized immediately that I was soaked in sweat.
13:05: And so I knew at that moment I'm overdosing, and so I got up, and I didn't want to panic, and I didn't want to make anybody else panic, so I walked over to the phone, and I picked it up, and I was about to call 911, but I didn't want to make anybody panic or myself, and so I tried to calm down.
13:20: I put the phone down, and I went over to the freezer, and I grabbed a big bag of ice. I walked over to the air conditioning unit.
13:27: That's these things in the United States where cool air comes in. I went over to the air conditioning unit.
13:33: I turned it all the way down. People I was with said, what are you doing? I said, just leave me alone, and so I went into the bathroom, and I poured a cold bath, and I dumped it, the ice, all the way out, and I sat down inside this bathtub, and I remember that I just melted the ice, and it wasn't helping.
13:51: My heart was out of control. My whole body was red, and this ice was now melted, and it wasn't helping at all.
13:58: It was getting worse. I remember that everything was very, very clear in that moment.
14:04: I'm about to die, and so I was losing my ability to focus at that point. I was losing energy, the ability to move, and I remember that I walked into the bedroom, and I sat down on the bed, and I think for a moment,
14:17: I considered, I think I'm going to lay down now and die, and so I sat on the edge of the bed, and I remember
14:23: I sat in front of a fan, and in this moment, I was in a dark room, dying on a bed, and I remember that I thought to myself,
14:33: I know what I'm doing. I know I'm about to die, and I remember I started to pray and talk to God, and I remember that I said to God, God, you have every right to kill me.
14:47: Just please don't kill me yet, and I remember that I was pleading with God, just don't kill me yet.
14:52: I know that I'm sitting against you. I know what I'm doing is against you. Just please don't kill me yet.
14:59: Just give me a chance, and so I said to God, smash my life. Destroy it.
15:06: God, destroy it. You have to help me. I'm asking you to not kill me, but please destroy my life.
15:13: Bring me back to you, and so the most amazing thing in that moment, pleading for my life before God, high and completely confused and delirious, hot, red, heart coming out of my chest, all of a sudden, in a moment, in an instant, shut off.
15:35: Completely back to normal. I wasn't high. I was as sober as a fundamental
15:41: Baptist on a Sunday morning. I knew you
15:47: Presbyterians would like that. I was sober, I was clear,
15:53: I was aware of everything, and I looked down at my arms, and I was back to normal.
15:58: My heart was beating at a normal rate. I was awake and sober and fine.
16:04: Now I'd love to tell you that that's the end of the story, and I came to Christ, and everything was fine, but the truth is, it wasn't genuine repentance.
16:11: I just didn't want to die, and so for a period of about two weeks after that, I continued to use and sin against God and betray
16:19: Him and completely diss His grace and mercy in my life, but after about two weeks,
16:27: God showed up, and in one day, He smashed my life. He was actually really good at it. Between the hours of 6 a .m.
16:33: and noon, one day, I woke up to my car being repossessed, pulled away, to an eviction notice on my door with a notice from the sheriff saying that if I'm not out in five days, the sheriff is going to take me out.
16:45: My phone was shut off, my electric was shut off, my water was shut off, and the person that I was working for called everybody in his staff and said,
16:54: I'm not paying any of you. If you don't like it, sue me. It's kind of hard to sue somebody when you don't have any money.
17:00: So I have no money, no electric, no phone, no water, an eviction notice, and my car is being towed away, all of this before noon in one day.
17:11: And so now, I'm sitting in my apartment with my wife, my one -year -old son, and a newborn baby girl, and I'm sitting there in a mess that I've created in absolute silence.
17:26: No more music, no more partying, no more ecstasy, nothing.
17:32: I can't go anywhere. I can't do anything. My life is obliterated. I have nothing in my bank account.
17:39: I have nothing in my home. I have no power. I have no water. I have no phone. I have no car.
17:45: I have no job. I have nothing, smashed. And so it was in those moments that I began to really rediscover what was going on.
17:59: And I remember one of my greatest helps in that time was my wife, who had been praying for me and really an amazing act of God's grace and mercy in my life and just power in hers.
18:11: She stuck around, which is absolutely incredible. There were times during that year,
18:17: I discovered later, that her family was actually working with her to just, they were going to come out, they were going to pick her up and drive back to Kentucky with her, which is across the country.
18:27: And for some reason, my wife rejected it every time. And so here
18:32: I am now with my wife, who for some odd reason believes in me and believes in God, and I'm sitting in a mess that I've created, and now
18:40: I started actually sitting on my couch in this quiet apartment with a Bible. And I remember that I began reading the
18:49: Bible again like it was the first time. And here's what I learned in those moments. I started reading the
18:55: Bible, and I started reading things that I had seen before, like I knew they were there.
19:01: And if you would have told me, if you would have asked me, have you read this, what Jesus says here? I would have said, yeah, I've read that about a dozen times.
19:08: I started reading things that Jesus said about coming to him, and it was like I had never heard it before, where Jesus would call people to come to him and he would call them to turn from their sin to come and trust in him, where he would call people to come to him and to abandon their self, to abandon their life, to come be joined to him in his death and resurrection.
19:29: I would see Jesus actually talk people out of coming to him, and that bothered me.
19:36: You see, I think that the message that I heard, which is more probably that I didn't understand the gospel, the message
19:43: I heard was that, look, you're a sinner, God is holy, and if you want to go to heaven one day and not go to hell, pray this magic prayer.
19:50: And now I'm seeing Jesus actually talking to crowds of people, and he's convincing them to not follow him, talking them out of it.
20:02: In the way that he would have crowds in front of him, massive crowds, the ministry is growing, it's successful.
20:08: He turns around, probably to the shock of his disciples, and he says to a crowd of people that are following him, it's a mega church movement now.
20:17: He says to them, if anyone comes to me and does not hate, and he starts naming now the most important people to us, father, mother, sister, brother, wife, yes, even your own life, you're not worthy to be my disciple.
20:30: He would say, you must come to me and take up your cross, deny yourself, take up your cross to come follow me.
20:36: And he says, count the cost, count the cost, come and die.
20:43: And I would see Jesus talking about sin in such a way that he was calling people to turn away from where they were, to come to where he is, and to be reconciled to God.
20:51: And I began to see, it looks like Jesus is saying this whole salvation thing is not simply about heaven one day, but it's about reconciliation and peace with God now, today, which was wholly different than I had thought about the gospel.
21:07: I thought about the gospel in terms of praying a magic prayer, Jesus punches your ticket, and you go to heaven one day, guaranteed eternal life as a gift of God's grace.
21:16: I understood the grace part. But I thought about heaven and Jesus and sense of somewhere you go, someplace you're going to be one day.
21:25: And now I'm reading the gospel and Jesus called to come to him for life, and I'm seeing something very different.
21:31: I'm seeing Jesus talking about the here and now, being reconciled to God now, the transformation that he brings into your life.
