Vietnamese Irish Nomad

Tim from Teen Challenge describes in a beautiful prayer who Jesus is.

Geoff: Let's take 15-20 minutes and do a, do a devotional. So I've asked Vin to share a little bit from God's work. And I'll give it over to Vin. Vin: Hey everybody, thanks for sticking around. Uh, thanks for the introduction, Geoff. Geoff: And let me, let me also say, we've got 12 pizzas showing up in just a little bit. Vin: Stick around for the 12 pizzas. My name is Vin. It's like Vin Diesel, or Vin number. When Geoff asked me to speak at a devotional for archery, Wow! What better, what better topic or what better timing for it to bring up the topic of sin? Sin is typically known in Christian circles as being, missing the mark. And in non-Christian circles, some people might find it to be a foreign concept entirely. Like what is sin? Why are you calling me a sinner? Well, we're told that from the moment we're born. We are to be considered sinners. We have missed the target. So whether we are Christian or not Christian, apparently we were all born as some sort of, an archer, if you will. But even if we're like little babies and stuff, we can't pick up a bow and arrow. We can't shoot for wherever the target is. What is the target? We don't even know where the target is or that there was a target. So, that's what I'm here today to talk about. Can you imagine being told that as you're going through life, you have missed the target? You have not hit the goal. There was a goal for your life put there by God and you've been missing it your entire life. That happened to me. It wasn't until the age of 38 years old. Just under eight years ago, that I found out I was a sinner. I found out that I have been missing the mark. I have been doing everything in my life to please myself. I have been hitting my own targets, but not knowing that there was another target put there from God for me to hit. But I haven't been anywhere near it. No where close to it. So, What is the mark? Well, the mark is God's desire for us. It's his righteousness. It's his righteous will for us. When he wants us to do his desire, he wants our wills to be in alignment with his will. So if I'm going around and I am taking aim, randomly at whatever is in front of me, but there is a specific target that I should be hitting or should be aiming for. But I'm not even aiming for it. I'm missing the mark. And for me, I discovered that the mark was very far away. We all have our own wills, our own desires, our own urges, our own cravings in life. And when I was growing up, I pursued every one of them for myself. I did what I thought was good in my own eyes. But I decided that my choices, my decisions in life have not led to a good outcome. I was not successful in my eyes. I was not happy with where I was at, with the choices that I've made. The decisions I've made in my life have brought me down. So I wondered to myself, is there a better way? Is there a better way to go through life? Is there a better goal that I should be having? Except....instead of just pursuing what I thought was right in my own eyes. And yes, there is. God's got a target for us. Every single one of us, whether we are Christian or not Christian, it's not the big blue part. It's not the white part here in the middle. It's the X and we're supposed to hit that X. Not just once, not just 1 out of 10 times, but every single time. So yeah, we can once in a while hit that mark. It's true. But how do we hit it every single time? This one right here, this, this, range is 18 meters, I believe. And I've been watching all of these young people shoot for the target. And I've been watching some of them hit it, and I've been watching their faces light up. And as their faces light up, I actually light up too. It's enjoyable for me to see them hit the target. I don't see any of their faces lighting up when they're missing the target. Some people completely miss the paper. Some people are in the blue, but if they're completely missing the target, they're not smiling when they come back. They're not smiling when they put their bow down. There's just this desire to hit that target. But some of us don't even know that God put a target there for each of us. We're supposed to hit the target that God put there for us. How do we even know where it's at? How do we even know as we go through life, that there's a better way? So we're supposed to align our desires and align God's desires so that they're the same. What I want should be what God wants. We should be equal and on par, but if there is a distance of 18 meters, that's here, but then in life, there's sometimes even a greater chasm than that. Sometimes the target could be behind me and I could be shooting in the wrong direction. And actually, I was shooting in the wrong direction most of my life. And I run into people.... I run an addiction recovery class. I've been doing it for 15 months now. And I run into people who, they have a particular way of doing things. They have this way of habitually doing the same thing over and over and over again. And they keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole. And their lives don't look good. I volunteer at a halfway house. I run into more people who have not done well for themselves. Their lives could be better. So, they need to have a different standard in their life. They need to have a different thing to shoot for. Something, a target that is not far away, but something that is attainable. But so far in their lives, they haven't been able to do it. So how do they do it? Well, This was a string that was given to me when I was training for the NASP basic archery instruction. It's to pretend like I had a bow string and I can draw it back. So as I draw it back, I can try to align my face down and look at the string and I can aim for the target. I could try to have my index finger near my mouth. And then when I release. I'm supposed to let it go back. And that's all the basic archery instruction. They teach you 11 steps for NASP. That's National Archery in the Schools Program. Behind me, there's 11 steps of shooting and you can go through it. There's the Stance, there's the Nock, there's the Hook and the Grip, there's the Set, there's the Setup, and number 6 says to Draw. So as we draw back on our bowstring, draw back on whatever it is, our, our selfish desires, we draw it closer. So we pull the string, we create tension, we're pulling it towards us. We're getting it all tensioned up. This could represent the things that we seek in life. This could represent the things that we seek to do for ourselves, not for anyone else, not for God, but for ourselves. But if we can draw this string back and try maybe reading scripture, try maybe in the privacy of our own homes to pray, try to do something different in our lives. Asking God for help, asking for guidance. God can draw us near to him. So even if the target that God set in my life behind me, and I was faced the wrong way as an infant, God will draw me to the target. Not so that it's 18 meters away, but that it can be right in front of me. And I should be able to hit that bullseye. Every single time. Every single time I should be able to hit the bullseye. But I haven't been, there's only one person who has ever been able to accomplish that. That's Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is, well, he's the archer that never misses. So even if we are non-Christians and we're saying we're going through life, I don't believe in this target stuff. I don't believe in this archery stuff. I don't believe in drawing a string back with my own selfish desires. I don't believe in God drawing me near to him. What you can understand is that when you miss the mark, it doesn't feel good. When you're aiming at something that you thought you put in front of your, your face. This, let's say you put your own target of something else in front and you've still missed the target. I can tell you that you have not found that to be pleasurable when you turn around and you put your bow down and you walk back, you're not happy that you missed the target. There's a Bible verse that says Romans 3:23 "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." So that mark that we're aiming for is the glory of God. It is God's will for us to aim right here to hit the bullseye, not just to hit the white part, but to hit the X. But in James 4:8, like I was saying. If I can draw near to God, drawing near to God by praying, drawing near to God by reading scripture, it says, "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you." And I'm looking at these bales over there. One, two, three, four, five, and they have wheels on them. And I was imagining maybe someone behind these bales, pushing the bale closer to me so that it is right in front of me. So even if it is right in front of me, I don't even need to draw back on a bow. I should be able to hit that X. Why do I still miss it? Because suddenly as I'm aiming for the X that's right in front of me, I see something up in the sky and my arrow flies up there. I see a squirrel to the side. My arrow flies over there. I'm constantly hit with distractions in life. Things that for just a brief second seem more appealing than what's right in front of me. These distractions can be overcome if I have my focus on God. These 11 steps of shooting, I personally think the first step should be find the target. Find the target. But we can't do it on our own. We have to ask God to put the target in front of us so we know what we're aiming for. So we know what the goal is. If we don't know what the goal is, we're just aimlessly shooting our arrows everywhere. We're not, we're not accomplishing anything. There's no satisfaction in our lives. And there's something that is empty within us, a hole within us that we're trying to fill and we go through life, trying to fill it. The people I run into, they're drug addicts, they're alcoholics. They're trying to fill it with things in their life that it just seems like it's an insatiable pit for them. They've never been able to fill that hole in their life. But when they start doing the will