In this enlightening episode, we delve into the nature of addiction, identifying it as not merely a sin but an attempt to escape from deep-seated pain. Collin Cook intricately examines the three types of pain stemming from our human condition, childhood wounds, and the erroneous escapes we create. Discover how believing in the substitute humanity of Christ opens pathways to confronting these pains, finding solace in faith, and embracing the truth that we are counted as righteous by faith.
00:00:05 Righteousness by Faith and Emotional Development
So we continue to look at the issue, the truth of righteousness by faith from a psychological point of view, because we need to understand how the message of God’s righteousness by faith affects our emotional development and our ability to face the struggles and addictions and the other issues. By the way, let me remind you, everybody is addicted in one way or another. because an addiction is an escape from pain. We’re going to talk about that a bit more today. Even worry is an addiction. One can trouble oneself about the present or the future as if one had power and control over it, and the more I worry about it, supposedly, the more I solve it, which, of course, is the very opposite of the fact. And so worry becomes another form of delusion. If I worry, I’m responsible. If I worry, I’ll solve it. No, you won’t. We are to give our issues to God. But that’s something I’ll come to in a bit. Let me say this for now. In this passage in regard to righteousness by faith in Romans chapter 9, Paul says, or asks, why didn’t the Jewish people receive righteousness? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were by the works of the law, for they stumbled at the stumbling stone. Now, don’t think the Jewish people are the only ones who stumble at the stumbling stone. The symbol of the stumbling stone, of course, is Jesus Christ. Jesus is like a rock, like a stone that we don’t notice in the road, and we walk in our own self-confidence, heads high, not looking where we’re going, and we stumble over him. Well, that’s the symbol, but of course the reality is that we stumble over Jesus, or we are offended by Jesus. The idea that’s connected with this stumbling is being offended by Jesus. We are offended by Jesus. The idea that he has to take our sins, that he takes our place, that we are not capable of handling our own life, thank you very much, that we cannot handle our own guilt, our own shame, our own sins, that’s right. Now you say, but I’m a Christian. I haven’t stumbled over the stumbling stone. I’ve accepted it. I have accepted Him that He is my Savior. He has taken my judgment on the cross. Amen to that. I’m glad you have. Nevertheless, there is a tendency because of our human nature which still exists until the coming of Christ when this mortal shall put on immortality and this corruptible shall put on incorruption. There’s a tendency to stumble over Christ all the time. In what way, you say? Well, in this way. There are many issues in a day, in a given day, where we find ourselves angry or troubled or guilty over or ashamed of, and we don’t talk to God about it. We rather sort of hide it from God as if we could, and we don’t talk to him about it because we’re too ashamed to bring it to him. Now, how is that stumbling over the stumbling stone? Well, it’s stumbling in the sense that we don’t realize that our human nature has been taken care of by the cross of Jesus Christ. There is no more condemnation because he took the judgment upon himself. Yet we go around so very often embarrassed or guilt-ridden or ashamed of the things that have happened in the day or we have done or failed to do, and we don’t bring that to God. We put God at a distance because we don’t like to feel or think or sense that he is intimately aware of what our day has been like or how our thoughts have been. What you can do is to say, Father, you got that thought that I just had, that evil thought towards another person. Forgive me, Lord. I thank you that it has no power to harm me because my human nature is counted as dead at the cross. Do you see? Don’t let your human nature shame you because Jesus took it at the cross. And if you are letting it shame you, you are stumbling over the stumbling stone. In other words, you’re not noticing that Christ is there for you. You’re stumbling over him. Okay, so that is something I just wanted to emphasize in relation to the struggle with addiction. Because addiction makes us feel separated, or rather, more accurately, in our addictive drive or lust at the time of its event or happening, we don’t want to talk to God about it. It is too shameful. But, as I have said the other day, don’t allow your soul to go silent, because the essence of addiction is abandonment or separation, disconnectedness from the self. When we feel ashamed before God, we disconnect our soul from Him by not talking about what we’re going through. But when that happens, we are actually encouraging the force of addiction. Because since addiction is isolation, disconnectedness, and aloneness, that becomes a terrifying experience. And the only comfort left is more addiction, more sin, more handing over ourselves to the power of our addiction, because that becomes a false comfort. All right. Now, I wanted to mention to you, as