Healing

Today's youth are dropping like flies from drug overdoses. It' become a national crisis! Parents of those who died from drug overdoses demanded something be done. So program after program is created. Authorities are going after drug dealers. The Pennsylvania Attorney General is now sicking lawyers on manufacturers and distributors of prescription opioids.  

All the King's horses and all the King's men are addressing every reason for this epidemic except for the drug abuser!  

The idea of going after others instead of those who abuse substances, themselves, and society goes back to prohibition, when Eliott Ness and his Untouchables went after bootleggers. After wasting tons of money going after suppliers, the government realized that the alcohol abuse problem that ten percent of the population has is not going to be resolved by not letting anyone drink alcohol. 

Proverbs 23: 29-35 

Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaints? Who has needless bruises? Who has bloodshot eyes?  

Those who linger over wine, who go to sample bowls of mixed wine.  

Do not gaze at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup, when it goes down smoothly!  

In the end it bites like a snake and poisons like a viper.  

Your eyes will see strange sights, and your mind will imagine confusing things.  

You will be like one sleeping on the high seas, lying on top of the rigging.  

“They hit me,” you will say, “but I’m not hurt! They beat me, but I don’t feel it! When will I wake up so I can find another drink?”  

Instead of trying to stop the supply, after prohibition efforts were made to help individual drunks break their bad habit, a besetting sin. Before the well-known Alcoholics Anonymous was formed, what was known as The Oxford Group was formed by a Christian missionary. The church then got involved, as it should, to help people break the chains of addiction and restore them to the way God intended them to be. 

The same principles that apply to treating alcohol abuse apply to drug abuse. This is why Biblical based treatment programs like the national program Celebrate Recovery were created. 

To fight drug abuse, besides the lawyers, authorities in Pennsylvania are calling out all the shrinks. I can hear a loudspeaker "CALLING ALL SHRINKS, CALLING ALL SHRINKS. BE ON THE LOOKOUT..." 

Even as far back as 1931, it was discovered that the shrinks can’t adequately resolve addiction problems. A business executive was treated by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung for alcoholism for a year, but then went back to the bottle. Dr. Jung told him that he may be a hopeless case and that his only hope may be a spiritual conversion with a religious group. And he did, and he overcame his life destroying problem. 

Today the problem of drug and alcohol abuse and other besetting sins cannot be resolved by hunting down drug dealers, suing legal opioid based drug manufactures – soaking them the way Slick Willy Clinton and his trial lawyers went after the tobacco industry – by calling all shrinks, or by creating programs in the schools to protect snowflakes.  

Blame shifting and scapegoats don't cut it. 

Here’s a folk song about blaming others: 

“I went to my psychiatrist to be psychoanalyzed 

To find out why I killed the cat and blacked my husband’s eyes. 

He laid me on a downy couch to see what he could find, 

And here is what he dredged up from my subconscious mind: 

When I was one, my mommie hid my dolly in a trunk, 

And so it follows naturally that I am always drunk. 

When I was two, I saw my father kiss the maid one day, 

And that is why I suffer now from kleptomania. 

At three, I had the feeling of ambivalence toward my brothers, 

And so it follows naturally I poison all my lovers. 

But I am happy; now I’ve learned the lesson this has taught; 

That everything I do that’s wrong is someone else’s fault.” 

-from gospelway.com 

Only by taking responsibility for your actions and by submitting to God and to Biblical counsel will you overcome your besetting sins. 

2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”