How to Talk to an Addict

Isaiah 35:4-7; Psalm 146; James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37

About thirty years ago, I was a newly hired marketing engineer for Texas Instruments, working out of Johnson City, TN. My job often had me fly around the country to support the local salesmen with our line of industrial control computers. And to get home, I always had to change planes in either Pittsburgh or Charlotte. One evening, on the way back to Johnson City, I found myself stuck in Pittsburgh because of some bad weather or equipment problems. They put me up in an airport hotel, it was a Friday night about 8 pm, and so I called up my old college roommate Jordan who lived about a half hour away in Washington, PA. I had to catch my plane at about 6 am.

Jordan was watching the Twilight Zone TV episodes with his sister and another old college friend. He said that they’d be delighted to come over as soon as they finished the tape, which would be about another hour. And then we hung up and I sat down to wait, in a hotel on the edge of a city. And I waited. And I waited...As the night wore on, I entered…The Twilight Zone…

Now I had known that Jordan and Scott loved The Twilight Zone. But I hadn’t really realized just how addicted they were to that show until that night when I waited for three hours for them to finish watching several episodes on a video tape they had recorded, that they could have stopped at any moment! And so they finally showed up around midnight, we talked for a few minutes, and then I had to kick them out because I needed sleep before I flew home the next morning.

Addiction is a huge problem in our world today, and it isn’t just addiction to heroin or painkillers or alcohol. Addiction is anything which damages a person’s health or relationships because of an unhealthy need to perform the action, take the chemical, or otherwise get the physical or emotional high from that action or chemical.

And in today’s society, addiction usually means two things. First, that a person becomes financially poor. Many of our addictions today lead us to prefer the addiction to working or even to holding onto money. And secondly, because most addicts are financially poor, they receive a double-discrimination – they are discriminated against because they are addicts and because they are poor. And this starts a vicious cycle which keeps addicts poor – and the poor addicted.

In my life, I have known people who were addicted to various drugs, to alcohol, to various sexual thrills. I have also known people who were addicted to video game playing, to email-checking, to exercise, to chocolate, to coffee, and to food. Furthermore, I have known people who are addicted to thrill-seeking behavior, to gossip, to stirring up trouble, to negativity, and to back-biting.

In general, addictions are bad – both for us and for the people around us. Addictions are those things which we love more than God in our lives. They have become idols to us, which need to be fed, protected, and even worshiped. And this is the primary problem with being an addict – our addiction keeps us from being close to God. And therefore, addictions are sinful, because they keep us from approaching God.

Do you know an addict? Is that addiction harming them, is it harming you or other loved ones near the addict? If so, you’ve probably tried to talk with your addicted friend or relative about their addiction, and it hasn’t really worked. And so you may have given up.

Back in the early years of the 1900’s, two men in Akron, OH became friends because they shared an addiction to alcohol. Together, with help from others, they began to put their lives back together. And then, they began to put together Alcoholics Anonymous, the first Twelve-step Program to help people with an addiction. It is still the most successful program in the world. It has become the model for many other Twelve-step Programs that help addicts recover from addictions of all kinds. And AA is based upon helping addicts have a spiritual change, for it is only through a spiritual change that addiction can be handled.

Perhaps you know an addict who may need help, and you want to help. To understand how to talk to an addict, we must first understand why an addict is an addict. There are two common things which you hear when you listen to addicts talk.

First, there are the addicts who are attempting to avoid something painful. Perhaps they are avoiding their feeling of failure, perhaps they are avoiding physical pain. Perhaps the addict is trying to avoid certain frightening thoughts, perhaps some bad memories – we all know the stereotype of the veteran who drinks to avoid remembering the sights and sounds and smells of the battlefield. Still others try to avoid their tremendously sad thoughts, their loss of their loved one through death or divorce, their diagnosis of a terminal illness. They are avoiding a slow death because they have emotional holes in their hearts, and they try to fill that hole with their video game playing, their Facebook postings, their gossip, their drinks, their heroin. And for a little while, they avoid thinking.

