Until 8 months ago. I was addictred to cigarettes. I could not stop. I tried the trust God stuff. I tried the faith atuff, I tried this pill and that pill. nothing worked. I was told many times in my early days I did not trust God or I could quite and never think about it.
so tell me. I Started smoking when I went to bootcamp (both my parents were smokers as were my grand parents, in fact most the people I knew smoked. so I was an easy target, even being Gods child) and smoked as a christian for 32 years. Where did I fail?
I know what crossnote said and what he believes, I actually agree with him.
People have bessetting sin, They are wonderfully blessed and walk with God in mary areas of their lives. But they struggle with this ONE sin issue (actually we all struggle with more than one sin, but you get the point) so where did we go wrong? Did we lack faith?
Well I cannot definatley answer that question, but if I asked you something, would you reply honestly? Did you try and ''co-operate'' with God to stop smoking? In other words, did you wake up some mornings, once you had asked God to heal you of smoking and make every effort not to smoke, so you could have the healing? You may not have done, but that is the route I know most have tried to quit. Then they have lasted a few hours, gone through torture, given up and smoked again.
You were a slave to smoking, I was a slave to something too in my teenage years. I will tell you how my slavery was overcome.
As you know, I responded to an altar call at the age of ten and became a Christian. Due to heavy legalism by the time I was 15 I was in the same place Paul was at when he tried to attain Heaven as a Pharisee(Rom 7:7-11) I walked away from the faith crushed.
At the age of 19 grace found me, now I dared to believe I could be a Christian after all and recommitted my life to Christ for he was my righteousness. But there was a problem, I was a slave of masturbation. And I was as addicted to that as you were to smoking, believe me. I was its slave. But what to do about it? I wanted to be a Christian and knew it was sin to keep committing the act?
Well for the first time in my life I simply stood on a righteousness of faith in Christ. I was a Christian because he died for me, not because I strove to defeat sin.
For the next three days the masturbation continued, I made no effort of my own to cease the act, but I did do one thing totally different from my previous Christian experience. Every time I committed the act I looked to Jesus and trusted I was saved because he died for me. Now as you have suffered from legalism you can appreciate how hard that is for an ex legalist to do. My logical mind told me I was a hypocrite, faking my Christianity, I was viewing grace as a licence to sin and much more. But I didn't give in to those thoughts. The best way I can describe it as, is I threw logic and reasoning out of the window and simply stood by simply faith that Christ was my righteousness before the Father, I had none of my own. I would not this time let the sin condemn me. And I repeat, I made little if any effort to cease the masturbation myself.
On the fourth day, this sin which had made me its slave for six years stopped. Why? Because I stood on the basic truth of why Christ died at Calvary, no more.
Most of the time it is easy to instinctively feel we must co operate with God by trying to stop ourselves what we are a slave to. He will do it if we stand on the truth of the Gospel message. That is my experience anyway.
The thing is, when we try and co operate with God, we are too busy doing the co operating to be keeping our eyes on Jesus, that is what I also found
God Bless
