God Loves Addicts, This I Know: God's Word and the Road to Recovery

God Loves Addicts, This I Know: God's Word and the Road to Recovery is an examination of both classic and modern recovery literature and the role that the Judeo-Christian Bible has played in their development, and particularly regarding how its teachings apply to those struggling with addiction in its many forms.

There is a common misconception regarding the term addiction in modern society, that it deals primarily, or even exclusively, with substances such as drugs and alcohol. While addiction certainly may include such things, it is hardly limited to them. Addiction in fact includes any person, activity, emotion, or way of thinking that someone turns to in an effort to make themselves complete, to fill some perceived void in their life. Any and all such efforts are doomed to failure, no matter how they may be disguised or how respectable they appear to polite society because they all violate the First Commandment's edict to have no other gods before the Lord. Further, anything that we place in a position of higher importance in our lives than our relationship with God is in fact an idol.

We do not think of careers, thriving children, a nice home, a flat stomach, new clothes, our reputation, or even our parents or spouses as idols, but when we find our sense of self-worth in them, we have in fact built an idol as surely as if we had carved it from stone with hammer and chisel. Each of us has an innate "hole in our soul," a need that we cannot meet in and of ourselves. The perceived void is in fact a spiritual need, and no person, no drug, no job, no drink, no feeling, no thing and no one, is capable of meeting it. It is only through the healing of our loving God that we can find the peaceful, joy-filled life that God intends for His children to enjoy.

Through the teachings in His Word, we find guidance to know how to live the life of happiness, joy, and freedom that He has in store for us. Twelve-Step programs have generally dealt with addictions to chemicals, though there has been an extension of them in both para-church and secular organizations into areas such as gambling, body image, anger management, food issues, sex, codependency, etc. This book goes a step further in identifying the root cause of all such addictions as a spiritual issue to which there is only one solution, a relationship with God as He has revealed Himself to us through His Word, His Son, and His Spirit.