of God and their will aligns with God's will, there starts to be more satisfaction, more gratification in their lives. So it would be great if the distance between us and the target could be eliminated. I think that the person who would be moving one of those bales, the person that would move it on those wheels closer to me, would be Jesus Christ himself, the one who never missed. And he knows that we miss and he's trying to help us and we need to pray to him. We need to ask him to please help us out of the dark hole that we put ourselves into. Help us to have a better life. Help us to have a more gratifying, a more satisfying, a more, I'm hitting the bullseye every single time life. And yes, once in a while we'll look up when we see a bird, even though the target's right in front of us. Yes. Once in a while we'll shoot the arrow to the side, even though the target's right in front of us. But we are lucky as Christians to have that target in front of us. But the thing that I've noticed with other people is that they've never known a different way of doing things. And so it's one of the things in the Bible. It's the great commission that we're supposed to go forth and let other people know, know about this guy named Jesus, know that there's a gospel message, the good news, and we can share that with them. So they can start to get an idea of what is missing in their life. What is that cavernous space in their heart? That they need to fill. With what? With God. And that's the goal. So when we are sinners, when we sin, we're just missing the mark. It doesn't matter if I got really, really close to that X. If I miss it just a little bit. I'm categorized as someone who has missed the mark. Another word for missing the mark could be failure. I don't want to say to any one of these young people who have not hit the bullseye. Hey, it looks like you've failed again. That's terrible. That won't be uplifting whatsoever. But in God's eyes, when we're not hitting the mark, we have failed, but he's not saying that's a wrap. It's over. I'm done with you. He is trying to put that target on wheels. He is trying to angle it right in front of our faces so that we won't miss. He's doing everything in his power. So we get the opportunity to hit that bullseye so that we don't have to try too hard, but it takes practice. There's, there's 11 more steps there. And if you add the step that I said, identify the target, there's 12 steps there. And we got to do that every single time that we're going to notch—nock— an arrow and shoot it. So every single time we're practicing more and more, I was watching in this lane here on the first bail, there was two young guys shooting and they weren't doing so hot. The first few rounds. But when they practiced more and more, they started getting closer and closer. So for each of us, as we practice hitting the bullseye, we get better and better. And it takes less effort. It becomes like second nature. I've been in here on Tuesdays when there's another gentleman here who he's always in this lane and he is almost always hitting the bullseye, but he's here every single day and he's practicing hour after hour after hour. It would be beautiful if Christians could do that. It would be amazing if we went in and just practiced being good followers of God every single day. But we get distracted, and we seek what is desirable to ourselves, not realizing that the greater prize is to please our Father in Heaven. The greater prize is not just to hit the bullseye, but knowing that once we do what our Father in Heaven asks us to do, He's going to have a pizza party. Aren't we going to have some pizza here soon? He's going to take us out to ice cream. It's not just about, Oh, okay. I have a little warm and fuzzy feeling here because I hit the X. There's a prize. We get rewards in heaven. So I want everyone here to realize that whether you wanted to be an archer or not, or you thought you were just taking your child here to practice archery. Each and every single one of us have a target in our lives that we have to hit. And if we don't hit that target, we feel bad about it and we need practice and we need prayer and we need to read scripture and we need Jesus to put that target in front of us because we will never hit the target if we don't even know where it's at. We need Jesus to put the target right in front of us and we'll still miss it. But we'll miss it less. Anyways, I smell pizza. Thank you all for listening. I do appreciate it. If you have any questions even about addiction recovery, that's that's actually my specialty, just come and find me afterwards.

