Breaking Addiction

Matthew 10:39, "He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it."

My thoughts and prayers this morning were on the similarity of my current walk with God and breaking an addiction. Sounds a little bit crazy, but the addiction that is being broken is the addiction of self. This ever present, holy need to die to self. Yes I am an ego addict, and the pain of getting over the addiction is horrible at times.

I remember all to clearly breaking the addiction to nicotine. Day 1 was hard, day 2 was harder, day 3 - 11 absolutely impossible. I wanted to turn back every step of the way. I was meaner than a rattlesnake in the whole process. It was pure insanity.

This point of wanting to quit is where I am in today with this discovering God as Provider and Provision. It is insanity. It is impossible. It makes no sense to anything natural in me. My flesh, my humanity is kicking and screaming telling me to just stop. Stop ignoring my intellect, training, society, and education. I hear the voice of, everyone else does it that way, why can't you? And I seriously consider it.

Then I read T Austin-Sparks, he said, "We know, do we not, of many who will go just so far with the Lord and then they draw the line; some will go a little further but then they stop short, and it seems that very few, very few indeed, go right into the absolute oneness with Him in His Heart, His Mind, His Will: and He is seeking for those who will be of His own Spirit, who will go a little further than the rest, than perhaps the most advanced of all the others, a little further still, to take them into the innermost secret and suffering of His own Heart."

Followed by Oswald Chambers who said, "You may talk about the nobility of human nature, but there is something in human nature which will laugh in the face of every ideal you have. If you refuse to agree with the fact that there is vice and self-seeking, something downright spiteful and wrong in human beings, instead of reconciling yourself to it, when it strikes your life, you will compromise with it and say it is of no use to battle against it."

Into my mind pops 2 Peter 2:22, "... a dog returns to its own vomit, and a sow after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire."

After that I think I will quit thinking about quitting and press on.