21:37: And I actually started to think to myself, that doesn't sound anything like me, nothing.
21:45: I mean, I have moral grief over what I've done. I have moral grief over the fact that I've abandoned my wife and my children, and I've destroyed all of our finances, and then
21:56: I've gone out and just run amok and just been depraved and sinful, and I've been a wretch. I felt morally bad about that, but I don't know that I really hated my sin.
22:07: And so I started asking the question, have I ever really turned from my sin to trust in Christ?
22:13: Did I want Christ or did I want simply heaven one day?
22:18: Was I simply trying to escape judgment or did I truly want to know Jesus and to be in a relationship with him and to be forgiven of my sin and to be joined to him?
22:28: And so I started questioning whether I had ever actually turned to Christ as Lord of my life, to save me from my sin, from it, as in,
22:39: I don't want it anymore. I need you to free me from it and take it from me. And so all
22:45: I remember is I felt overwhelming grief over my sin.
22:50: I felt ashamed. I felt guilt. I felt lost. I felt like a slave. And so I remember
22:56: I walked into my closet, and it wasn't a magic prayer. I can't even tell you word for word what
23:02: I said, except I walked into my closet, I closed the door, I got on my knees, and I talked to God, and I said something like this.
23:10: I said, God, I am awful, and I am sinful, and I have nothing to offer you.
23:16: And I remember I said this, I am not good, and I will never be good. I will never be good enough.
23:23: I will never be righteous enough. I can't do this. And all I'm asking is that you forgive me.
23:29: And here's what I said. I said, you're the boss. You take over my life. You're the boss.
23:36: You tell me what to do. You rule my life. Take it over, and you rule my life. I'm yours.
23:42: Please save me from my sins. I just want you. And I remember that it was from that time that all of a sudden now
23:52: I felt alive. I felt new. I had a hunger now for God that I didn't have before.
23:59: It was beyond just a moral feeling and sense of guilt and shame. I all of a sudden now hated my old life.
24:07: I hated my pursuit of my idols. I hated the ecstasy. I didn't just stop doing ecstasy and marijuana and all the pills and the alcohol because I didn't want to get caught, or somehow
24:18: I didn't want to feel bad. I didn't want to lose things again. Here's the thing. I didn't hit bottom.
24:25: I didn't hit bottom in the sense where my life just got really bad, and so I just now switched drugs for Jesus, and now that's my new addiction.
24:34: That's not what took place. Something happened within me where all of a sudden now I detested pursuing that stuff in place of Him.
24:45: Now I had tasted and seen Him. I wanted Him and not the idol. The idol had lost its luster for me, and God began to transform my life.
24:58: Now I had this new war inside me that wasn't there before. I had to cut off my relationships with all of my friends, everybody that I knew.
25:08: They would come to the door and know that I was home. They would knock on the door and say, Jeff, answer the door, and I wouldn't answer the door because I knew that if I answered that door and I went back with them,
25:17: I would continue to go down that path, and I loved God over them, so I said, God, I will give them up.
25:23: If dying to myself means not speaking to them ever again, then I want you and not them.
25:29: You are a much greater treasure to me than they are or anything they could offer me. I want you, and so there was a period of time where I just learned to sit and to worship and delight in God and to enjoy
25:42: Him, and I began to see that everything that I was pursuing in the drugs and the alcohol, everything
25:49: I was pursuing, the joy, the freedom from loneliness, the peace that I thought I was getting with the drugs and the alcohol,
25:56: I really could have in Christ, and I had it, and it was for real. It wasn't counterfeit.
26:01: It was true peace, real joy, real satisfaction and delight.
26:07: It was the knowledge of God that I was pursuing in this false God and functional savior in the ecstasy and the alcohol and the pills, and I recognized what
26:19: I was doing. I wasn't an addict in terms of I have the disease of addiction.
26:28: I understood that's not what was wrong with me. The drugs and the alcohol was just a symptom of a larger problem, and that was my rebellion against my creator.
26:37: The drugs and alcohol were just parts and pieces of my entire life that was at war with God, and God filled my life with Christians.
26:47: I had met, it was amazing. I got to share this with you. I didn't plan on sharing this with you, but I want to.
26:53: I remember that one of the great moments of grief for my wife and I was that now I had abandoned all the drugs and alcohol.
27:00: I didn't want it anymore. I didn't want those relationships. Now we had a question of, okay, who do we have in our lives that loves
27:07: Jesus? We don't know anybody. We have nothing. I don't have my unbelieving friends anymore, and now
27:12: I have no Christian friends, and so what do we do? I remember this. I said to God one day, I said,
27:18: Lord, if you want me to continue to pursue you, you got to fill my life with people who love you, and I don't know anybody.
27:27: I need your help. I said, Lord, please give my wife and I believers who love you and will love us and can support me and help me.
27:35: That was a Saturday night we prayed that prayer. Sunday, we opened up the phone book. There was this thing to find local churches and just pick one, and so I saw one that I thought was doctrinally strong.
27:51: I at least understood that that's an important thing, and so we go to this church, and here's the amazing thing. That Sunday morning, we didn't know anybody.
27:58: By Sunday night at 9 p .m., we were sitting at the lake in Tempe, Arizona, surrounded by Christians who were worshiping
28:06: God with music and taught, and I had immediately a community of believers who loved me, kept me accountable, and I went from going out every night to worship and serve the false god to going out literally every night to go and fellowship with men and women getting into the word of God, and I immediately was aware of the fact everything that I was pursuing in this false god over here can only truly be found in Christ, and I remember that I had moments in my life where I would literally be in tears thinking to myself, why would
28:38: I have ever exchanged him for that, and God began to transform my life, and I have to tell you,
28:47: I was not, of course, perfect. I was being sanctified. I still am being sanctified. I'm a work in progress.
28:53: There's a sign over my head that says, under construction, God at work, like that's me, but I had no plan to be in full -time ministry, to be a vocational minister.
29:07: I had no plan to do that. As a matter of fact, after God had freed me from my addiction and began to reshape my life, he actually gave me the opportunity to own my own business.
29:16: I had one of the most successful martial arts schools in the United States. I had 300 students.
29:23: My school was grossing about $50 ,000 a month with bills of about 6 ,000.
29:30: It was hugely successful, and God was blessing me, and my thought was in my life that I was going to have a very successful martial arts business while I continued to study about Jesus Christ because he's the one that I love.
29:44: I just wanted to know him, and while I served him, I would go out on missions and do evangelism. I had no thought ahead of me of pursuing vocational ministry one day.
29:54: It just wasn't a part of my plan. And then, elders who knew me and loved me began to speak into my life and tell me,
30:03: Jeff, you're supposed to be a pastor. Jeff, you're supposed to be doing this. And I told them, no,
30:09: I am not, and I don't want to do that, and I'm not pursuing that. And they told me, no, you're going to teach for us this
30:15: Sunday. I was like, I don't think that's a good idea. They said, it doesn't matter because you're doing it. And so I had no plan of being in vocational ministry, doing any kind of addiction ministry, but God continued to call me and use me in little ways while I was serving him.