Jonesing for Jesus: [Part 2] Become a GOD-ADDICT! Turning our Sin Addiction into a God Addiction We have a NEST, Nature—Sin nature or saved nature? "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" Romans 3:23 Eternal—Damnation or salvation? "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 6:23 Servant—Do we serve God or Satan? “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16 Trust—Do we trust in the world or the Creator? "but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:8 We need an EGG, Enemy—Identify who this is. You can make an enemy of God or you can make an enemy of the devil. Whoever your enemy is, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.” Proverbs 24:17 Glorify—You can glorify yourself or you can glorify God. It’s your decision. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, wholly and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Romans 12:1 God— We need a god in our life. We can be gods over our own lives, or we can have little “g” gods that, I call idols, rule over our lives…or we can have the big “G” God rule over our lives. The God of all creation. “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good. Psalm 14:1 COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT: I like to pray. Yeah. Do you guys mind if we pray? No problem. Alright. Dear Lord Jesus Christ, Please, Please bless the words that come out of my mouth. Let it enter into the ears of every man here. Let it affect their hearts, because if you want to affect a man's life, you can affect their hearts, and it will change their lives. So God, please let these words be meaningful to those who hear it. Please let me be guided by the Spirit. And all that I say so that these men can leave here richer, having heard what I said, and being able to be reflections of Christ in their life towards everyone that they meet once they leave these doors. In your precious name, we pray, Jesus Christ, amen. Hey guys, I, uh, yeah, Mike said, uh, he invited me over here and I didn't think I was going to stay a couple of years ago. So....the food. Food got me. I kept coming back for the food. But, no, I remember meeting Jake. He was a great guy. I remember meeting other people, too. And, it's the relationships that we build that cause us to keep wanting to come back and, and nurture that relationship with one another. If we had negative or unhealthy relationships that would drag us down, then we would probably want to avoid those. But in this room, these are people I feel that Jesus has brought here to want to have a life change. To do better to hold themselves up to a higher standard. And I mentioned last week, God is the highest standard and we're supposed to hold ourselves to his standard. We are not just reflections of Jesus in our life towards others when we leave the door, but we are made in the image of God. I want to get into, Genesis really quick. It's the first verse, it says, "In the beginning, God, Made a decision...." Does it say that? No, it doesn't. It says, "created the heavens and the earth." But every time I read that, I was like, what made him do that? What made him decide to do that? What made him choose to create the heavens and the earth? He made a decision. He made a choice. Just like each of us do. We make choices in our lives. Choices that affect us positively. Choices that affect us negatively. And we pay the price of those choices by the consequences or the rewards that we get after we made those decisions. Those decisions follow us. I know that everyone says, become a Christian and you can start a new life. Well, you can, but it doesn't mean that your old life disappeared. It doesn't mean that you're still not paying consequences for the actions that you've had in the past. The things that we did wrong back then are still wrong today. The only thing that's changed is that now I believe in Jesus Christ, and now I have a heart change, and now moving forward from this day on, I will do things differently, but the past is still there. It didn't disappear, and that's important to know. So last week we covered having a nest. I want to quickly review Uh, what that means because I gave everyone a choice. The nest is an acrostic that stands for nature. Whether you want to have a sin nature or a saved nature. Uh, it also, the E stands for eternal. Do you want to choose eternal damnation or eternal salvation? Do you want to be a servant of God or do you want to serve Satan? That is the S of nest. The T stands for trust. Do we trust in the world or do we trust in the creator? There's Bible verses for each of those. We can go through that, but that's just one acrostic. Acrostic is, is a memory mnemonic. It helps you to remember, uh, certain things that are important in this case. I think. We can build a nest that positively can grow our lives in a good direction and a Godly direction to do what is righteous in God's eyes. But there's this difficulty that people run into where they might not recognize that there is a God. And I understand that for up until the age of 38 years old, I fought against there ever even being a God. I thought that, you know what? I was raised Buddhist, I will be reincarnated, there's this, this cycle of life, this wheel of life, and I will, uh, if I, if I do things good now, then, uh, maybe I'll get a better station in life the next time around, until I reach this nirvana. But who do I answer to? Who is it that I'm responsible to? And that's when Christ entered into my life and