House of Refuge—Lesson 2 (of 2) God Addict

This is a presentation made at the Sunnyslope House of Refuge in Phoenix, AZ on March 7, 2024.

This is Part 2 of 2 and is about Becoming a GOD-ADDICT!
Turning our sin addiction into a God Addiction.

Last week, I used the word NEST to illustrate that the nest we build for ourselves in our lives will always be built around our identity.
We have a NEST:
Nature—Live with a sin nature or saved nature?
Eternity—Are we eternally saved or damned?
Servant—Do we serve God or Satan?
Trust—Do we trust in the world or do we trust in the Creator?

We need an EGG,
Enemy—Identify who this is. You can make an enemy of God or you can make an enemy of the devil. Whoever your enemy is, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.” Proverbs 24:17
Glorify—You can glorify yourself or you can glorify God. It’s your decision. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, wholly and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Romans 12:1
God— We need a god in our life. We can be gods over our own lives, or we can have little “g” gods that, I call idols, rule over our lives…or we can have the big “G” God rule over our lives. The God of all creation. “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good.” Psalm 14:1

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

I like to pray. Yeah.

Do you guys mind if we pray? No problem. Alright. Dear Lord Jesus Christ, please, please bless the words that come out of my mouth. Let it enter into the ears of every man here. Let it affect their hearts, because if you want to affect a man’s life, you can affect their hearts, and it will change their lives.

So God, please let these words be meaningful to those who hear it. Please let me be guided by the Spirit. And all that I say so that these men can leave here richer, having heard what I said, and being able to be reflections of Christ in their life towards everyone that they meet once they leave these doors.

In your precious name, we pray, Jesus Christ, amen.

Hey guys, I, uh, yeah, Mike said, uh, he invited me over here and I didn’t think I was going to stay a couple of years ago. So….the food. Food got me. I kept coming back for the food. But, no, I remember meeting Jake. He was a great guy. I remember meeting other people, too.

And, it’s the relationships that we build that cause us to keep wanting to come back and, and nurture that relationship with one another. If we had negative or unhealthy relationships that would drag us down, then we would probably want to avoid those. But in this room, these are people I feel that Jesus has brought here to want to have a life change.

To do better to hold themselves up to a higher standard. And I mentioned last week, God is the highest standard and we’re supposed to hold ourselves to his standard. We are not just reflections of Jesus in our life towards others when we leave the door, but we are made in the image of God. I want to get into, Genesis really quick.

It’s the first verse, it says,

“In the beginning, God, Made a decision….”
Does it say that? No, it doesn’t. It says,

“created the heavens and the earth.”

But every time I read that, I was like, what made him do that? What made him decide to do that? What made him choose to create the heavens and the earth? He made a decision.

He made a choice. Just like each of us do. We make choices in our lives. Choices that affect us positively. Choices that affect us negatively. And we pay the price of those choices by the consequences or the rewards that we get after we made those decisions. Those decisions follow us. I know that everyone says, become a Christian and you can start a new life.

Well, you can, but it doesn’t mean that your old life disappeared. It doesn’t mean that you’re still not paying consequences for the actions that you’ve had in the past. The things that we did wrong back then are still wrong today. The only thing that’s changed is that now I believe in Jesus Christ, and now I have a heart change, and now moving forward from this day on, I will do things differently, but the past is still there.

It didn’t disappear, and that’s important to know. So last week we covered having a nest. I want to quickly review Uh, what that means because I gave everyone a choice. The nest is an acrostic that stands for nature. Whether you want to have a sin nature or a saved nature. Uh, it also, the E stands for eternal.

Do you want to choose eternal damnation or eternal salvation? Do you want to be a servant of God or do you want to serve Satan? That is the S of nest. The T stands for trust. Do we trust in the world or do we trust in the creator? There’s Bible verses for each of those. We can go through that, but that’s just one acrostic.

Acrostic is, is a memory mnemonic. It helps you to remember, uh, certain things that are important in this case. I think. We can build a nest that positively can grow our lives in a good direction and a Godly direction to do what is righteous in God’s eyes. But there’s this difficulty that people run into where they might not recognize that there is a God.

And I understand that for up until the age of 38 years old, I fought against there ever even being a God. I thought that, you know what? I was raised Buddhist, I will be reincarnated, there’s this, this cycle of life, this wheel of life, and I will, uh, if I, if I do things good now, then, uh, maybe I’ll get a better station in life the next time around, until I reach this nirvana.

