Hi, friends. What or who is our greatest enemy in recovery and why I don’t call myself an addict? Read on!
1 Peter 5: 8-9 says:
"Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Stand firm against him, and be strong in your faith."
The devil is prowling around each of us, waiting for a chance to destroy us. He wants us to open the door to him, to crack open our lives so he can come in and devour us. It’s a warning we should heed.
We don’t want to live our lives afraid of that, but we should, especially as people in recovery, be aware and not forget it.
As a woman in long-term recovery, I have built years of sober muscle memory and good habits, and that is awesome. My daily life has nothing to do with the chains of addiction anymore. I don’t think about it (or I didn’t until I started this podcast). I don’t worry about it. It rarely crosses my mind. But I am always one bad decision away from going right back to where I was seven years ago. I have to, we have to, continue to make good choices, saying no thank you to the thing that bound us in the first place. We have to stay vigilant about our recovery, guarding it and protecting it against all attempts the devil will use to thwart us. He is our great enemy and will never stop trying to kill us.
Addiction often creeps in subtly. One day we are having a glass of wine with friends at lunch and the next we are waking up at 3 am with shaking hands. I’ve talked to so many people who say something like, “I don’t know how it got so bad so fast.” In my experience, addiction is like being on a roller coaster. We are inching our way up to the top, slowly but steadily. We keep moving up and then suddenly we are teetering on the precipice, knowing the fall is coming. Then bam…. There we go! Hurtling down and down, faster and faster, screaming and hanging on for dear life. I wish I had jumped off that ride before I got to the top, but I didn’t, and you probably didn’t either. We don’t have to get back on though. I’m definitely not interested in taking that roller coaster ride again. I spent far too many years riding that dang thing and I’m done!
Gratefully, we don’t have to do all this alone. God is right there with us. Peter encourages us to stand firm against the enemy, stay rooted in our faith. It’s an invitation to resist the pull of addiction through the strength of our belief in God.
The devil wants to steal your joy, break your heart and ruin every good thing in your life. His greatest desire is to come between you and the Father.
In John 10:10-15 Jesus says:
The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd sacrifices his life for the sheep. A hired hand will run when he sees a wolf coming. He will abandon the sheep because they don’t belong to him and he isn’t their shepherd. And so the wolf attacks them and scatters the flock. The hired hand runs away because he’s working only for the money and doesn’t really care about the sheep. I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me, just as my Father knows me and I know the Father. So I sacrifice my life for the sheep.
We are the sheep, and we need the Shepherd. The wolf will attack. He’s always looking for a way into the flock. But we have protection from Jesus.
In verse 3 Jesus says, “The sheep recognize his voice and come to him. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”
He calls his own sheep by name. Jesus knows us intimately. He understands us because he was fully human during his time on earth. He knows what it’s like to want and hurt and weep. He surely understands temptation. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights by the devil, who used everything he could to get Jesus to fall. But nothing worked. Jesus stood firm, calling on the scriptures to refute everything the devil said and finally ordering him away.
In Matthew 4: 10-11, Matthew writes: Get out of here, Satan, Jesus told him. For the scriptures say , You must worship the Lord your god and serve only him. Then the devil went away and angels came and took care of Jesus.
This is how we deal with the devil. Use the authority given to us by our relationship as children of God and order the devil away in the name of Jesus. The bible tell us that the evil ones trembles at the name of Jesus. Use it. Say it. When you feel weak or tempted, order the devil away from you in Jesus’s name. Tell him to GET OUT oF HERE! Get out. Call on the name of your shepherd, the one who knows you and loves you and wants to care for you forever. Call on the name of Jesus and order the devil to flee. He will. It works.
2 Chronicles 16:9 says The eyes of the lord search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.
We are not alone. We have the most powerful and loving Father on our side. The commander of the heavenly armies. The creator of the universe. The one in whom there is no darkness. The all-knowing, ever-present. The Great I Am. He searches for you, to strengthen you, to protect you. Commit to him with everything in you and watch what He does.
So now to the second part of today.
I never refer to myself as an addict, an alcoholic. I say I am in recovery. And I am. God, in his beautiful and tender mercy, recovered me from bondage. He lifted me out of the pit of addiction and set me on the road to a new life. Why would I want to claim that pit as part of my identity? I don’t. I have the disease of addiction. I always will. Just like if I were a type-one diabetic or left-handed. I will always have the disease of addiction, but it is not who I am. It is a tiny part of me and one that doesn’t take up much space anymore.
My identity is as a child of God, a lover of Jesus Christ, a believer in the resurrection. I’m a mom, a wife, a business owner, an entrepreneur, an author, a podcaster. I’m a person called by God to minister to those still bound in addiction. I’m a woman who is free from the chains that bound her for 20 years and I refuse to name myself anything related to those chains.
I will never name myself the thing that the devil tried to kill me with.
I am delivered from that. God recovered me and I will forever be in recovery. And that’s a very wonderful place to be. God lifted me out of the clutches of the devil and tucked me under His wing and there I remain and pray I always will.
You are not your addiction. You are not your disease. You are a child of God. A life restored. A person known by the Shepherd and loved by the creator of all things. You are loved. Never forget that. You are not an inconvenience to God. You are not forgotten or unseen. You matter. You are important.
In the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15, Jesus says, Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep. In the same way, there is more joy in heaven over one lost sinner who repents and returns to God than over ninety-nine others who are righteous and haven’t strayed away.
I was a lost sheep. I’m not anymore. Come home, friends. Heaven is waiting to rejoice over your return.
Have a wonderfully recovered day!
Susanne