30:32: I had a business, but I was also serving him in ministry all the time because that's what I wanted to do.
30:37: I just didn't have any plan of being up here. And after a period of time,
30:45: God called me into vocational ministry. And the high point here in terms of what we're talking about today is
30:56: I got a phone call one day. I actually was moving across country, believe it or not,
31:03: I was moving across country from Phoenix to South Carolina to be a pastor, get this, in a
31:10: Presbyterian church as a Reformed Baptist. I was like, are you guys sure about this?
31:17: And they were like, as long as you're cool with this, we're cool. I was like, I think someone's going to have something to say about this, but okay.
31:25: So it was just a really unique situation, and I understood their doctrine, they understood mine. It was just one little area we're going to say, you just won't have anything to do with this.
31:34: Babies. Just don't go near them, Jeff. Anyway, so I was actually headed to South Carolina.
31:45: My entire house was boxed up, and you can ask my son, it was literally boxed up down to the silverware.
31:52: We were eating off of plastic forks and knives and paper plates, and the church itself in South Carolina was waiting for my phone call so I could call them and tell them
32:01: I'm ready to go, and they would literally buy the tickets and send the moving truck, and I was going to South Carolina. We were saying our last goodbyes to everybody, and my phone rings.
32:13: My phone rings, and it's a buddy of mine, and he's the head of a local hospital in Phoenix.
32:18: It's actually the oldest drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in Phoenix. It's a hospital with a nursing staff and doctors and therapists, and it's a residential treatment facility, all the rest.
32:31: I didn't know he worked there, and he said, Jeff, we lost our chaplain. Our pastor can't be here anymore.
32:38: Would you be willing to come tonight? We have chapel, and we have a room full of addicts that want to take part in chapel, but we have no one to do it, and I said, wait, what is this?
32:49: He said, oh, it's a hospital with a Christian rehab program within it, and I said, wait,
32:54: I didn't know you do this. He said, oh, yeah. He said, we have chapel, and it's got about 50 people in the room, and some of them are still on detoxification medicine.
33:02: Some are just getting in today, and a lot of them want to come to chapel, and I said, wait, it's a room full of people that I can talk to about Jesus, and they can't go anywhere?
33:12: He said, yeah. I said, I'm in. Okay, I'll show up. Captive audience, kind of like this one.
33:21: So I show up that night. Now, mind you, I am leaving to South Carolina, and at any moment,
33:28: I'm leaving. It may have even been the next day that I made the phone call, and I show up that night, and I just go there to present the gospel to people who are struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, and I remember that I'm talking to them, and giving them the gospel, and talking to them about the gospel in the context of drugs and alcohol, and I remember that that night, numerous people came to Christ right there in front of me, and I remember that I'm looking into their faces, and I thought to myself, as I was talking to them,
33:57: I am literally looking into my own face in every one of these people, and what was amazing was
34:03: I went home that night, and I remember that I started talking to God, and I thought to my,
34:08: I thought to God, what are you doing? Why are you showing me this now?
34:14: Why are you doing this? I had this overwhelming burden all of a sudden for these people in this hospital, and I thought to myself, every day?
34:22: Every day it's like this? These people are just sitting there that need Jesus, and they're stuck, and they can't go anywhere, and they want to listen to me every day, and they're like me?
34:33: And so, I remember that I called the head of the search committee at the church that was waiting for my phone call to come, and I told him,
34:43: I said, hey, I know that you have been my biggest supporter, and I know the decision is unanimous, and I know that you guys are waiting for me to call you to tell you to pull the trigger and to bring me out.
34:55: I said, I just got to tell you something, and I feel awful about it. I think that I'm supposed to stay here, and I don't know why, and it was really amazing.
35:05: He says to me, he says, Jeff, look, he said, I am your biggest supporter, and he said, and we are ready.
35:11: You say send the tickets, and you are out right now. The truck is there. You're coming. He goes, it's really weird,
35:17: Jeff. He said, I woke up today, and I have the same feeling. You're not supposed to come, and he says, it's unanimous.
35:25: Everyone's waiting for you right now, but I don't know what it is. There's something going on. I don't think you're supposed to come, and I have no answer as to why, and so what was amazing about this is
35:35: I had sold my business. I have no job. I am now volunteering as the pastor of the church that I'm at, and there is no promise of any money here, and I have a wife, and I have four kids, and so I remember
35:49: I took a step of faith, and I said, God, I don't know what you're doing, but I'm going to go ahead and take a step of faith here and say
35:54: I'm going to stay, and I'm going to reach these people with the gospel, so that was seven years ago, and now after working for four years full time at that hospital and being a pastor at a church in Phoenix at the same time, we planted
36:10: Apologia Church seven years ago, February 27th. We just had our birthday. Seven years, and now our church is about 200 people.
36:20: It's a church filled with a bunch of ex -drug addicts who love Jesus. We planted the church in the family building at the hospital.
36:30: Our first night of service, we had people who were in halfway houses, sober living facilities.
36:36: We had people who were still on detoxification medicine. We had people who had just OD'd from heroin a week prior.
36:43: We didn't have two pence to squeeze together. We had no money. We had nothing.
36:49: We planted this church basically from zero seven years ago. Now about 200 people. Now we have children running around who were created after these people started coming together.
36:59: We have a church now with global impact where we have a radio program that was downloaded a million times just last year.
37:08: We have a YouTube channel that is seen all over the world with tens of thousands of subscribers and millions upon millions upon millions of views.
37:17: We have a television program that's seen really internationally on the NRB network. We've debated atheists.
37:24: We've engaged Mormons publicly, and we have seen literally thousands of people freed from drug and alcohol addiction through the ministry that God has given to us, and it's all to his glory, and I had no plan for it.
37:40: And I just wanted to share this with you. By the way, how much time do I have tonight? I never even asked. It's a dangerous thing to give me the podium and not tell me when to stop.
37:49: It's 822. Do I have any particular time to stop? Okay, so what
37:56: I wanted to share with you is how many of you guys have heard of Alcoholics Anonymous?
38:04: Yes. Okay, so it's gotten here too, okay. Alright. So, in terms of how are you freed,
38:12: I just want to share this with you. When I first got into this hospital, they said, Jeff, you take control of the
38:18: Christian program, you run the Christian program, you can do whatever you want, just make sure it's a
38:23: Christian program. And I said, okay, and I remember this was in the context of a hospital who also had a secular track, which was
38:32: AA, NA, HA, all those things, SA. And so, they told me to do a
38:39: Christian program, and I thought to myself, well, what's really so special about drugs and alcohol?
38:46: When I came to Christ out of drug and alcohol addiction, I was turning from my sin to God to be freed, to be reconciled to God.
