God wants us to appreciate pleasure and not become dependent on its gratification. God created pleasure for us to enjoy, not to exploit it. Addiction is enlavement to pleasure because it turns people to incessantly become consumed by it to the exclusion of other aspects of life. Addicts’ lives are positioned and organized to find ways to feed their addiction. I spent 9 years teaching the poorest of the poor in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Many of the people I met and taught were led to the eastside through addiction. Their lives became obsessed to finding ways to take drugs, alcohol and sex to fill the empty void in their lives. The result was slavery to the drug of choice to the point where things like personal hygene, eating food, work or safe shelter did not matter as much as injecting their drug daily. In Ephesians 5: 13-14 we find a clear teaching on this theme: “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh ; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Freedom in Christ
