Addiction

Recognizing an addiction is the first step toward curing it. Seeking freedom from addiction is to admit that the object of the addiction has left us powerless. We need to submit to a power greater than ourselves to restore sanity.
Israel was set up to be a nation of priests to the whole world. Yet they, through their weakness toward sin, could not complete that mission on its own. The Israelites rejected the prophets, set up corrupt kings who allowed idol worship in the Promised Land, and traded their mission for worldly and material power rather than trust in the Lord. They went into exile and repented, and returned — but only to go through the same process again and again.
The long history of the Israelites serves as an object lesson to this basic truth, and to another: we are, as part of our nature, addicted to sin. It’s not just an addiction to material pleasures, but also to the sin of arrogance, that we do not need the Lord, or that the Lord serves us rather than the other way around.
We are addicted to our own sense of ersatz godliness, (ersatz godliness is a substitute, of less quality, for God). This substitute for God blinds us, just like a laser pen beam across our eyes.
As a disciple of Christ, we are not perfect beings. But we must continue to pursue and embrace the teachings of Christ. We need to stay on that path, forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead – We need to:

1. Recognize our sinfulness and seek forgiveness for it.
2. Work to overcome it through faith in Christ.
3. We need to seek the righteousness of God – not self-righteousness.
4. We can only find it through faith in Christ.