38:54: There was God now within me, there was sanctification happening now, there was the church as the community around me, there was confession of sins, there was people upholding me and encouraging me, keeping me accountable.
39:06: And so, when someone says, do a Christian drug and alcohol program, I thought to myself, what is so special about drug and alcohol addiction?
39:14: I thought in terms of Jesus, now imagine now, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn't come to the mountain and begin to teach them and say, okay, heroin addicts, you guys sit over here, drunkards, okay, you guys sit over here, and adulterers, oh, you guys are over here, liars over here, and thieves over here.
39:35: There wasn't a breakup in the community based upon your sin and your addictions.
39:44: There was a single gospel message for all people. There was a consistent call to repent and believe, no matter where you've come from, no matter what you've been doing.
39:55: Jesus doesn't have a special message for heroin addicts that's different than His message to adulterers.
40:01: You see, the problem is fundamentally sin, and so what I discovered early on in engaging in this kind of ministry is that much of what calls itself
40:11: Christian recovery programs is nothing more than secular humanism warmed over with a couple of Bible passages thrown in for good measure.
40:23: I began to discover that much of what is said in terms of how a person is freed from drug and alcohol addiction is the antithesis of what the
40:33: Bible says about how we are freed. I began to discover that what people say commonly in Alcoholics Anonymous about men and women is very, very anti -biblical.
40:46: I started hearing them say things like this at the treatment facility, you'll always be an addict. Once an addict, always an addict.
40:54: You have the brain disease of addiction. You can't help being an addict, and that's why you need to announce at the beginning of the meetings, hi,
41:03: I'm Jeff, and I'm a alcoholic. Hi, I'm Jeff, I'm a pill addict.
41:10: Hi, I'm Jeff, I'm a cocaine addict, because they said, once an addict, always an addict.
41:16: They said things like this. Well, you see, what you need to do is you need to read from the big book, you need to meet with your sponsor, you need to confess your moral failings, you need to come to your mandatory meetings, essentially is what it was, you need to spread the message of AA to the world, and that's how you'll get free from your addiction.
41:33: But not really free from your addiction, because you're always going to be an addict. And what you need to do is you need to walk these steps, do these things, listen, so that you can fake it until you make it.
41:46: You're never not going to be a heroin addict, you're just going to learn to tame it, you're going to learn to cover it, you're going to learn to walk in such a way as not to go down that road again, but you will always want heroin, you will always be an addict, you will never ultimately be free.
42:02: This is the message that I heard kicked about in the hospital, and I'm supposed to introduce now a Christian program.
42:08: Well, suffice it to say, I got in a lot of trouble over four years. I got called into the principal's office about twice a week, and I was told over and over and over again,
42:22: Pastor Jeff, you can't keep telling everybody that Jesus is the only way to God. Pastor Jeff, you can't keep telling people that when they turn to Christ that their identity is now in Christ and they're no longer identified as addicts.
42:37: They would tell me, Jeff, you can't be telling people that there is actually freedom in Christ and they will not always be an addict.
42:46: My message as a Christian minister in a hospital with the gospel was antithetical to what the world was saying about addiction, the primary problem, and how a person gets free.
42:57: And so the message that I gave in this context was nothing really special, and I just want to say that to you.
43:03: Hopefully, it gives you hope. If you're struggling with drug and alcohol addiction in this room, if you're struggling with really any kind of addiction, whether it's pornography, you name it, you're not special.
43:16: Addicts aren't special. You're not. Now, that might bother some people to hear that.
43:22: Well, I know I feel kind of special with my sin, like, you know, like I think it's a really big problem. And the answer is yes, it's a really big problem.
43:28: And yes, some people's idolatry doesn't express itself in such a way that everybody notices all the time.
43:36: Now, of course, yes, heroin addiction, that kind of idolatry has an expression that becomes really, really obvious, has physical things that make it very, very easy to catch and spot.
43:48: And of course, yes, as a Christian, I recognize that drug and alcohol addiction is a very complex issue.
43:56: It has issues of toxicity that are involved, where now when you're shooting up the heroin, now you have the problem of toxicity.
44:03: You're going to now struggle with actually kicking the habit. There's detoxification, which is painful.
44:09: All of that is acknowledged from a Christian perspective. But in terms of what leads me to drug and alcohol addiction, the problem is not that you are simply a drug addict with a brain disease of addiction.
44:22: You don't have a drug and alcohol problem or a pornography problem.
44:28: Our problem fundamentally is that we have a worship problem. That's the biblical answer.
44:37: You don't have a drug and alcohol problem fundamentally. You have a worship problem. We have a worship problem.
44:44: In Romans chapter 1, the Apostle Paul talks about the fall, and here's what he says in verse 18.
44:51: He says, the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who, by their unrighteousness, suppress the truth.
45:02: It says that which is known about God is evident within them for God has shown it to them. What's that say?
45:07: It's that God's wrath is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.
45:13: And it says that we suppress the truth in unrighteousness. We are holding down the truth of God in unrighteousness.
45:21: That is active suppression. That is the primary methodology of fallen human beings. We take the truth and we hold it down.
45:28: We don't want to see it. We don't want to be reminded of it. And even when God has made himself evident to each and every one of us, every single one of us, yes, we don't want
45:38: God in our knowledge, Paul says. We don't want to know him. And so what is the result of all of that sin?
45:45: It says that even when creation is bombarding us with truth about God, it's preaching to us, it's shouting to us about God.
45:53: It's not even whispering. It's God testifying constantly through what he has made to each and every one of us.
46:00: We say, no, we don't want you in our knowledge. And we switch God for idols.
46:08: John Calvin said it well. He said the human heart is a natural idol making factory and it is never idle in making idols.
46:20: It's always working. It's always producing. It's always searching because that is our default position as human beings, idolaters.
46:29: We switch God for idols. Now catch this. Listen closely to this. We notice it when we drive down the road and you see some cult or some ism or some religion that's distorted maybe the
46:41: Christian worldview and it creates a different kind of God with a different kind of gospel, with a different religious text or maybe some of the same words.
46:48: And you know, immediately I see the idolatry. I can see it expressed in the building and in the religious text and the false
46:57: God. I can see it in the icons. I see the idolatry. It's plain to see there is idolatry.
47:05: And then of course you recognize the other kinds of idolatry where maybe you walk into, uh, do they have this in Ireland?
47:11: You walk into like an Asian food restaurant and they have like little, uh, they have little idols with pennies like thrown at the foot of the idol.
47:17: For some reason they love pennies. I don't never know. Figure that out. Like why pennies?
47:23: I don't know. But you see that kind of idolatry, you know, the Buddhas and all the shrines, you see people bowing down or you see the people today who feel very enlightened and they are grabbing hold of trees and they're bowing before trees and they're worshiping the creation and they're, they're doing what
47:38: Romans one says we do. We know the true God, but we don't want him because we're rebels against the king.
47:45: And so we suppress the truth and we end up switching God for idols. And that's why so many different religions, so many different gods.
