Dealing With Drug And Alcohol Addiction

Hi, folks. Welcome to another edition of The Dividing Line. I'm trying my best to make this comfortable for everybody that's saying, what is happening right now? That's how he opens up, right? It's, hi, folks.

What does he say? Rich, what is it? Isn't it like, how does Dr. White do it? He's like, howdy, folks, or how... Maybe that's just how I imagine it. Good afternoon, folks. I think he says, what up? Welcome to another edition of The Dividing Line.

I'm Jeff Durbin. Not David... David Bowie. Do you know what you're going to say? David Bowie. I'm not James White. I'm here today with Pastor Luke. We're the pastors and elders at Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona.

And we're here for another edition of The Dividing Line. And we're going to do a special show today on addiction. You get an opportunity to take over The Dividing Line. What do you do? I mean, this is Dr. White's seat.

This has been the place where Dr. White has communicated with people from all over the world. And so much has happened in this spot. And what do you do? I can't match Dr. White's intellect and his... What do you do, sir?

Shiny head. His shiny head? Can't match it. Can't match it. Can't do it. So what do you do? And I thought, well, let's do something that would be beneficial for the church, for people who watch this. So we're doing something on addiction.

Pastor Luke and I planted a church years ago. Just had our seventh birthday at Apologia Church. Planted it out of a drug and alcohol rehab facility, a hospital, actually. And so we've been through a lot.

We thought maybe we could share some of those experiences with you and hopefully give you something that would be beneficial. Maybe if you're struggling with addiction, this will help you. And maybe if you're a pastor of a church or a leader in a church and you're considering an addiction ministry or ministry in the area of addiction at your church, maybe this will bless you.

We hope so. We hope so. But of course, before we do, we're in The Dividing Line studio right now.

And made it into the bunker, made it through security. That's right, made it through security.

This place is blockaded like you don't even know. Underground. Dr. White is on the other side of the planet right now. And so what's amazing, Dr. White, is that right now I can do anything in here I want and you have no ability to stop me.

So let's figure out. Let's do it. I mean, this is what everyone wants to see. What is happening inside here? So first and foremost, I want to point out to you that we have, of course, Dave Hunt's What Love Is This?

This is the paperback edition. I actually had a copy of this as well. But it's not enough for Dr. White to have just one copy of What Love Is This? Of course, we also need the hardback edition. This is actually a nice little cover right here.

That'll sell a book right there.

Why is that so much thicker than the paperback? It's updated and expanded.

Oh. This might be after maybe he had some interaction with Dr. White. If you guys don't know about that interaction, you should get on it. I know that a lot of that stuff is up on YouTube. You can listen to some of the interaction.

I was listening live to the original interaction that Dr. White had with Dave Hunt on KPXQ. Right? That's where it was. I was listening live. Wow. Yeah. There was a time where you knew someone was going to be on.

You had to be there in front of the radio and tell everyone to hush. Yeah. I was listening live when that happened. It was an amazing experience. So What Love Is This? Dave Hunt. So that's what's happening over here.

All kinds of interesting books over here. The Other Side of Calvinism. What else? So you saw the four copies of The Kingdom of the Colts, which is ridiculous. You need all four, but apparently... So, you know, before we do the show today, let's do something and let's see, Pastor Luke, how long it lasts in the studio.

Let's do something in here and let's see how long it actually stays a part of the dividing line. So what we thought we would do is... What's that? Look in the corner. This? The very corner. Oh!

Who's that from? It's Doc from the... What is it? From One of the Seven Dwarfs. It's One of the Seven Dwarfs. Snow White. And there's a book. It's Read the Bible. Okay, that's good.

How long has that been there for? Since day one. Since day one. Okay. So Dr. White and I, and of course, Rich, have had a long relationship. We've known each other for a long time and have a very special relationship with Dr. White.

He's had so much of an impact on me personally, on us, on our ministry. And yeah, we love him and we love Rich and we're grateful for this ministry. So we thought, Dr. White, what does he love? He loves riding bikes.