started to show me that, you know, there's changes that I can do here. And now I don't have to wait for another life, although we will get one as Christians, it's called the new creation life, but I don't have to wait for the next life to get rewards. We can get rewards here. If we change our life here, we can change our decisions here. The things that we do will affect all of those around us. I was told once that when I have a bad day in my house, my children have a bad day. My wife has a bad day. The people that she runs into has a bad day. The kids that my kids run into have a bad day because I had a bad day. Am I taking too much credit? I thought, nah, you can't give me that much credit. But I looked and I saw it and it was true. If I get really grumpy, if I get really so full of myself, I'm just seeing the world through the lens of my own eyes and seeing what is right in my own eyes and, and, and taking it out on my wife or snapping at my kid, they're going to take that out of the house and they're going to, they're going to interact with other people and the world becomes a little sadder, a little bit more bleak. So, it's easier to give a compliment than it is to give an insult. It's easier to be able to, to lift someone up in what's called exhortation, to give an encouraging word to someone than it is to tear them down and to rip them to pieces. But why don't we do that? Why isn't that the choice that we choose to do in life? It's easy, isn't it? We're selfish. We're just selfish. We need an EGG for our NEST. A nest egg. Now, again, you get choices. Uh, the E stands for enemy. Um, everyone has enemies in their, in their life. You need to identify what that enemy is. I hear people say that God is my enemy. Now, I used to kind of, I wish I could tell you that God's not your enemy. But then I was like, well, I'm happy that you believe that there's a God. Let's work with that. Let's work with the fact that you believe that there's a God. And yeah, you think he's your enemy. You think he's working against you. Let's, let's keep the conversation going. It's better than starting the conversation at someone who says, you know what? I don't believe that there's a God and I can't be affected by this. Okay. So, uh, there's a Bible verse with that. Uh, can someone choose to read it? I didn't read it loud. Uh, anyone raise their hand. Anyone. "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls. Let not your heart be glad when he stumbles." Proverbs 24:17 So, I love reading scripture, and I love to try to grasp the meaning of what's being said. Proverbs 24:17 says that when your enemy falls, don't, don't be happy about it. Haven't you ever Whether it be in the workplace or in your private life, someone has done something wrong against you, and then something later terrible happens to them, something bad happens to them, and you get, like, this personal joy inside? That's like according to this, that's not what we're supposed to feel. So what we're doing, when we're getting, like, this personal joy inside when someone else falls, that's sinful. We should still want to lift up our brothers, even if they against us, even if they are our enemies. And that goes against everything I was taught. Why would I want to help up this person off the ground when he just kicked me when I was on the ground, I want him to get what's coming to him. I can't speak for everyone in this room, but that's how I felt. And sometimes on a bad day, that's still how I feel. I can't say I don't, I'd be lying. So how can we let this verse affect us in our own hearts to change? So that way, when even our enemy wants something bad to happen to us, that we don't take joy in something bad happening to them. Well, let's play it out. How is it going to benefit us other than maybe a strange, morbid, fuzzy feeling inside to watch someone else go through trauma to watch someone else go through a crisis in their life, to watch someone else go through pain and hurt and suffering. And we take joy in that. How does that help us? Does that make us better people? So everyone knows about the Good Samaritan, right? If you don't, I'll tell you really quick. There's a story in the Bible about a dude who got beaten and left on the side of the road for dead. And there was, uh, a few people that should have stopped for him, but didn't. But a Samaritan, a Samaritan was thought of as, uh, they weren't the best of society. They were frowned upon. They were hated. They were despised, stopped and gave aid and took this person to, uh, get some lodging and fed him and, and, and nursed his wounds. And that was told by Jesus to, uh, explain to someone who is your neighbor. And I took that to mean that everyone's our neighbor, even our enemies, the Samaritan, the good Samaritan, it was a misnomer, a misnomer is something that's misnamed, it's not the Jewish person listening to the good Samaritan story, wouldn't think anything good or highly of a Samaritan. They were hated. Think of someone that you hate doing something good for someone else. And that's what this