47:53: And here's why we're made in the image of God, of the one God of the only
47:58: God before him. There were no gods. There will be none after him. He is the only God.
48:04: We're made in his image to know him, to love him, to be an intimate relationship with him, but we don't want them.
48:11: And so we end up switching him for some other functional savior and functional God. One that looks a lot like God, but is not
48:19: God. And here's why. Because we know if we go to the true God, we have to reckon with him.
48:25: We know if we go to the true God, there are certain things about us that need to change. And so we don't want the true
48:30: God, we want something like him. And so we chase false gods. And again, it could be religious false gods in terms of worship ritual, religious text, but oftentimes our idolatry is not so easy to spot.
48:44: It's not an icon. It's not a religious text. It's not an expression of a theological treatise.
48:51: Sometimes our idolatry is much more subtle, but still devastating.
48:57: Sometimes we choose some functional savior in place of God. We switch them for the functional
49:03: God and functional savior. One of the things that is really compelling to think about is that every person that goes to the drugs and to the alcohol, that situation doesn't just exist in a vacuum.
49:18: It doesn't just happen. People go to drugs and alcohol for a reason.
49:25: Now, oftentimes I notice that heroin addicts and pill addicts had a general sense of this is why
49:32: I went to the heroin or to the pills. And one of the things was, was peace.
49:39: I just want peace. That was one of the major identifiers of people who use heroin and pills.
49:45: They want peace. And so they take the pills, they shoot the heroin because they want an overwhelming sense of peace.
49:53: They just want everything to be OK and they want to feel good and they don't want to worry. And it was amazing because we have as image bearers of God, God, who is according to the
50:05: Bible, the God of peace. We could go to him for that peace, but what do we do?
50:13: We rebel against him. And what do we try to find? The functional savior that will give me peace. People who are addicted to alcohol oftentimes would go to the alcohol because they had overwhelming shame.
50:26: And so they would go to the alcohol to try to wash away the shame. They try to forget. There was a column at one a while back and it was
50:34: Ann Landers. Somebody was writing into Ann Landers and they said to Ann Landers in the in the write up, they said,
50:42: I'm really struggling with alcoholism and I can't stop drinking. I'm drinking constantly.
50:48: She said, I have overwhelming shame and guilt from my past. And so I drink to try to to try to get rid of this guilt and shame.
50:55: And I don't know if Ann Landers is a Christian or anything, but she wrote back to this person and she said the problem with going to alcohol to rid yourself of guilt and shame is that guilt and shame can swim.
51:10: I think that's a really good way to put that. But people tend to do that with with with alcohol is they they run to the alcohol to drink, to forget, to wash away their past, their guilt and shame.
51:22: And the amazing thing about false gods is they never really deliver. And when you pursue an idol in place of God, you're always going to come back broken, crawling and hurting.
51:35: People that chase down the alcohol to wash themselves of guilt and shame always end up doing in the alcohol more things that actually deliver more guilt and more shame.
51:47: People that go to the ecstasy. Why do you think people go to ecstasy? Well, ecstasy, right?
51:53: They go to ecstasy for joy, right? For pleasure. And it's just incredible because let's use this both your your confession and mine.
52:04: And you guys are like, because you stole it. Your confession in mind, what's what to say?
52:11: What is the chief end of man to glorify God and to enjoy him forever?
52:18: Like God actually creates us to delight in him and he delights in us to take pleasure in God that actually that's something we've been created for.
52:29: God doesn't create us to have a cold, stiff Christianity. God creates us to have joy.
52:37: He creates us to delight in him, to take pleasure in him and in his creation. And yet what do we do?
52:43: We switch this great treasure of joy and pleasure and delight with God.
52:48: And we end up switching him in our rebellion for some substandard God, some other functional savior for pleasure and joy.
52:59: You see, that's what we do. We feel lonely. And so what do people do when they're lonely? People who are lonely end up trying to find someone to be intimate with.
53:08: They want to feel some fulfillment, some joy, some intimacy. And so they go off and they find some functional
53:14: God, a really bad boyfriend, a really awful girlfriend. And they find out when they pursue this false
53:21: God that it wasn't such a good God. It came back and it hurt me. It wasn't true joy.
53:26: It wasn't real intimacy. People who have a pornography addiction, they go off to that addiction because they think they're going to find some pleasure, some satisfaction, some joy, some intimacy.
53:35: And they find themselves six hours later in darkness, broken. You see, all of these ultimately are not addiction problems fundamentally.
53:48: From a foundational perspective, it's not an addiction problem. It's a worship problem.
53:54: It is watch. It is glorying and sacrificing to something in place of God.
54:02: Think about that closely. Worship, a good working definition of worship is glory and sacrifice, glory and sacrifice.
54:11: That is to say in worship, you glorify God. You give him the weight.
54:17: He has preeminence. He occupies a space of the throne of your heart. He is the one who receives the glory from you.
54:25: And worship is also sacrifice. What do you do to worship God? You sacrifice praise.
54:32: Right? That's worship. You sacrifice your time. You sacrifice your gifts. You sacrifice your talents.
54:39: You sacrifice your money. Think about it. And you recognize it in church. You glorify
54:44: God. He occupies the weight right now and the preeminence. And you sacrifice praise and the offering.
54:51: You are glorying and sacrificing to God. That's worship. That's an amazing thing.
54:58: When you consider the drug and alcohol addiction, that it really is worship.
55:04: They say, and I don't know if they are right, but they say that people who are lost in a drug and alcohol addiction think about their addiction or their substance over 80 % of the day.
55:20: So 80 % of your thinking is occupied with the substance, the thing that you are going to.
55:28: And I don't know how they could really clock that, engage that, but I think that's about close to right when you're truly addicted.
55:35: Is it occupies, listen, the weight of your life. It has preeminence.
55:42: You're thinking about it all the time. You're thinking about it right now. You're thinking about when you're going to do it next.
55:47: You're thinking about how you're going to get it after that. You're thinking about how you can enjoy this moment more with the substance.
55:55: It has the glory in that moment. That's worship. You also sacrifice to it.
56:02: What are some of the things you've sacrificed for your addiction? What did you give up? What did you sacrifice?
56:08: Did you sacrifice your family? People do that for Jesus, don't they? What does
56:13: Jesus say? Come to me. You got to be willing to let everything go, right?
56:19: You're going to be persecuted. Christians do that in foreign lands, by the way, when Christians, when people become
56:24: Christian in some of these Islamic countries that are dominated by Islam, they recognize when they come to Christ that they're actually going to give up their family.
56:32: They're going to lose their family by coming to Christ. That's sacrifice. That's worship. That's worship. It really is.
56:40: And when you are in your addiction and you give your life to the addiction, what do you sacrifice? You sacrifice your family. You sacrifice your relationships.
56:46: What else do you sacrifice? Possibly your job. What else do you sacrifice to the addiction? You sacrifice your money. What else do you sacrifice to the addiction?