He loves to ride bikes. He's insane, actually. Yes, this is true. He's crazy. He's a little bit crazy. He knows a lot about God. He loves Jesus and he loves to defend the faith. But he's just a little bit crazy.

Just a little bit. Anybody that gets up at 3 o 'clock in the morning to ride their bicycle... For any reason at all. For any reason, really. First of all. He's right, you know. Any reason, you're crazy.

But then to do it in Phoenix when it's like super hot in the desert, something is a little bit off. But all of us have something like that. So he loves to ride bikes and we love him. I think he loves us.

I think he does. And I thought we... This is pretty awesome. We thought we would give you a gift, Dr. White. And this gift right here is a picture. That's a real picture, by the way. Yeah, Marcus took that.

Marcus Pittman. Right. Do you remember this, Dr. White, when we did this? Yeah. So we... I think it was in Brussels, wasn't it? I don't know. Somewhere. Tandem in Brussels. This is a picture of Dr. White and I riding a tandem bicycle.

And man, those legs. Wow. And wow. So there you go. So that's Dr. White and I riding a bicycle. I'm very excited. You can tell from my face. I'm very excited. You can tell he's doing all the work. Dr. White is very disciplined.

He's there to do business. He's really what it is. He's just along for the ride. He's just there to do business. And so that's... We're going to leave this as a special gift for you, Dr. White.

Where should we put this? Set it up behind you so it's always in the camera. That's right.

Set it up on the books. Put it to where everyone can see it and we'll see how long it lasts in the studio. That's pretty good. There you go. There you go. We'll see how long that lasts. That's probably not very long, I'd imagine.

So now we've had our moment. We've left our piece. And now let's give you guys an enjoyable show. So we wanted to talk about drug and alcohol addiction. It's a complex issue. It involves the physical aspect of our being.

It involves, of course, the spiritual aspect of our being. And what tends to take place as people approach this issue is they tend to focus on one or the other. So one becomes the emphasis over the other.

That's generally what tends to take place. So you sometimes have people who are believers. They love God. They know the gospel. They try to address the issue of addiction. They address spiritual aspects of addiction, idolatry, drunkenness as sin, the need for repentance and faith, the need for regeneration, forgiveness, reconciliation with God, sanctification, the local church.

And I'll emphasize those things, but sometimes neglect the physical aspects of addiction, the toxicity that exists and those sorts of things. And then what generally takes place in the industry, and believe me, it is an industry, what tends to take place in the secular industry of addiction is people focus in upon an unbiblical anthropology.

There is a totally contradictory worldview, a worldview that is in many, many respects opposed to Christ. I mean, really in every respect opposed to Christ. So you have an anthropology that is based upon an evolutionary worldview, a Darwinian model.

I can remember being at the hospital, and every month they would have new people coming in constantly, but they ran them through like a 30-day cycle. And I remember that once a month, if you came there for the 30-day program, you had to watch a film, and the film is a very popular film.

Oh man, the name of it is leaving me at the moment. I think it's Weaving the Rainbow or Unweaving the Rainbow or something like that. And the entire thing is meant to convince people that the problem of addiction is that it is a disease.

So they teach the disease model primarily, and that the reason we have this problem of addiction is because of our evolutionary past. It has to do with reward centers in our brains, and it's not really a choice you're making, it's a disease which leads to that.

And so what tends to take place is as families drop their loved ones off in this hospital, they end up having a meeting where they're convinced that what's wrong with their loved one is that they have the disease of addiction, and what they're doing is not really ultimately their fault, it's a disease.

And you've got to really sympathize with the disease and work on the disease, and they'll say things like, you have the disease of addiction, you're never not going to be an addict, you'll always be an addict, because, well, those are the cards you've been dealt, those sorts of things.

But what will tend to take place is they focus in upon the physical aspect of addiction and completely neglect the spiritual aspect. And of course, if you're not approaching it from a Christian position, you're not focusing in upon the word of God, you're not focusing in upon the gospel, those sorts of things.