I mentioned at the beginning of the broadcast, that there is an escape from pain in addiction. But be careful what you understand by that. There are three kinds of pain. The pain of our fallen creation, that is, that we are fallen human beings, that we are born in sin. The pain of our woundedness in childhood and the pain of our escape from that woundedness and that sinful condition that we call our broken human nature. Let me repeat that. There are three pains. We all go through this. The pain of our humanness where we are born into the world already broken and already sinners. And then the pain of our wounds in childhood, where perhaps a parent died early in your life, or maybe you are the victim of a divorced family, or maybe you had an abusive parent, or an absent parent. Or a detached parent, a parent who didn’t know how to be emotionally warm towards you because his parents weren’t emotionally warm towards him. And that passed on to you. And so that’s painful, the lack of, the unfulfilled state, the unfulfilled emotions, the unmet love need becomes such a pain that you then want to escape it. So you go into your drugs or your alcohol or your obsessive-compulsive behavior or your food addiction or your sexual addiction, and that is an escape from the pain that you experience. Now, Most of us as Christians don’t realize that. We simply think of a failure or a sin or an addiction as a sin, but it’s also a pain that is being escaped from. So we need to look at two or three things all at once, and that’s not easy to do. the fact that I am born into the world as a sinner, and the fact that I am dealing with the emotional wounds of childhood, and the fact that I am escaping from them temporarily until my addictive binge is over, and then I have more pain, the guilt and the shame of having escaped from those earlier two pains in an inappropriate way. So, we really do a number on ourselves, don’t we? What do we do about this? I think the first thing, again, based on these verses is, let’s read verse 30 again of Romans chapter 9. What shall we say then that Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith? We first of all come before God, allowing ourselves, giving ourselves permission to believe that we are counted as righteous, and we believe that by faith. How is it that we are counted? Remember, we are counted righteous because Christ is the substitute humanity for all of us. What he went through at the cross was on behalf of every human being who ever lived and who ever will live. Jesus took the judgment for all mankind, and Jesus was one with God, and so it was God who took his own judgment upon himself, and more accurately, it was God who took the judgment of the world upon himself. Therefore, when we believe in Jesus, we believe we are no longer judged. And we come before God and say, Father, I’ve got a lot of pain. I’m pained because I’m a sinner in the first place. Before ever I was born, I was born into sin. And Lord, before I ever knew right and wrong, I discovered once I did know right and wrong that I was already on the wrong side. Now, granted that children are very innocent in one way, they’re unaware, and the beauty of a child is so very often the beauty of his innocence and playfulness and joyfulness, so naive, but it doesn’t take long for a child in that first decade to become very aware that he has his little secret ways of sinning and being deceptive and unkind and cruel and all the rest of it. So we discover that this is within us and we can’t shake it off. And there are people that actually try to overcome their sinful nature, that is to eradicate it. Well, the first thing we need to understand is that you cannot eradicate your sinful nature. You can come to the place where you don’t let it rule in one way or another, but once you’ve not let it rule in one way or another, you discover that there are another 99 ways in which it does rule. Because we are people who are naturally bent towards evil. And so we come before God and say, Father, I thank you. that though my inclination is towards evil, though my bent and proclivity is towards selfishness and self-interest, I praise you that the judgment for that human nature has been taken by Jesus. Thank you so much, Lord. But then we come and we look at our childhood wounds, and we don’t say the same thing about those. We say, Father, I see that I’m wounded here, and by your grace I can do something about this. And the first thing I can do is… To believe. To believe that you were in the experience of my woundedness so that I know that it doesn’t have the power to destroy me because you are present in that pain. If you begin to look at your woundedness and pain like this, you will discover that your woundedness has an advantage over It actually leads you by faith to trust in God and His comfort for you. Thank you for listening today. You can hear this broadcast by Colin Cook, that’s me speaking, on your smartphone. Simply download a free app, soundcloud.com or podbean.com and key in how it happens with Colin Cook when you get there. This is listener-supported radio, so if you would like to make a donation, please do so. You can send it to FaithQuest, P.O. Box 366, Littleton, Colorado, 80160, or online at faithquestradio.com. Thanks, see you next time. Cheerio and God bless.
