This Week’s Blog is a section from Session 1 of our 10 Week Course.
Do you feel as if your life is out of control?
What is the first thought you had this morning? What’s the last one you had last night? Was it about your job? Your family? Your faith? Was it about the girl who sat opposite you on the train? Or the bottle of scotch in the cabinet, the next opportunity to smoke cannabis, the next time you are going to vomit
or spin the roulette wheel? Was it where to find the next bathroom to cut yourself? Were you thinking about the website you’ve been visiting or the app you just viewed? These could all be considered as thoughts of escape from a life that has become unmanageable and out of control. We could call them life-controlling thoughts.
Can you stop these thoughts? Have you tried, or even wanted, to stop them? Are they so much a part of your life that you cannot imagine living without them? If so they have a strong hold on you – to the point of slavery. These thoughts and desires have become your master and you have become their
slave. We’re going to look at someone in the Bible who you might not think had anything to do with enslaved thought patterns or life-controlling behaviours.
His name was Paul and he wrote this in the book of Galatians:
“For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how
intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it…”
GALATIANS CHAPTER 1 VERSE 13
When he looked back on his former life, Paul realised that he had been a slave to his desire to persecute the church. Today, we might even say that he was addicted to that desire to destroy the church. It was everything to him.
Only an act of God could release him from it, and only an act of God did – Jesus appeared to Paul as he was travelling to Damascus on his way to arrest Christians for their belief in Jesus.
Paul was a passionate man – as a Jew he was passionate for the Jewish faith, to the point of supervising the death of Christians like Stephen in the book of Acts chapter 7. Before he knew Jesus, his passions were like an enslaving life-controlling behaviour – his passion for Judaism clouded his judgement, and right and wrong had gone out of the window. As a Christian, Paul was so passionate in his love for Jesus that now he was the one being persecuted, imprisoned and eventually killed for his faith.
But as a Christian who knew that every one of his sins, past, present, and
future, were already forgiven, Paul still struggled with sin, just like you and I
do.
Paul said in Romans:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do,
but what I hate I do.”
ROMANS CHAPTER 7 VERSE 15
Does this sound like you? If so, you are not alone. Let’s unpack Paul’s life a little more. Paul said in Galatians:
“For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how
intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I
was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my
people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.”
GALATIANS CHAPTER 1 VERSE 13-14
What do you think Paul’s first thoughts were in the morning, before he was a Christian?
His thoughts would have been blinded by his passion for keeping Jewish traditions – you could even say it was an obsession. Before he knew Jesus, Paul was a slave to the Jewish law. His life was controlled by these thought patterns which took him to the point of murder. And we see him supervising the stoning of an early Christian, Stephen, in Acts chapter 7. You might ask:
• ‘What has this got to do with me?’
• ‘What has this got to do with life-controlling behaviours?’
Well, Paul’s thought patterns weren’t that different to a typical addict –Some of you have not yet come to the point of recognizing that there is a problem- obviously Paul didn’t. You are here because someone else has encouraged you or given you an ultimatum. They see a problem but you don’t. This indicates your denial. Denial can be defined as a refusal to admit truth or reality. It is a coping mechanism that those with life-controlling behaviours use. Denial leads to blame shifting and excuses to protect or explain our life-controlling behaviours. Denial can mean that we say, or think, things like:
• ‘The real problem is other people judging me’,
• ‘I could stop any time I want to, but I don’t want to’,
• ‘My family stresses me out. I need alcohol to relax and unwind’,
• ‘Life is so boring that I need stimulants!’
• ‘The law is wrong to say that this is illegal’.
Those of us with life-controlling behaviours are very good at covering up our problems from ourselves and from others. In fact, we can be so good at it that the only way we get the point of admitting our problem is when we hit rock bottom and see that we can no longer continue on this path – change has become more of a necessity than an option. This might be because a relationship finally collapses or the doctor tells you that you are going to die if you don’t stop or you end up in prison because of your life-controlling
behaviours.
At the end of Acts chapter 7 and the beginning of chapter 8, a young man called Saul, who would later call himself Paul, was oblivious to the fact that his actions were in any way against God. Saul supervised the stoning of Stephen and set out to destroy the church, causing immense pain and hurt to the new
Christian church. He was in complete denial that his actions were morally wrong. Isn’t this what we do, maybe not so dramatically? We say things like:
• ‘I really need a drink to calm me down’,
• ‘I’m only hurting myself, if I’m hurting anyone at all’
• ‘It’s my life, I can do what I like with it’.
Saul was an unlikely candidate for God’s recovery program. He had no idea that his persecution of the young Christian church was against God, who had created the law Saul so zealously protected. But when God rescued him he was transformed from Saul the persecutor to Paul the Apostle, the man who
would eventually die for the very message he had fought so hard against. That is the kind of transformation God has in mind for us.
Before he was a Christian, Paul had a religious life-controlling behaviour. His passion and obsession for religious purity was his master. He was controlled by his interpretation of the rules of his religion. As we’ve seen from his letter to the Romans, Paul deeply understood enslaved behaviours from personal
experience and knew how desperately easy it is to fall back into slavery to our old habits and behaviours, even when we think we’re free. He wrote in Galatians:
“Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those
who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God – or rather
are known by God – how is it that you are turning back to those
weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all
over again?”
GALATIANS CHAPTER 4 VERSE 8-9
It’s all too easy…
to turn to activities or substances to help us deal with our problems, but we discover the hard way that slavery to drugs, alcohol, sexual immorality, work or religious activities can never solve our problems. We can so easily become addicted, leading to much deeper and far-reaching problems.
As Paul writes, we see that he is passionate about Jesus Christ, and he doesn’t
want his readers to get entangled and enslaved in sin again. He writes in
Galatians:
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and
do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”
GALATIANS CHAPTER 5 VERSE 1
Are you feeling burdened by slavery to a life-controlling behaviour? Jesus
himself said in the gospel of Luke:
“That he had come to set the prisoner free and to release the
oppressed.”
LUKE CHAPTER 4 VERSE 18