And so the industry works like that. You have Christian programs that sometimes neglect the physical aspects of addiction, and you actually have secular programs that, of course, divorce it all completely from Jesus and the biblical worldview.

So, how do you address the issue? And I want to say that I never personally planned to go into this ministry. Luke and I met many years ago, and we were doing ministry, and we were involved in ministry together at a church, pastoral work, that sort of a thing, but never really saw this coming, and so this was really a shock, I think, both to Luke and me.

I was pastoring at a church in Phoenix, and I got a call from a friend of mine who was working at this hospital. I didn't know the hospital existed. I was actually, at the time, looking to move across country.

I had gone through like a year-long search committee process. I was going to move across the country to take a job as a pastor in South Carolina, and I had gotten a call from a friend of mine who was an employee at this hospital, and he said they lost their chaplain, they lost their pastor, and they needed someone to come teach chapel that night.

And for me, it was an awesome opportunity because I didn't know it existed, but I thought, I get to tell people in a room about Jesus and none of them can leave? Okay, that's great. I'll do it. So, I went to the hospital that night, no plans of anything else except just going to preach the gospel that night.

And so, I go to preach the gospel to a room of people that were just like me. Some of you guys know my past. Oh, how many years ago now? 17, almost 20 years ago, I was a professing Christian, I went into drug and alcohol addiction, and just a complete life of depravity and brokenness, almost died numerous times.

But God smashed my life and brought me to repentance, and that's where I know. I know that I truly came to Christ then, turned from my sin to trust in Christ, and really began to experience the change that takes place when you know Jesus.

So, at any rate, when all that took place in my life, I knew enough about God's Word to understand the problem of addiction was fundamentally spiritual, fundamentally, and I knew that my need was transformation, I knew my need was the Word of God, I knew my need was the church, I knew that I need to have my mind renewed.

And so, that took place in my own life personally. I never thought to go to AA, NA, HA, I knew that existed, never thought to go, because I knew that God's Word had the answers, and I knew that God had promised that He restores people.

And so, that was many, many years ago. So, when this came up and this opportunity was presented before me, and I preached the gospel this night to this room of people, I saw people come to Christ that night, and I remember that I was essentially thinking in my mind, I'm on my way across the country, I'm leaving, I've already been selected, it's a unanimous vote from the search committee, you're the guy, we had boxed my entire house up down to, I mean, everything, forks and knives were boxed up, and we were ready to basically make the phone call and say, send the truck and get us the tickets.

And through some circumstances that happened at the church I was at, they needed me to stay essentially to carry this church. And it ended up that this hospital asked me to take over the Christian program.

They had a Christian program and a secular program, and they said, we want you to run the entire thing. You have full control to do what you want, make it a Christian program. And so, it became really clear that God was leading me to do this, and so I did.

Luke was there the whole time, and I don't know, I can't even recollect or recall how long that was for, I was there before the Lord was really showing us. At Calvary? Yeah, how many, was it maybe two years?

Was it a year? Maybe it was a year.

Probably a year, and by the time we planned the church it was like two years. Right, yeah.

So, I minister at this hospital while I'm also the pastor at a church in Phoenix. The church is growing, it's flourishing and doing well. I was also ministering at the hospital, and so many people were coming to Christ at that hospital, many of them were going back home to New York, Florida, all over the country.

People came every day, people came from around the country, because if you looked up on Google, Christian rehab program or something like that, it was one of the first ones that came up. So it was a popular program, they were making a lot of money.

And so what happened was, we started seeing that when we would try to send these people to churches across the country, we would call a pastor and say, hey, this person just came to Christ here, I'm sending them home, I want them to meet with you.

And I kept getting, like, consistently from pastors across the country, what do I do with them? Like, that was the thing, and I remember telling Luke about this, these pastors would say, what do I do with them?