story was, was it was how it affected the people in the first century when it was first told. So we're to behave like that in our lives. We're to help someone when they've been beaten, help someone when no one else will, we're supposed to step up and be the helping hand. We're supposed to nurse them to health. We're supposed to pay for their lodging. It was a Jewish person that was beaten and they hate the Samaritans, but yet the Samaritan was giving him a helping hand. So that was a person who hated another person being helped by the person he hated. Do you think that was impactful for that person's life? When he made a full recovery. His wounds were nursed back to health, his lodging was paid for, his food was paid for, everything was paid for. Do you think he thought differently about Samaritans? That's what we're supposed to do. If we can truly actually do that, we would have less enemies in our lives. It is morbid to see someone beaten on the side of a road and leave them there for dead. It is morbid. It is not right. It is inhumane. I think it's pure evil. Even if you hate that person, you ought to give them a hand up. And that's what we're commanded to do. If you believe in scripture, we are to, uh, glorify either God or ourself. It's up to you. I say that we should glorify God. That's the next G there. E G glorify. It's your decision. Here's a Bible verse here. Can someone read Romans 12:1 and read it loud? Just read. "I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." Okay. So. Oftentimes we go through life and we're trying to get that new car for ourselves or get that new pad that we want to, uh, uh, hang out in, that new, uh, uh, condo, townhouse, whatever, apartment. We want things of this world that will glorify us. Or let's say we don't have a lot of money and we want things to, uh, uh, pat us on the back. We want to get credit for things. We want people to recognize what we've done and to give us credit, pat us on the back. But. We're not supposed to do that according to scripture. That's glorifying ourselves. What is a way that we can glorify God? What is glorifying God? What does what does it mean to glorify God? Lifting him up So when we lift up God above ourselves, we've recognized that he's a higher power above us and that we want to, to serve him. And what capacity do we want to serve him? Any capacity, because whatever he wants for us is good. There is nothing bad that God wants for us. If we say, Hey God, you got me, I'll do whatever you want, whatever. I can trust in God's characteristics that he will never ask me to do something bad. I can fully surrender to God. And by doing that, I can serve God and glorify God. Now there's other gods. I hinted at last week, these little G gods, lowercase G gods. And for me, I come from a background of addiction. I was addicted to methamphetamines. I was a chef in some beautiful kitchens. I went to school in Scottsdale. I trained very well just to get into these kitchens and cook fine dining for lots of people who loved my cooking. But I was addicted to drugs and every day I woke up, I couldn't wait for my next fix. And every day I said I would quit, I would quit for my family. I would quit for my wife. I would quit for whatever that reason is. Put a reason there. Yet I still went back and did that drug. There was nothing I could do of my own power to stop doing that drug. I got myself there, but I couldn't get myself out of there. It was hard. I was stuck. So. For a guy who didn't really believe in God, I heard about God. I was pretty indifferent to it. I did ask God for a sign and he did give me a sign. We covered that last week and that sign was powerful and it was so powerful. I had to step out of the way and let God do his work in my life. And to pull me out of the hole that I was in, I couldn't do it on my own. I was lucky. Not everybody has that experience where their cravings go away. My cravings went away. And people know what cravings are. My daughter knows what cravings are. She craves YouTube shorts. My wife knows what cravings are. She craves chocolate. My littlest daughter, she craves making her big sister angry. I don't get it because big sister will hit her and it hurts. But, there's things that we crave in this world that we're not satisfied until we get it. We're going to do it over and over and over again, habitually. We won't stop. We are creatures of habit because we are made in the image of God. And we do things over and over and over again. Does that mean that God is a person of habit? The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon comes up and it goes down. The, there's air. There's, there's, there's the butterflies. There's the flowers that come every season. You would almost say that if everything was created by God and everything seems to repeat itself, that God is a habitual being and we are made to have habits too. And those habits are the things that we crave in life. that we put into our hearts to take the place of what's really missing. And I'm going to say, I think what's really