Good Morning All,
A few weeks ago, I was listening to a radio
program where the host was interviewing a recovering addict. That is how he referred to himself as
“recovering;” he said,” The beast is never far away.” As I listened, in my cynical judgmental
fashion, I thought he really has a way with words. Yet I kept listening and his story got more intriguing. He had tried to defeat his addiction many
times and many times he failed. None of them lasted longer than 9 months before
he was back using cocaine.
The interviewer asked him how he finally
won. The man’s answer was
refreshing. He told her that he didn’t
win but that Jesus won for him. He told
her that until he accepted Jesus as his personal savior (not exactly a Lutheran
phrase but it was his phrase) his battle with the beast was always won by the
beast but Jesus is stronger than the beast. Then he ended the interview with an
observation that intrigued me and really flustered the gal interviewing
him. He said, “we are all addicts; we
all have destructive beasts within us which we can never defeat on our
own. As long as we battle them by our
power we will lose, we need something else to win; for me it is Jesus Christ.”
We are all addicts; Paul said we are all
sinners. Yet I really like how he
phrased the idea that we are all “addicts.”
We all have those sins which just seem so hard to shake. We maybe aren’t addicted to drugs or even to
many other sins but there is always one or two which seem to really pull us
down. The early Church used to speak of
the seven deadly sins, wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony, as
the fallen human tendency toward sin. If
we look at this list; it pretty much gets to all our issues.
There are a lot of things that can be said
about this list but one thing I hope we all take away from this is that we are
ALL in this list. You might be one sin,
and I might be at another, but we are all sinners and thus we should not judge
others for where we think they sit in the list.
I may think that one person is greedy, or another is lustful yet if I am
envious of my neighbor; I am no different than they are.
So, what do we do? First, we see life as Jeremiah does, “Heal
me, O lord, and I shall be healed, save me and I will be saved.” Jesus is our only true salvation and our only
way to defeat our addictions, our sins. So,
we struggle on as recovering addicts, fighting the beast within, our sinful
nature. When we can, we should, with
God’s love as our motive, help our fellow believer fight his addiction as well. With Christ, we are all in this together,
offering each other comfort, hope, and consolation because of Christ’s free
gift to us. We are all recovering addicts,
and we need each other’s prayers and support.
Divine
God, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be
understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that
we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we
are born to Eternal Life. Amen. (A prayer of St.
Francis.)
God’s
Peace,
Pastor
Bret
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