But who do I answer to? Who is it that I’m responsible to? And that’s when Christ entered into my life and started to show me that, you know, there’s changes that I can do here. And now I don’t have to wait for another life, although we will get one as Christians, it’s called the new creation life, but I don’t have to wait for the next life to get rewards.

We can get rewards here. If we change our life here, we can change our decisions here. The things that we do will affect all of those around us. I was told once that when I have a bad day in my house, my children have a bad day. My wife has a bad day. The people that she runs into has a bad day. The kids that my kids run into have a bad day because I had a bad day.

Am I taking too much credit? I thought, nah, you can’t give me that much credit. But I looked and I saw it and it was true. If I get really grumpy, if I get really so full of myself, I’m just seeing the world through the lens of my own eyes and seeing what is right in my own eyes and, and, and taking it out on my wife or snapping at my kid, they’re going to take that out of the house and they’re going to, they’re going to interact with other people and the world becomes a little sadder, a little bit more bleak.

So, it’s easier to give a compliment than it is to give an insult. It’s easier to be able to, to lift someone up in what’s called exhortation, to give an encouraging word to someone than it is to tear them down and to rip them to pieces. But why don’t we do that? Why isn’t that the choice that we choose to do in life?

It’s easy, isn’t it? We’re selfish. We’re just selfish. We need an EGG for our NEST. A nest egg.

Now, again, you get choices. Uh, the E stands for enemy. Um, everyone has enemies in their, in their life. You need to identify what that enemy is. I hear people say that God is my enemy. Now, I used to kind of, I wish I could tell you that God’s not your enemy. But then I was like, well, I’m happy that you believe that there’s a God.

Let’s work with that. Let’s work with the fact that you believe that there’s a God. And yeah, you think he’s your enemy. You think he’s working against you. Let’s, let’s keep the conversation going. It’s better than starting the conversation at someone who says, you know what? I don’t believe that there’s a God and I can’t be affected by this.

Okay. So, uh, there’s a Bible verse with that. Uh, can someone choose to read it? I didn’t read it loud. Uh, anyone raise their hand. Anyone.

“Do not rejoice when your enemy falls. Let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.” Proverbs 24:17

So, I love reading scripture, and I love to try to grasp the meaning of what’s being said. Proverbs 24:17 says that when your enemy falls, don’t, don’t be happy about it. Haven’t you ever Whether it be in the workplace or in your private life, someone has done something wrong against you, and then something later terrible happens to them, something bad happens to them, and you get, like, this personal joy inside?

That’s like according to this, that’s not what we’re supposed to feel. So what we’re doing, when we’re getting, like, this personal joy inside when someone else falls, that’s sinful. We should still want to lift up our brothers, even if they against us, even if they are our enemies. And that goes against everything I was taught.

Why would I want to help up this person off the ground when he just kicked me when I was on the ground, I want him to get what’s coming to him. I can’t speak for everyone in this room, but that’s how I felt. And sometimes on a bad day, that’s still how I feel. I can’t say I don’t, I’d be lying. So how can we let this verse affect us in our own hearts to change?

So that way, when even our enemy wants something bad to happen to us, that we don’t take joy in something bad happening to them. Well, let’s play it out. How is it going to benefit us other than maybe a strange, morbid, fuzzy feeling inside to watch someone else go through trauma to watch someone else go through a crisis in their life, to watch someone else go through pain and hurt and suffering.

And we take joy in that. How does that help us? Does that make us better people?

So everyone knows about the Good Samaritan, right? If you don’t, I’ll tell you really quick. There’s a story in the Bible about a dude who got beaten and left on the side of the road for dead. And there was, uh, a few people that should have stopped for him, but didn’t. But a Samaritan, a Samaritan was thought of as, uh, they weren’t the best of society. They were frowned upon. They were hated. They were despised, stopped and gave aid and took this person to, uh, get some lodging and fed him and, and, and nursed his wounds. And that was told by Jesus to, uh, explain to someone who is your neighbor. And I took that to mean that everyone’s our neighbor, even our enemies, the Samaritan, the good Samaritan, it was a misnomer, a misnomer is something that’s misnamed, it’s not the Jewish person listening to the good Samaritan story, wouldn’t think anything good or highly of a Samaritan.