missing, and they, lots of pastors will say this is a God shaped hole in my chest. I'm missing God. Now, whether you believe in God or not, that's, that's your journey. That's your path. But for me, once I started putting in my heart, God, I started. Not craving the things of this world. I started wanting to please God. I started waking up instead of going for that morning cigarette for that morning cup of coffee. Those are addictions too. I went for scripture and I would read the Bible so I replaced one addiction for another addiction. There's good addictions. Not all addictions are bad. I'm addicted to telling my wife she's beautiful every morning. I'm addicted to giving my daughter hugs. I'm addicted to whatever it is that I habitually do. I chose to make it more positive in my life instead of pulling out a glass pipe and worshiping some other demonic god. I want to worship God, the Father in heaven, so that when, when I do things for him, not, not for rewards, life gets better. Haven't you ever, haven't you ever gotten up in the morning and realized that because of some of the choices you made in life, there's no changing where you're at? You're in a deep, dark hole. For me. I thought that my life was over. I thought that there was no way forward. There was no path to victory where I was still married and my kid loved me. It was an end game for me. When I finally cried out to God, help me, save me, pull me out of this ditch thinking, you know what? He's not going to listen, but he did. And when he did that, I was finally changed in my heart. I finally started wanting to read the Bible. And I finally started to want to know who is this God. And then as I learned who God was, I started to learn about who Jesus was. And then I started to want to tell other people about it too. Have you heard about this guy, Jesus? And in Christian circles, they start chuckling and start laughing. Yeah, we've heard of him, but then I've heard other people. They're like, I don't want to hear it. And they get really hostile. They're like, you know what? I'm, I'm fine with my own friends. I'm fine with the way that my life is going right now. I'm okay with where I'm at. Well, I don't know. I like to talk to those people and say, well, what are you addicted to? Do you let your addictions rule over your life? Do you submit to your addictions when it says, feed me? Do you light up that cigarette? Do you look for that pipe? Do you run to the store to get a carton of smokes? Whatever your addiction is. Who is the master and who is the slave? I don't mind being a slave if I have a good master. Because every time I said I was master, I made some pretty bad choices. I don't mind following someone else who knows what they're doing. I don't mind following someone else who has my best interest in mind. Actually, I've had bosses in my life who have looked out for me, who have taken me under their wing, who have showed me the ropes, showed me how to succeed. Not because it was going to benefit them. Although if I did really well, it would benefit them. We'd make more sales or whatever. We'd get more customers. But the thing is, it is a beautiful feeling inside to know that someone, for the most part, not selfishly, is taking you under their wing and showing you how to do good. How to make choices in life that won't negatively affect you and follow you for the rest of your life. Choices in life that, that make you feel good to go home. That make you like, you know what? I didn't just kick that guy on the side of the road that I saw laying there. Cause I hate him. I helped him up. I nursed him back to health. I gave him some money. I paid for his hotel. We can do those things. Those are the choices that we make in life. Those are the decisions that we make. Every single day we make decisions in our life and those decisions follow us. We can choose to do good versus choosing to do what is wrong. We need a God in our life. That's the last G. So for this EGG that we're putting in our NEST, we need God. Now I've mentioned the little "g" gods, the lowercase "g" gods. You can have those. Everyone does, but those are idols. I call them idols. They aren't intelligent enough to take care of a human being. God created human beings. We are made in the image of God and he did put an addictive nature within us. He wanted us to be addicted to him. The entire point of what I'm talking about is knowing that each one of us has some sort of addiction, whatever it is, you can keep it private. That's fine. But we have an addiction in life that will, will either destroy us or make us better. Addictions in their nature aren't bad. It's what you choose to be addicted to that can destroy you. If you choose to be addicted to drugs, if you choose to be addicted to anger, if you choose to be addicted to pornography, whatever you choose to be addicted to, that's negative, it can destroy you and kill you. And you will receive eternal damnation for that. But if you choose to be addicted to God and you choose to open up the Bible, when you wake up first thing in the