56:53: Well, you sacrifice your criminal record. You sacrifice and sacrifice. Think about the addiction. It's worship.
56:59: It's glory. It's sacrifice. It's taking everything from you and giving nothing back.
57:04: False gods never satisfy real spiritual needs.
57:11: It's a fiction. It's a counterfeit. But we keep coming. We keep bowing.
57:16: We keep worshiping. We keep giving until ultimately it takes everything. But that's fundamentally what addiction is.
57:24: It is not so special. It's common to all of us. It's idolatry.
57:31: It's switching God for an idol. And when you recognize that addiction is fundamentally a spiritual problem, it's a problem of worship, you,
57:41: I believe, can be free. Because now you can begin to look at the true nature of redemption.
57:50: And what is that? How do you get free from drug and alcohol addiction? Well, you can do what the world does.
57:58: You can follow what they say. And you can think in terms of symptoms, right?
58:04: I mean, I remember this at the hospital. I had to peek in sometimes to see what they were saying. I just had to.
58:10: They had the therapist, the doctors, the secular side. I had to listen to what they were saying to people. And what they would say is, and they recognized it.
58:17: They said, you know, we got to deal with these problems. Some of you guys are lonely. And so they had seminars on how to deal with loneliness so you don't go to your addiction.
58:25: And so I remember I sat in these rooms and I would listen to them talk for an hour dealing with symptoms.
58:31: They would say, when you're lonely, here's what you need to do. Join a singles club.
58:38: They really said it. They said, when you're feeling lonely, rather than going to the addiction, rather than going to the substance, whatever it is, go to a movie.
58:51: They said, when you're lonely, try to find a friend. When you're lonely, get out of the house and take a walk with your dog.
58:59: And just try to find some way to manage the symptoms of loneliness. And they had no real answer because once an addict, always an addict.
59:07: You just got to learn to deal with the symptoms. And here's the problem with that kind of thinking.
59:13: At some point, it's going to be three o 'clock in the morning and you're going to wake up and you're going to wake up to your loneliness and nobody's going to be there.
59:23: And there's going to be no outlet. You're not going to be able to go outside and go to a movie and call a friend. It's three in the morning and you are sitting in your room realizing how utterly lost and lonely you are.
59:35: And you know what's compelling to think about is that from a biblical perspective, listen closely to this.
59:43: Loneliness is understandable. Loneliness is a result of the fall. But from a biblical perspective, you can find the true hope there is out of loneliness.
59:54: And here it is. Fundamentally, listen from God's perspective. God is triune.
01:00:00: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. There has never been a time for all eternity past and there never will be for all eternity future where God will be lonely.
01:00:12: What does John 1 .1 say? In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was
01:00:20: God. In the Greek, the word was toward God, an intimate relationship with the
01:00:31: Father, the Father and the Son and the Spirit, an intimate relationship and joy and delight for all eternity.
01:00:38: You might be saying that's incomprehensible. That's right. It's incredible. But from a biblical perspective, loneliness, loneliness is a result of the fall.
01:00:50: God is not lonely. And when he created his image bearers, he created them, listen, to be an intimate relationship with him and one another.
01:01:00: Loneliness is a result of the fall. And listen, the freedom we have from loneliness in Christ is that, listen, when we know
01:01:07: God and we are joined to Christ, what does he say to us? He says, I will never leave you.
01:01:13: I will never forsake you. We have the promise of him, his presence within us for all eternity.
01:01:20: The promise of eternal life, that God is our father now. He is the faithful one.
01:01:25: He will never betray us. And even in my darkest place, my darkest moments, the places where I think
01:01:31: I actually am lonely, the truth of God is that even there God is with me. Even there,
01:01:38: God promises hope to me that he will never leave me. He will never forsake me. He will never betray me.
01:01:44: From a biblical perspective, there's an answer to loneliness that goes way beyond the symptoms. It's rooted in the truth of God.
01:01:53: And it's true whether I like it or not. And it's true whether I feel like it or not. There is healing hope in the word of God as a
01:02:02: Christian that actually frees me from loneliness. And remember, from a
01:02:12: Christian perspective, the answer to freedom from addiction is not going to be in your abilities.
01:02:22: And that was, I think, what was most significant. I got in trouble all the time at the hospital.
01:02:29: People ask, how come you didn't get fired? Well, that's a good question. How come I didn't get fired?
01:02:35: Well, I didn't get fired because this was a hospital that was advertising all over the world
01:02:40: Christian rehab. They actually only had one program that was Christian. It was only Christian because they had me as a pastor there.
01:02:47: The rest of the program was entirely secular. They were making millions of dollars a year off their Christian program. And so while they would challenge me, they wouldn't fire me because I was making them too much money.
01:03:01: And that's the truth. But I would say to people in the program that I am not ashamed of the fact that the way out of this must be a miracle.
01:03:16: It must be a miracle. I would say to them things like this. You can't do it.
01:03:24: You can't. You won't be able to do it. Apart from Jesus Christ, you will not be able to ever have a new identity.
01:03:33: You must have a new identity in Jesus Christ, or you really will be the things that you have done and the places you have gone.
01:03:42: You really will be that. It will be your identity apart from Christ. I would say I'm not ashamed of the fact that what took place in my life wasn't a matter of sheer discipline and might and self -control and power.
01:03:53: It was truly a changed heart that I had nothing to do with. And that irks the world.
01:03:59: When you tell the world that they need a miracle and a new heart, and they can have nothing to do with that, they can add nothing to it.
01:04:07: It bothers the world because they want to get their hands on it. They want to try to figure it out. They want it must be about them and what they could do.
01:04:13: But the truth is, if the problem is a worship problem, if the problem is an exchange of God for idols, if that's fundamentally the problem, then you need peace and freedom that only
01:04:25: God can provide. And that's why we get back to the point of addiction is not special.
01:04:31: If you're an addict, you're not special. What you need is to hear the same message that every single person needs to hear.
01:04:40: Whatever your idol, whatever your sin, whatever the temptation, the answer is, and listen, don't be jaded to it, the gospel.
01:04:51: Now, there's a problem in saying that because watch, I recognize that if you live in a Christian culture or a culture that has been impacted by the gospel, if you're raised in church or you've been around, you hear the word gospel and you become jaded to the word gospel.
01:05:05: It doesn't hold its punch anymore. It's not really significant anymore. It just seems like religious speak. It sounds like that Christian ghetto language,
01:05:13: Christian ease. You need the gospel, right? Put it on a t -shirt. Like you need the bumper sticker, right?
01:05:18: Oh, I know the gospel saves Jesus, a great mighty savior. And the truth is you need the gospel because the problem is fundamentally spiritual.
01:05:27: It's a problem of addiction that is actually a worship problem. And here's the answer.
01:05:34: Fundamentally, I'm at war with God. This is the answer. God is good and I'm not.
01:05:41: God is righteous and I'm not. God is just and I am not. I am not sick.