They were hated. Think of someone that you hate doing something good for someone else. And that’s what this story was, was it was how it affected the people in the first century when it was first told. So we’re to behave like that in our lives. We’re to help someone when they’ve been beaten, help someone when no one else will, we’re supposed to step up and be the helping hand. We’re supposed to nurse them to health. We’re supposed to pay for their lodging.

It was a Jewish person that was beaten and they hate the Samaritans, but yet the Samaritan was giving him a helping hand.

So that was a person who hated another person being helped by the person he hated. Do you think that was impactful for that person’s life? When he made a full recovery. His wounds were nursed back to health, his lodging was paid for, his food was paid for, everything was paid for. Do you think he thought differently about Samaritans?

That’s what we’re supposed to do. If we can truly actually do that, we would have less enemies in our lives. It is morbid to see someone beaten on the side of a road and leave them there for dead. It is morbid. It is not right. It is inhumane. I think it’s pure evil. Even if you hate that person, you ought to give them a hand up.

And that’s what we’re commanded to do. If you believe in scripture, we are to, uh, glorify either God or ourself. It’s up to you. I say that we should glorify God. That’s the next G there. E G glorify. It’s your decision. Here’s a Bible verse here. Can someone read Romans 12:1 and read it loud? Just read.

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

Okay. So. Oftentimes we go through life and we’re trying to get that new car for ourselves or get that new pad that we want to, uh, uh, hang out in, that new, uh, uh, condo, townhouse, whatever, apartment. We want things of this world that will glorify us. Or let’s say we don’t have a lot of money and we want things to, uh, uh, pat us on the back.

We want to get credit for things. We want people to recognize what we’ve done and to give us credit, pat us on the back. But. We’re not supposed to do that according to scripture. That’s glorifying ourselves. What is a way that we can glorify God? What is glorifying God? What does what does it mean to glorify God?

Lifting him up So when we lift up God above ourselves, we’ve recognized that he’s a higher power above us and that we want to, to serve him. And what capacity do we want to serve him? Any capacity, because whatever he wants for us is good. There is nothing bad that God wants for us. If we say, Hey God, you got me, I’ll do whatever you want, whatever.

I can trust in God’s characteristics that he will never ask me to do something bad. I can fully surrender to God. And by doing that, I can serve God and glorify God. Now there’s other gods. I hinted at last week, these little G gods, lowercase G gods. And for me, I come from a background of addiction. I was addicted to methamphetamines.

I was a chef in some beautiful kitchens. I went to school in Scottsdale. I trained very well just to get into these kitchens and cook fine dining for lots of people who loved my cooking. But I was addicted to drugs and every day I woke up, I couldn’t wait for my next fix. And every day I said I would quit, I would quit for my family.

I would quit for my wife. I would quit for whatever that reason is. Put a reason there. Yet I still went back and did that drug. There was nothing I could do of my own power to stop doing that drug. I got myself there, but I couldn’t get myself out of there. It was hard. I was stuck. So. For a guy who didn’t really believe in God, I heard about God.

I was pretty indifferent to it. I did ask God for a sign and he did give me a sign. We covered that last week and that sign was powerful and it was so powerful. I had to step out of the way and let God do his work in my life. And to pull me out of the hole that I was in, I couldn’t do it on my own. I was lucky.

Not everybody has that experience where their cravings go away. My cravings went away. And people know what cravings are. My daughter knows what cravings are. She craves YouTube shorts. My wife knows what cravings are. She craves chocolate. My littlest daughter, she craves making her big sister angry. I don’t get it because big sister will hit her and it hurts.

But, there’s things that we crave in this world that we’re not satisfied until we get it. We’re going to do it over and over and over again, habitually. We won’t stop. We are creatures of habit because we are made in the image of God. And we do things over and over and over again. Does that mean that God is a person of habit?

The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon comes up and it goes down. The, there’s air. There’s, there’s, there’s the butterflies. There’s the flowers that come every season. You would almost say that if everything was created by God and everything seems to repeat itself, that God is a habitual being and we are made to have habits too.

And those habits are the things that we crave in life. that we put into our hearts to take the place of what’s really missing. And I’m going to say, I think what’s really missing, and they, lots of pastors will say this is a God shaped hole in my chest. I’m missing God. Now, whether you believe in God or not, that’s, that’s your journey.

That’s your path. But for me, once I started putting in my heart, God, I started. Not craving the things of this world. I started wanting to please God. I started waking up instead of going for that morning cigarette for that morning cup of coffee. Those are addictions too. I went for scripture and I would read the Bible so I replaced one addiction for another addiction. There’s good addictions.