I'd say, well, they were a heroin addict, they turned to Christ now, they've been here for 30 days, now they're coming home. Like, you disciple them. Disciple them. Nothing special, like, you know, disciple them.

And they'd say, I don't know what to do. Or we would run into this, this was common, they would say, yeah, we have an addiction program at our church that meets on Wednesdays. I'd say, great, what is it?

And they would say, oh, we have an AA group that meets here. And so what I knew at the time about AA being at this hospital, that worried me. And so I would usually say, like, a celebrate recovery program, and they would say, no, no, like, the AA group meets here on Wednesdays.

So this is like a secular run AA group. And what we started seeing was that even locally, trying to send people away to churches, people said, I don't know how to handle it, or I have an AA group, but we're like, well, where's the Christian programs, and where's the people who just understand the nature of this?

And so through a long course of events, God started to make it really, really clear to both Luke and I that he was calling us to plant a church. It was terrifying. Yes. Because we tried to resist it. Yeah.

For, I don't know, it was probably like six or seven months of resistance. At least, yeah. At least six or seven months, because we never had any plan for that. Right. We never had anything in our sights of we're going to plant a church one day.

We just wanted to be faithful, serve God the way that we were. And what happened was people started coming into our lives and telling us, pastors, seminary professors that knew me, saying, you have to plant this church, you're supposed to plant this church.

And I had a pastor that knows us both very well call me one day and said, Jeff, if you don't plant this church, it's sinning against God. He's making it obvious to you. So Pastor Luke and I began to put our fleece out before the Lord.

So we started throwing out things before God. Lord, if you're in this, we're not forcing it. If you're in it, you got to give us this. And he would give it to us. We'd say, okay, one more thing, Lord, this one, he'd give us that.

We got down the list to last thing. We needed a location for free as many times a week as we wanted. And then God gave us that at the hospital. So we planted the church end of February. 2010. 2010. And we planted the church from basically zero.

It was Luke and Cheryl. My pregnant wife. Yeah, she was pregnant with his first child at the same time. It was me, my wife, and my four kids. Joy. Joy. Joy was with us, and that was it. Joy the girl. What's that?

I said Joy the girl. Joy the girl. She was with us since the very beginning. And that night we had the room filled with a bunch of ex-drug addicts. People who had just overdosed not long before that.

People still on medication, detoxification medication. And so the first two years of Apologia Church were, wow. Difficult. Really, really rough. Yeah. So go ahead, and I'll let you talk about that. Maybe talk about the experience we had as pastors.

Man, it was a couple things. Well, first, I mean, we'd have times where we were literally out chasing people at 2 o 'clock in the morning. We knew the block they were on, essentially, and trying to find them because they had been using it and didn't know if they were alive, stuff like that.

So that happened a lot. We learned a lot, too, just, I think, specifically speaking about how to help people through addictions. We learned the importance of being concrete about things with people with addictions.

We learned just the importance of accountability. And we learned that, essentially, you can't make someone stop using. You can't be, as much as we wanted to and tried, you cannot be the Holy Spirit in someone's life.

Ultimately, they have to want to stop using. And it only comes through the gospel, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And so those were probably the big things we learned the first two years.

Yeah. The first two years of our lives was all day, every day, around the clock. And Luke's not telling tales out of the schoolyard. We used to literally be chasing people. We'd find out someone that was maybe new to the church had gone back, and we would literally try to go find them because these are people that were at risk to kill themselves.

They would use so much they would die. We would be scooping people off the street at 2 in the morning. We'd taken people to the hospital. I can't even remember how many times that took place. And all this took place, and the reason why I tell you this, not to just sort of tell you the sad story, but to tell you really the victorious nature of it all.

We had people who were new to Christ that had never been to church in their lives that were in this tight community of faith in Jesus, that loved God, loved each other, were experiencing transformation in ways that nobody thought was possible.