On the other hand, there are the addicts who are looking for life and feel like they get it when they get a high from the cocaine, from the whiskey, from winning the videogame match. It is no accident that many addicts feel like dancing when they are happy and high. Exercise addicts live a bit when the “runner’s high” kicks in and gossip addicts feel good when their friends laugh at a particularly good “put-down” where they insulted a mutual friend who wasn’t there to defend herself. Coffee addicts live when the coffee picks them up in the morning and they feel alive for an hour or two, and food addicts feel great at 9 pm when they have that big bowl of chocolate ice cream. There is an emotional high that their addiction gives them and they feel alive for a little while.

But when you look at both types of addicts, you see that they are really both filling the emotional holes in their hearts – the one uses the addiction to pile a nice soft mound of dreaminess over the hole, and the other one uses the addition to jump up out of the hole for a few minutes. But for both types of addicts, the hole in their heart is there, waiting for something to fill it. There is a hopelessness, a desperation, a tremendous need that fills the addict’s every waking existence, for that hole is so very demanding and needy and commanding. We bleed out through the holes in our hearts and so we try to stuff something, anything into that hole to stop the pain, the bleeding, the emptiness.

And this is a hole in our hearts that we are born with, for we all start with a dead spot in our hearts, a dead spot called “sin”, a dead spot that feels like that hole and becomes that hole. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans, chapter 5 that “sin entered the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people…” He continues to explain that sin puts us into a master-slave relationship to that sin - and we are the slaves.

And therefore, the root problem of addiction is the slavery to sin that is the root of all human problems. In God’s eyes, there is no significant difference between the man who is addicted to heroin and the woman who is addicted to gossip. Both are hurting themselves and others with their addiction, and both are outside of God’s will. After all, the root meaning of the word “sin” is “outside” or “without”. Outside God's will. Without God.

And so before we talk to any addict, we must recognize that each of us has had certain addictions that have held onto us from time to time, each of us has been a slave to sin. And the only cure for a slavery to sin is to surrender your life to Jesus Christ and let Him fill that dead spot in your heart with the permanent life of the Holy Spirit. For not having the Holy Spirit is the real problem.

When we left the Garden because of Adam’s sin, in every heart a particular spot that had been filled with life went dead, because we no longer walked with God every day. And our children inherited that dead spot. And that dead spot is exactly the size and the shape of the Holy Spirit, and this is why every Twelve Step Program includes God explicitly in six of those steps.

So when you need to talk to an addict, recognize that it is more or less the same as talking to someone about Christ.

An addict will not change unless they recognize to begin with that they are powerless over their addiction and that the addiction has made their lives unmanageable. Some people call this “hitting bottom”, and it is the first step of recovery. Hitting bottom is a good thing, for it is only with that understanding of our lack of power that we will truly ask for real help from the One who can truly help us.

Perhaps the biggest thing that prevents people from recognizing their powerlessness are their friends and loved ones who give them far too much help with their addictions and keep them from recognizing their powerlessness, who rescue them from the consequences of their addictions, who make the phone calls to tell the boss they are sick, who buy the next video game, who pay the bills for the drugs, who cook the high-calorie meals or who pay the credit card bills for the clothes. If you have been helping an addict, you have to stop so they can face the consequences of their addiction and ask for help. For it is only when they admit their addiction that recovery can begin. And so if you have a friend who is addicted, the best way you can help that addict is to stop rescuing them! Your in-action is what they need – not your action! You can't help an addiction through action - only through inaction.

It is not until the second and third steps that you can help an addict through your actions and words.

For the second step is for the addict to come to believe that God could help them. You need to reassure them of God’s almighty power – after all, look what Jesus and God have done for you!

And when they believe that God can help them, help them decide to turn over their will and their lives to the care of Jesus Christ, following Him as their leader and master INSTEAD OF their addiction, which is what they were following.

It is at that point that you will begin to see an improvement in the addict. It is at that point that they may want to join a twelve-step program such as AA or Narcotics Anonymous, or Weight-watchers or Celebrate Recovery! or any of the other specialized groups that have arisen to support addicts. It is at that point that a person is willing to find a church and attend that church regularly.

And it is important when you are talking to an addict that you remind them – and yourself – of this one very important point. Everyone who follows Christ had to make the same choice, to give up an addiction to sin in order to follow Jesus Christ and His way, the way that leads from death to life. Everyone here was once an addict, even those who were baptized at birth, and so no one should boast except in the power of Jesus Christ to save us from sin and death.

Amen?