Not all addictions are bad. I’m addicted to telling my wife she’s beautiful every morning. I’m addicted to giving my daughter hugs. I’m addicted to whatever it is that I habitually do. I chose to make it more positive in my life instead of pulling out a glass pipe and worshiping some other demonic god.

I want to worship God, the Father in heaven, so that when, when I do things for him, not, not for rewards, life gets better. Haven’t you ever, haven’t you ever gotten up in the morning and realized that because of some of the choices you made in life, there’s no changing where you’re at? You’re in a deep, dark hole. For me. I thought that my life was over. I thought that there was no way forward. There was no path to victory where I was still married and my kid loved me.

It was an end game for me. When I finally cried out to God, help me, save me, pull me out of this ditch thinking, you know what? He’s not going to listen, but he did. And when he did that, I was finally changed in my heart. I finally started wanting to read the Bible. And I finally started to want to know who is this God.

And then as I learned who God was, I started to learn about who Jesus was. And then I started to want to tell other people about it too. Have you heard about this guy, Jesus? And in Christian circles, they start chuckling and start laughing. Yeah, we’ve heard of him, but then I’ve heard other people. They’re like, I don’t want to hear it.

And they get really hostile. They’re like, you know what? I’m, I’m fine with my own friends. I’m fine with the way that my life is going right now. I’m okay with where I’m at.

Well, I don’t know. I like to talk to those people and say, well, what are you addicted to?

Do you let your addictions rule over your life?

Do you submit to your addictions when it says, feed me? Do you light up that cigarette?

Do you look for that pipe? Do you run to the store to get a carton of smokes? Whatever your addiction is.

Who is the master and who is the slave?

I don’t mind being a slave if I have a good master. Because every time I said I was master, I made some pretty bad choices. I don’t mind following someone else who knows what they’re doing. I don’t mind following someone else who has my best interest in mind. Actually, I’ve had bosses in my life who have looked out for me, who have taken me under their wing, who have showed me the ropes, showed me how to succeed.

Not because it was going to benefit them. Although if I did really well, it would benefit them. We’d make more sales or whatever. We’d get more customers. But the thing is, it is a beautiful feeling inside to know that someone, for the most part, not selfishly, is taking you under their wing and showing you how to do good.

How to make choices in life that won’t negatively affect you and follow you for the rest of your life. Choices in life that, that make you feel good to go home. That make you like, you know what? I didn’t just kick that guy on the side of the road that I saw laying there. Cause I hate him. I helped him up.

I nursed him back to health. I gave him some money. I paid for his hotel. We can do those things. Those are the choices that we make in life. Those are the decisions that we make. Every single day we make decisions in our life and those decisions follow us. We can choose to do good versus choosing to do what is wrong.

We need a God in our life. That’s the last G. So for this EGG that we’re putting in our NEST, we need God. Now I’ve mentioned the little “g” gods, the lowercase “g” gods. You can have those. Everyone does, but those are idols. I call them idols. They aren’t intelligent enough to take care of a human being. God created human beings.

We are made in the image of God and he did put an addictive nature within us. He wanted us to be addicted to him. The entire point of what I’m talking about is knowing that each one of us has some sort of addiction, whatever it is, you can keep it private. That’s fine. But we have an addiction in life that will, will either destroy us or make us better. Addictions in their nature aren’t bad. It’s what you choose to be addicted to that can destroy you. If you choose to be addicted to drugs, if you choose to be addicted to anger, if you choose to be addicted to pornography, whatever you choose to be addicted to, that’s negative, it can destroy you and kill you. And you will receive eternal damnation for that.

But if you choose to be addicted to God and you choose to open up the Bible, when you wake up first thing in the morning, you choose to get down on your knees and pray until you do have calluses on your knees. It’s an amazing thing. It’s something to show off. It’s like a wound, like a scar. Look at the scar I got here.

Look at my calluses on my knees. I pray every day. Thank you God for the next breath that I take. Thank you God that my eyes are open. Thank you God that I’m not dead. Thank you God that my daughter doesn’t hate me anymore, that she comes up to me and she hugs me and she loves me. Thank you God for my wife who didn’t divorce me, who didn’t leave me.

Thank you God for 22 years of marriage.

So when God can do these powerful things in my life, what did I have to do to get it? I had to submit. I had to submit to God because I was tired of submitting to these lower addictions. I was tired of submitting to these lower idols. I was tired of submitting to things that didn’t know how to take care of a human being.