We had people... I mean, we were known early on as that drug church. That's how people were called. Oh, that drug church? Because everybody at Apologia came out of drug and alcohol addiction. So we had like 30, 50 people, and all of them really, really close to one another and all with a deep understanding of the struggle that they were having, and really just the glorious moment of it all.

What made it so beautiful is these people were literally people that had been to rehab, some of them like 5 to 10 times, and now they're in Christ, and they hate their addiction. They love God. They're wanting to just follow Christ with their lives.

It was beautiful seeing people. I mean, you come to Apologia, and maybe to some of you guys who look crazy right now, he's covered in tattoos. I've got tattoos. You come to Apologia Church, people will be covered in tattoos and gauges, and they've torn jeans, and they're worshiping Jesus and love God, and they're preaching the gospel to people, and they do not look like a Christian.

Like, they don't look like it. And it was awesome, awesome. And I would say, like, the beauty of where we're at now as a church is that God so sanctified those people and this church that if you were to walk in on a Sunday today, if nobody told you where we came from, if nobody shared the story, you wouldn't know.

You come into the church now, and it's just filled with, it's like 200 people, and there's families now with children that actually came to being because of this church. I mean, like kids everywhere. There is people, you know, older people, younger people, people who wear those same clothes, people who are wearing suits and ties.

It's just such a mix, and you just wouldn't know. Like, this church came to life out of an addiction context. And so it's amazing. Do you want to share anything else about kind of that, what it was like or?

Oh, man. Well, I will share this story. One of the things that was interesting is that Luke and I, we were with the church like all week, every day. Yeah. I mean, it was Bible studies all throughout the week.

There was time to get together. There was prayer nights. Like everybody who would like come to Christ and was really fresh in the struggle of sanctification would like gather together with the church on a Friday night where they would stay up all night just fellowshipping in the word, praying to like, I would get up and I would see them sharing pictures of like the sun coming up and they're like still not in bed yet.

They were just up all night rather than using the drugs and alcohol. They were like fellowshipping and worshipping with God's people and they were loving it. It was just, it was amazing. But we also had like these experiences of like really sincere accountability.

Like, you know, you're in Christ now. We treat them like anybody else. Nothing special about your addiction. Like this is a sin. Don't pursue it. You need to be accountable. You need to confess your sins.

You need to be healed. And we had breathalyzers. I still have it. You still have it? In my bag. Is it in your bag right now? Do you want to show it? Just to show them the history of apologia. He still carries it with him.

Because of the nature of our church and the people coming in were usually raw. Like they just turned to Christ at the hospital and now they're coming, now they're out. They're going to church. We couldn't have people coming to church like drunk or under the influence in any way.

And so we would be checking people at the door and we wouldn't say, come here, let me smell you. But we knew. We could tell. We could see it in their eyes. I could look right in their pupils and know exactly if they were using and what they were using.

And Luke and I just knew so we'd say, hey, we need to talk to such and such. We'd pull them aside and I forget even how to use it right there. They'd blow right into this and we'd show it to them. And so there's apologia's breathalyzer.

Yeah, we had some pretty hefty numbers on there at times. We did.

Well over the legal limit. Yeah. So we also had, we had sort of this tradition as a church where we had so many people that were new in Christ and really experiencing sanctification. So they're being, you know, as a new Christian that's coming out of this fresh, you have these, you're torn from side to side.

On the one hand, like, you know, God is causing you to love him and love his word and to desire fellowship. And so you just see these glorious moments of like worship of Jesus. Right. But then all of a sudden they have a bad moment.

Like they're experiencing anxiety, depression, loneliness, all these things. And they're used to going to the idol for those things to be satisfied. But now like they're struggling. So they would come to church and I don't know how many drugs you held in your hand, but people would come and they'd say, hey, Pastor Jeff, I almost used again.

I went out and bought, I forget what it was at one time, like 50 tabs of ecstasy. I think so, yeah. Something like 50 or 25 tabs of ecstasy, which by the way was my drug of choice almost 20 years ago.