01:05:48: That's not the problem. I don't have a mild problem of sin.
01:05:54: The problem is much deeper. It's much larger. I'm a rebel against a holy
01:06:01: God. I deserve condemnation. Watch, not just for my drug and alcohol addiction.
01:06:08: You see, listen, this is important too. You cannot think in terms of Christ and the gospel and getting free from addiction in terms of I just need to get rid of my drug and alcohol problem and repent of that.
01:06:21: The problem is bigger than that. My whole entire life is an opposition to God. The drug and alcohol addiction is one aspect of my rebellion.
01:06:30: God is a holy God. I am a sinner. I am a rebel against God and my sins have separated me from God and there is no way to fix it.
01:06:40: I can't atone for my own sins. I can't make up for it. I can't make myself better.
01:06:47: I will not make myself better. The answer is fundamentally in what God has done in the place of his people.
01:06:54: It's what he does in sinners in transforming their hearts and minds. And this is what
01:07:00: God has done. God took on flesh. Christ, the second person of the
01:07:05: Trinity, eternal God took on flesh to live a sinless life.
01:07:14: That I haven't and you haven't. See, Jesus wasn't an idolater. Jesus didn't seek satisfaction elsewhere.
01:07:25: Jesus obeyed the father, loved the father. Listen closely. Listen, what do you notice about Christ's relationship in his earthly ministry?
01:07:33: He sought the father for intimacy, for pleasure, for joy.
01:07:38: He trusted the father. He knew the father was there. He knew the father's character.
01:07:44: He knew he would never leave or betray. He trusted him. He knew him.
01:07:49: And when Jesus walked in his earthly ministry and took on flesh, listen, he was representing his people, living the life that they have not.
01:07:57: And listen closely. When he went to that cross, he died a death. And this is significant that you deserve, you deserve that death.
01:08:08: I deserve that death. And I think, listen, one of the things that really drew me in early on was really contemplating what the death of Christ actually meant.
01:08:20: I have to confess. I think I was just jaded to it. Yeah, Jesus died. Jesus rose again. That's the gospel. I get it.
01:08:26: I think I had that flipping kind of attitude like, yeah, it's wonderful and Jesus died. Yeah, but it was sort of not getting the punch, recognizing this and look, my sins took him there, that he didn't deserve that, but he took it for me.
01:08:43: There's a sense in which that death, I'm joined to it.
01:08:49: It was for me. I should have taken it. And yet he took it in my place and the wrath of God for all my sin, not just drug and alcohol addiction, but so much more.
01:09:02: All my sins past, present, future were absorbed into Jesus Christ and exhausted on that tree.
01:09:10: He died and he rose from the dead. And listen, what drug and alcohol addicts need to hear is your problem is a problem of sin and idolatry.
01:09:22: It's a switching God for an idol. And the freedom that we have in Christ is a freedom that you could never create on your own or accomplish on your own.
01:09:34: What you need is a turn from your sin to the living God. Turn from your pursuit of all idols, all your sin and come be joined to Christ by faith.
01:09:45: Trust in him. You can't do it. Trust in what he's done in your behalf. Trust in his death and resurrection.
01:09:52: Come to Christ. And here's the promise. All who come to Christ to trust in him and his work are given the gift of eternal life.
01:10:04: And God promises some things in his words. Listen closely. He says in Ezekiel 36, he says one of his promises of the new covenant, what he's going to do in Christ and salvation,
01:10:13: I will sprinkle clean water on you. I will cleanse you of all your idols. And he says this, he says,
01:10:19: I will remove your heart of stone and I will give you a heart of flesh. What was once a hard heart can't be molded.
01:10:28: What was once a hard heart is now malleable. It's soft. It can be molded and shaped by God.
01:10:34: And who does it? You? He says, I, I give you a heart of flesh.
01:10:40: And he says this, he says, I will put my law within you. He says, I will cause you to observe my statutes.
01:10:47: Watch. How do you like that? How do you like that promise where the world says once an addict, always an addict.
01:10:54: You got to fake it till you make it. Here's God saying this, I'll wash you of all your sin. I'll give you a new heart.
01:11:00: I will, I will put my spirit within you. I will cause you to obey me.
01:11:05: I'll do it. That's the hope you have in the gospel is that God fundamentally transforms you from the inside out is when you trust in Christ and are reconciled to God, he acquits you.
01:11:17: He declares you righteous. He gives you as a gift, the righteousness of his son. He sees you as blameless, not because you are, but because Christ is, and you are joined to him.
01:11:29: You have a relationship with God that can never be broken because he has accomplished it. And God now dwells there.
01:11:36: And the promise in the gospel is that when God saves sinners, he's not done with them.
01:11:43: He saves you and he's not finished. You now live a life where you're in Christ.
01:11:49: There is an old man and now a new man. And Paul says in Colossians three, something significant.
01:11:54: He says to Christians, he says, if you've been raised up with Christ, keep seeking what is above.
01:12:00: He says, your life is hidden with Christ and God. And he says, therefore, because you're raised up with Jesus now alive from the dead, he says, therefore put to death what is earthly within you.
01:12:12: He starts naming some sins and he says, which is idolatry. And he says, what put on Christ, your old self was crucified with Christ.
01:12:20: And he says, now walk this way, put to death all these things. And how could you ever do such a thing?
01:12:27: You can do it because you've been now made alive. You're now new in Christ.
01:12:34: That's the hope in the gospel is this is not something that you accomplish. It's not up to you.
01:12:41: It's not. What do you have to give in this moment in exchange for your freedom?
01:12:47: Nothing. What can you do to actually forgive all the past sins?
01:12:54: What can you do to wash yourself? Nothing. It's one of the compelling things about Alcoholics Anonymous, which makes it ultimately antithetical to the gospel is one of the steps they have is the portion where they try to deal with their sin and they have an atonement scenario.
01:13:10: And what they say is you need to, you know, to your sponsor, essentially admit your moral failings to confess your sins.
01:13:19: And what I used to say to people in the program who were NAA, I say, this is a hopeless system and they get angry with that.
01:13:28: Why are you saying it's hopeless? Why are you saying it's hopeless? I would say because if you finally come to the place as an addict where you're willing to admit your moral failings,
01:13:39: A, without Jesus, you can't speak about morality. You have no standard. And B, if you start finally recognizing your sins and your failings and you put them out on the table and you don't have
01:13:51: Christ, all you have is fear. Because if you finally admit the fact that you're a sinner and you've done all these awful things and you bring them out on the table, if you don't have
01:14:03: Christ, you have nothing to cleanse you of your sin. All you have is the admission that you are a sinner and you are, in fact, guilty of all those things.
01:14:13: In Christ, when you turn to him, you are washed, you are cleansed, and now God lives there.
01:14:20: And listen, this is when I say you're not special as an addict. People always want to have in churches like very special programs where they hire out and have some specialists come in for addiction, right?