I wanted to submit to someone who would take care of me in my life. Someone who had my best interest in mind. I wanted to submit to the creator of me. The one who knows how I function knows how I work. The one who truly does have my best interest in mind. I wanted to submit to God, big G, God, the father in heaven.

We all make choices in our life that follow us. Sometimes even after you get out of this program, someone might call you. Are you going to answer the phone? This is an old contact. You used to do drugs together. Are you going to answer the phone? Oh yeah, he’s a good, good buddy. We won’t do drugs. He knows I’m on the mend.

He knows I’m on the wagon. I don’t know if that’s a good choice. But you do. You do. And you’ll know if those choices will follow you. And you’ll know if those choices will cause you to stumble. I’ve known people that said, you know what, I’m only dealing drugs because I want to preach the gospel to the people who really need to hear it.

That is, that is, that is evil. I have not heard that once or twice. I’ve heard that multiple times on the street. I go out and I feed the homeless twice a week and I talk to people who know better scripture than I do. They’re quoting scripture like, like they just got out of seminary and they got pockmarks all over their skin and they’re telling me about Jesus Christ and they’re like, yeah, he saved my life.

And then he’s got a backpack full of drugs and he’s dealing to everybody on that street corner. And he’s asking me for a bag of food. And he’s asking me can I pray over him.

But those people, they don’t have your best interest in mind. So if you’re thinking of picking up the phone when someone calls you, remember, these are choices that you make every single day that will affect you for the next day, for the next week, for the next month, for the next year. And those choices will follow you until you choose to break that bad decision making.

If you choose to actually say, you know what? I am tired of ending up in jail. I am tired of, of, of my daughter not picking up the phone. I am tired of my wife screaming at me. I’m tired of not seeing my family at all anymore because they won’t, I don’t even know where they’re at. I’m tired of this hell hole.

I put myself into, I want a different life for myself. I want to serve someone who can take care of me. I’m a human being. I want to serve the God who created me because he knows how I work. It’s okay to be an addict to God. It’s okay to want to wake up and you just can’t wait to read scripture. It’s okay to just want to pray.

I used to find it difficult to pray for more than five minutes. I actually had to Google how to pray. I was like, how do people do it for like 10 minutes? I could pray a good hour easy now.

God listens to our prayers You don’t need someone to pray for you. It’s helpful. Scripture says in James 5:16 confess your sins to one another and Pray for one another So that your sins may be healed They’re talking about your sins as if it’s a freaking injury! So that your sins may be HEALED.

We can pray for one another.

We can affect one another through this prayer because God answers prayers. We can form a relationship with our God in heaven and we can start to understand that God loves us and he pursues us and he sends people in our lives daily to pull us out of the muck and the grime and the muddy messes that we put ourselves into.

God, is here to save us.

So now that you know that we can have positive addictions, I want to ask you guys, moving forward into the future, what do you want to crave for yourselves when you wake up in the morning? Just know that God did not mistakenly give us the ability to be addicted. He purposely made us addicts.

It’s in us. I just recently got over an addiction to, uh, breakfast sandwiches at Wendy’s. It was, it was, it was adding up. But they kept giving me coupons, but I woke up one day and I said, I’m not going to do that anymore. I was doing it every single day. Seriously, for a week. And I was like, I’m going to stop this.

There’s small addictions, small decisions that we make every single day. Those decisions, you can choose to stop them or to continue them, to start new decisions. There’s one last thing I want to read that Joshua read at the end of the book of Joshua. Uh, he said, now fear the Lord. This is Joshua 24:14. Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness.

Throw away the gods of your ancestors, the ones that they worship or to bring it home, forget about the cigarette or the drug or the alcohol, God serve the Lord. But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day, whom will you serve? Are you going to serve the gods of your ancestors, the gods of your past?

Or are you gonna do as I’m doing? But as for me and my household We will serve the Lord So that’s a choice that we can make when we wake up and we decide who will we serve? I want you guys to all serve Jesus. I want you guys to all be my brothers in Christ. I want you guys to be able to leave here and saying you know what I have made bad decisions. But I’m not gonna let those decisions hold me back tomorrow can be another day.

And I can’t do it on my own, but I can ask God for some help. I know that this was a 2-part thing on, uh, Addiction and then becoming a God Addict. Last week we talked about Identity. Thank you for bearing with me. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.