And they would come and say, here's, you know, I bought all these tabs of ecstasy. I don't know what to do. I almost sinned. Help me with this. So we had this tradition where people can come in, you can be transparent.

Like you would come to Apologia Church and somebody would be coming to the pastors with like a bag of heroin saying, I almost went back. And we'd say, awesome. Like there was this, it's okay for you to be transparent and honest with your sin and your struggle and to want to repent.

And so we would have a tradition where people would, you know, give us their drugs and we would walk to the bathroom together. We always had accountability. It was always, you know, making sure that there was somebody there to watch.

And as an act of worship, to worship Jesus now, instead of this idol, we would go to the bathroom and we would have a little worship ceremony where they would dump it in the toilet and flush it as an act of worship to God.

So all of this to sort of train ourselves in, this is an act of worship. If you go to the heroin right now, if you go to the alcohol, if you go to the pills, if you go to the weed, you are worshiping.

You are engaging in idolatry. You are going to that for what you can only have satisfied in Jesus. And that was the context. And so we would do it as an act of worship. We're going to dump this so that you can pursue Christ for these things right now rather than this idol.

And those are some of the most amazing experiences for me personally is seeing those victories in people's lives. So before I go into, let's talk about addiction in the church and those sorts of things.

Anything you want to share in terms of the whole experience? Lots of church discipline. Oh, yes. Yeah, we've had, I've lost, I don't know,.

12, 15 maybe over the years. Probably. We've had to bring before the church. And so we always, you would tell us that one night there was like three people one night. I think we had like seven people in the first two years or something like that.

Yeah. But two of those people, three of those people have come back and repented.

Yeah. Oh, that one night. Just that one night. Oh, that one. Yeah, just that one night. Just that one night. Yeah. So yeah, it was really, it was sanctifying for all of us. They were being sanctified.

Pastor Luke and I were being sanctified as pastors because God was really testing us as ministers because we got this new church that's doing so well. It's doing so well. And we're experiencing the blessing of seeing God work in these people.

And then all of a sudden, like somebody would, who's professing faith in Jesus, would go off and they would start using again or drinking heavily again and abusing alcohol. And what we would always try to do is we would always try to restore them with a spirit of gentleness.

We'd always try to restore them and help them. So we would plead with them. We would call into repentance. We would offer them whatever they needed. And if they still wouldn't turn, we would even give them up to the last moment before we started worship.

We would call them and say, please don't, please don't make us do this. Please come back. And one night I remember, I think Luke, the church was only about 30 people. Real tight community. I mean, it was amazing.

And we had three people to discipline that night. And these were people who were like, they were very important in the church. They were very important in the church. And I remember like, Pastor Luke and I talked before church and we committed that night.

Look, if God wanted to do this just for this and he's gonna kill the church now, okay, but we're gonna be faithful and we're gonna do this. And we had to do the first one. We brought it before the church and the church was in tears.

I mean, the church is just like, you know, crying and we're crying. And as soon as this horrible experience is over, I'm like, okay, now I have to talk to you about another one. And then it was the next one and then the next one.

So, but what God ended up doing after that night is we thought it was gonna hurt us as a church, but it ended up growing us as a church. The church came back that next week stronger than ever, more committed to Christ, more committed to holiness.

It was an amazing experience. We could just do whole episodes here on just this, but Luke and I thought we would do an episode on addiction and talk about how do we think about this and how do we move forward?

So, the first thing is what we would wanna always share with people when we talk about addiction is that you're not special. You're not special. Jesus didn't have, like, separate messages for particular sins.

So, like, you know, the Sermon on the Mount begins. Jesus doesn't, you know, sit down and begin teaching and then before he does go, okay, now all my adulterers sit over here. All my liars sit over here.

All my drunks sit over here. All the thieves, you guys sit over there. He didn't have separate messages. He had a message, the message of the gospel that saves sinners, and he didn't break people down into little huddles saying, well, you're very, very special and you require a totally unique message.