01:14:31: And you have the seven steps of success or the 12 steps and work this special program. We think we've figured out a way to work the addicts.
01:14:38: Do you know that God's been saving addicts and changing them for thousands of years? And for 2 ,000 years in Christ, believers have gone from a life where they were once pursuing idols and drunkenness and drugs, they've come to Christ, they've been shaped and transformed within the community of the body of Christ with God's people, and there's nothing ultimately special or unique about it.
01:15:03: It's just biblical. What do you have in Christ? Forgiveness of sins. What do you have now?
01:15:09: A new heart. What do you have? The presence of God living within you. What do you have? And this is important,
01:15:15: God's people surrounding you as his hands and feet, encouraging you, loving you, keeping you accountable, speaking his truth into your life so that your mind is renewed and your heart and mind are shaped.
01:15:33: That's the significant thing I've got to say. Just to be transparent, the first year when
01:15:39: I came out of my addiction, there were hard moments. I'm not going to lie to you or give you any illusions that you come to Jesus and all of a sudden now there's no war.
01:15:49: No, as a matter of fact, now there's a real war that takes place and praise God for that war. It's because that war exists that you're going to get free in Christ because the war is now there and you can't live the way that you once were.
01:16:02: But I remember my first year where there were times where it was Friday night and I was used to going out and losing myself and partying and drinking and doing everything else and it's
01:16:11: Friday night now and I'm at home and I got to learn to actually taste and see.
01:16:18: I got to learn to actually worship and experience God and there were moments of real struggle where my heart was in love with God, but there were these moments thinking like, find the easy way.
01:16:28: Find the easy way. Just go one more time. Just go one more time. And I was in so much brokenness.
01:16:35: How could I be thinking that thought? I hate my sins. God, why am I even thinking that way? I only want you. I only want you.
01:16:41: And I used to remember, I remember that I used to think to myself, God, why is this struggle there? Why do I feel this way?
01:16:46: And here's the thing. Thank God for that struggle. That struggle wasn't there before. The fact that I was now full of just so much anxiety over the fact that I would even think of exchanging
01:16:58: God for that thing. There's your victory. And having God's people around me there to lift me up and encourage me and to love me to speak
01:17:05: God's word into my life. That was freedom. Coming to worship on a
01:17:11: Sunday and experiencing in worship things that couldn't even compare.
01:17:21: The idol had nothing over the time that I had with God. All of what
01:17:27: I thought were the best moments of my addiction, the most fun, the most joy, the greatest party, all of what
01:17:33: I thought were the best were just bootleg pleasure and bootleg joy.
01:17:39: It was a mess compared to what I had in Christ. And my encouragement to you for those of you guys who may be struggling right now even with an addiction to drugs, to alcohol, pornography, whatever it may be,
01:17:57: I do want you to hear from a person who has no right being before you that there is true hope in Christ.
01:18:08: What must take place is repentance. You have to turn from sin to God.
01:18:15: Now, did you hear it in my story? And I told you at the beginning, I wasn't sure of my conversion early on.
01:18:21: Was it a real conversion or not? You see, this is how I think most of the evangelical
01:18:27: West preaches the gospel. We're going to close after this. I think most of the evangelical West preaches the gospel today in this way.
01:18:37: You're a sinner. God is holy. If you want to go to heaven and not hell, then pray this prayer.
01:18:46: And one day you'll go to heaven. I challenge you to find in the
01:18:54: Bible anywhere where it says anything like that. You won't find it.
01:19:02: That's never how Jesus preached the gospel. That is not how Paul preached the gospel. That is not how Peter preached the gospel.
01:19:08: It is found nowhere in the Bible. You see, actually, the Bible talks about the gospel and forgiveness in much more glorious terms and hopeful terms.
01:19:19: It's not just about heaven one day. And I hope that if you ever thought that, then right now
01:19:25: God is shattering your perspective. It is not just about heaven one day. It is about reconciliation, peace with God, knowing
01:19:34: God intimately now, now. And the hope is, is when you turn from your sin to Christ, to trust in Him and what
01:19:45: He's done on your behalf, you are joined to Him and listen. Remember how
01:19:50: I told you in AA, the way the world deals with it, they say, Hi, I'm Jeff and I'm a pill addict.
01:19:57: Hi, I'm Jeff and I'm an alcoholic. Your identity is always as an addict. When you turn to Christ and trust in Him, the
01:20:05: Bible says, if anyone is in Christ, He's a new creation.
01:20:12: The old is gone. The new has come. When you are joined to Christ, you are joined to Him and His death and resurrection.
01:20:19: So listening closely, you are wrapped in Christ. So when the father sees you, he sees the righteousness of his son and he's declared you righteous and forgiven and blameless, not because you are.
01:20:32: In fact, you're not. But Jesus took all that you deserve so that you can be counted as righteous in Him.
01:20:40: And now your identity is not the drunk. It's not the pill addict.
01:20:46: It's not the heroin addict. There's actually more hope than that. In Christ, your identity is wrapped up in Jesus.
01:20:54: So what are you now in Christ? Loved by God. What are you now in Christ?
01:21:00: Child of God, no longer enemy. What are you now in Christ? Forgiven, raised up with Him, alive from the dead.
01:21:11: So we used to have at the hospital things that made the therapist angry. They would come into the therapy groups they were required to go to.
01:21:20: And you have all these unbelievers in the room with now all these new saved Christians. They'd be going down the room and they'd say,
01:21:26: Hi, I'm Bill and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, I'm Jim and I'm a heroin addict.
01:21:31: And they'd get to one of my people who had just come to Christ.
01:21:38: They'd say, Hi, I'm Jenny and I'm righteous in Jesus Christ. And they'd be like, well, wait, what?
01:21:48: And they had a hard time because people who had come to Christ in this program would not allow their identity to be wrapped up in their addiction.
01:21:57: And they would be saying in these groups with all these other people, while they're saying, I'm an addict, I'm a pill addict,
01:22:02: I'm an alcoholic. They'd be saying, Hi, I'm Jeff and I'm forgiven of all my sin. Their identity was now new in Christ.
01:22:12: And that's what's true of us in Christ. You are not summed up in all your sins and all your past and all your unrighteous deeds and all your unjust decisions.
01:22:23: You are now identified with Christ. And now the hard work begins.
01:22:31: Not hard work that depends upon you, but hard work that is promised by God for victory.
01:22:38: You see, here's your hope. Last word on this. Your hope is this. God says that his aim in predestination and the plan of salvation and bringing salvation into the lives of his people.
01:22:53: He says this, that it is to conform us to the image of Christ.
01:23:02: You want guaranteed hope? You want a promise of change in the future that doesn't depend upon you?
01:23:10: Then repent and believe the gospel. Be joined to Christ and trust in him.
01:23:15: Turn from your idolatry. Turn from your sins. Come to Christ for life. And God promises that he will finish what he's started in you.
01:23:27: He that began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. That's your hope.