Part of the psychology of addiction is that an addict cannot imagine a different existence for himself. The problem is not simply one of despair; it is one of dependency. The insightful writer Gabor Mate defines addiction as follows: ‘any repeated behavior, substance related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others.’ The word compelled is of particular interest here. Addictive behavior is driven by a sense of need.
The addict sincerely believes that he cannot cope without a particular substance or behavior. The above paragraph could be rewritten substituting the word sin for addiction. Both are subject to the same lie. Sin desires to drive us into a posture of submission and dependency. It wants us to believe that if we stopped a specific behavior, then we would no longer be able to endure life.
This, of course, is deception of the worst kind. Living water is not found in porn, or drunkenness, or binge eating, or self-harm. It is found in Jesus, the fountain of eternal life. Threatened by the fear that we will die of thirst without our secret sin, we need to hear afresh the invitation of Christ: ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’ (John 7:37-38). It is only Christ that can bring deep and enduring satisfaction to our souls. Any voice that suggests otherwise needs to be identified as a puppet of Satan and resisted with the vigilance that Odysseus resisted the Sirens on his journey back to Ithaca.