Hi, I’m Jacob, a grateful, recovering sex addict. I’ve been sober for 7 months.
As I’ve told you in the past, I’ve been a Christian since my teen years. And some of you have judged me for saying that. “How can you call yourself a Christian when you are a sex addict?” I’ll deal with that in a future post, but today, I want to talk about deconstructing my faith.
When I came into the recovery journey, I was very self-righteous. I may have had a “struggle” with pornography (the term I used while deluding myself) but I was certainly no addict. And I was MUCH better than those other guys in that twelve step group. In fact, I would go for a couple of weeks to prove that I didn’t need to be there and then go back to normalcy.
However, things didn’t go that way. I quickly realized that I was just like every other guy in the group and that I belonged there. Little by little, my self-righteousness began to fade. It dawned on me that all of those things I did to “earn” God’s grace did not help me one bit in dealing with my addiction.
Little by little, the Spirit began to chip away at my self-righteousness – my attitude, my sense of superiority, my arrogance and my pride. Once that was gone, I was left with nothing of merit.
I hope some of you reading are saying “Well, duh!” at this point because you’re long since realized that you have nothing of worth to bring to God. But for me, all the many delusions of addiction merely encouraged my self-righteousness to try and hide the reality of addiction.
So, I went to church, taught a Bible class, preached occasionally and was even on the leadership board of my church for a while. I did all the right things and said all the right things, I regularly checked all the right boxes and was pretty good, all things considered.
In fact, the Lord was pretty lucky to have me. I had been in church since I was born. I was sprinkled as an infant in a reformed church and baptized as a teenager in an evangelical church. Talk about nailing it! I was about 60% good. So, I just needed Jesus to “top me off” with the other 40%.
When confronted with my addiction and starting to work the steps, I balked at Step One: “We admitted we were powerless over sex and love addiction…” Whaddaya mean “powerless”? I’m pretty good. I’ve got the Lord on my side. I can’t be powerless. See how hard I’m working? I’ll just try harder.
Except that I’ve been trying to stop my addictive behavior for decades. Time and again, I’ve sworn I would stop only to go back to it – sometimes only hours later.
So, all that “working for the Lord”, ticket-punching and (self) righteousness I had did me no good in battling addiction.
Little by little, slowly but surely, I came to realize that I really didn’t have a real faith to hold onto. I believed in God, but I had a stronger belief in my ability to earn His love. So, my focus was on earning His love instead of living in His Light.
OK, I’ve written you a book but I haven’t gotten to deconstructing my faith. But maybe I’ve laid enough groundwork that you are ready to read “the rest of the story”. That will be my next post.
Blessings,
Jacob The Addict (jacobtheaddict@gmail.com)
Jacob The Addict 