It's the same message, and the problem of addiction from our perspective is fundamentally spiritual with physical consequences, but fundamentally spiritual, and the problem of addiction is at its bottom, sin, rebellion against God, but it is first and foremost in terms of what's happening there, it's idolatry.

And what we like to do is we like to go to Romans 1 for a lot of reasons when we're dealing with generally the gospel or talking about atheists who suppress the truth of God or all of us who suppress the truth of God.

What we like to do is talk about addiction in terms of our primary problem as fallen people, and what is it? We know the true God, but we don't want Him. And what does it say? It says we suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness, Romans 1, 18, and it says we know Him.

He's made Himself evident to us. The creation itself is bombarding us with testimony about who God is. You can't avoid it. It's just unavoidable. You can't help being what God made you to be, but what we end up doing, what our MO is as fallen creatures, is knowing the true God, Paul says, we profess to be wise, we become fools, and it says we don't want God in our knowledge.

We don't want to know Him. And so what do we do? We switch God, the true God, the creator of all things, for a false God. So the fundamental problem, and Calvin says this, Calvin says that the human heart is a natural idol-making factory, and it is never idle in making idols.

And so the problem of addiction and drugs and alcohol is not the disease of addiction, it is really sin and the switching of God for idols. So, for example, when we would look at an issue like, I'll take this as a great example, whenever I would talk to heroin users, I would generally understand the heroin user what their great struggle is.

They would generally struggle with peace. They have no peace, there's anxiety in their lives, there's worry in their lives, and so they generally are choosing the heroin because it gives them this pseudo-peace, this false peace that is just so temporary and it's just fleeting, but they would go to the heroin for that, generally.

People who love to get lost in a bottle and to abuse alcohol, drunks, they would usually have the same story. Not always, but they would usually have the same story. They would say, you know, I feel really guilty, they're trying to wash something away that couldn't be washed away except through Jesus, they struggle with guilt and shame, they're trying to forget, and so they would go drink.

Or somebody who is, well, like myself, addicted to ecstasy and those sorts of things is a person that usually has a lack of joy. They're just not happy, they're depressed, they're not happy, they feel sad, they want joy, and so they're off chasing that idol to really get what they can only have in God, but they don't want God because they're at war with Him, so they switch God for the idol.

So what we would try to emphasize is the problem is fundamentally spiritual. It's rebellion against a holy God, and it's a switching of God for idols. Now often, the switching of God for idols is pretty dramatic in terms of, we can look at religion and we can say, I can spot that switching of God.

I get that. Joseph Smith didn't like the God of the Bible, and so Joseph Smith created a God in his own image. He created a God that he could understand, the kind of God that looked like him, that he could like.

So we can go, okay, that's dramatic. I see that religious suppression, that switching of God for idols because here's the religious text, here's the building, the temple, here are the prophets. I see the switching of gods, but sometimes Romans 1 and the switching of God for idols is a little harder to see.

It's not so much on the surface like addiction to drugs and alcohol. It's a switching of God for an idol. It's trying to get in this substance, this thing which you can only have.

Ultimately satisfied in God. Anything you want to say to that? Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of the people that actually came through apology early on through the rehab were, like you mentioned earlier, people that had gone through rehab time after time after time.

And I see you have AA. We'll get into that and stuff. But ultimately, if you're not replacing that idolatry with Christ, with the gospel, it doesn't work. It doesn't do anything. It's like you said, just switching for another idol.

And so I've lost count of people that had gone through rehabs or gone through AA, HA, you name it, dozens of times and never worked. And they kept ending up in the same spot until they repented and turned to Christ and everything changed from there.

And so that's ultimately the answer to addictions, is the gospel. That's right. And so I want to address, I mentioned at the beginning that people will go.

Two directions, right? So the unbelievers will go strictly physical, right? It's a physical problem. They have an unbelieving Darwinian anthropology, right? And so the problem is a disease model. It's something, you know, gone wrong in your brain.