morning, you choose to get down on your knees and pray until you do have calluses on your knees. It's an amazing thing. It's something to show off. It's like a wound, like a scar. Look at the scar I got here. Look at my calluses on my knees. I pray every day. Thank you God for the next breath that I take. Thank you God that my eyes are open. Thank you God that I'm not dead. Thank you God that my daughter doesn't hate me anymore, that she comes up to me and she hugs me and she loves me. Thank you God for my wife who didn't divorce me, who didn't leave me. Thank you God for 22 years of marriage. So when God can do these powerful things in my life, what did I have to do to get it? I had to submit. I had to submit to God because I was tired of submitting to these lower addictions. I was tired of submitting to these lower idols. I was tired of submitting to things that didn't know how to take care of a human being. I wanted to submit to someone who would take care of me in my life. Someone who had my best interest in mind. I wanted to submit to the creator of me. The one who knows how I function knows how I work. The one who truly does have my best interest in mind. I wanted to submit to God, big G, God, the father in heaven. We all make choices in our life that follow us. Sometimes even after you get out of this program, someone might call you. Are you going to answer the phone? This is an old contact. You used to do drugs together. Are you going to answer the phone? Oh yeah, he's a good, good buddy. We won't do drugs. He knows I'm on the mend. He knows I'm on the wagon. I don't know if that's a good choice. But you do. You do. And you'll know if those choices will follow you. And you'll know if those choices will cause you to stumble. I've known people that said, you know what, I'm only dealing drugs because I want to preach the gospel to the people who really need to hear it. That is, that is, that is evil. I have not heard that once or twice. I've heard that multiple times on the street. I go out and I feed the homeless twice a week and I talk to people who know better scripture than I do. They're quoting scripture like, like they just got out of seminary and they got pockmarks all over their skin and they're telling me about Jesus Christ and they're like, yeah, he saved my life. And then he's got a backpack full of drugs and he's dealing to everybody on that street corner. And he's asking me for a bag of food. And he's asking me can I pray over him. But those people, they don't have your best interest in mind. So if you're thinking of picking up the phone when someone calls you, remember, these are choices that you make every single day that will affect you for the next day, for the next week, for the next month, for the next year. And those choices will follow you until you choose to break that bad decision making. If you choose to actually say, you know what? I am tired of ending up in jail. I am tired of, of, of my daughter not picking up the phone. I am tired of my wife screaming at me. I'm tired of not seeing my family at all anymore because they won't, I don't even know where they're at. I'm tired of this hell hole. I put myself into, I want a different life for myself. I want to serve someone who can take care of me. I'm a human being. I want to serve the God who created me because he knows how I work. It's okay to be an addict to God. It's okay to want to wake up and you just can't wait to read scripture. It's okay to just want to pray. I used to find it difficult to pray for more than five minutes. I actually had to Google how to pray. I was like, how do people do it for like 10 minutes? I could pray a good hour easy now. God listens to our prayers You don't need someone to pray for you. It's helpful. Scripture says in James 5:16 confess your sins to one another and Pray for one another So that your sins may be healed They're talking about your sins as if it's a freaking injury! So that your sins may be HEALED. We can pray for one another. We can affect one another through this prayer because God answers prayers. We can form a relationship with our God in heaven and we can start to understand that God loves us and he pursues us and he sends people in our lives daily to pull us out of the muck and the grime and the muddy messes that we put ourselves into. God, is here to save us. So now that you know that we can have positive addictions, I want to ask you guys, moving forward into the future, what do you want to crave for yourselves when you wake up in the morning? Just know that God did not mistakenly give us the ability to be addicted. He purposely made us addicts. It's in us. I just recently got over an addiction to, uh, breakfast sandwiches at Wendy's. It was, it was, it was adding up. But they kept giving me coupons, but I woke up one day and I said, I'm not going to do that anymore. I was doing it every single day. Seriously, for a week. And I was like, I'm going to stop this. There's small addictions, small decisions that we make every single day. Those decisions, you can choose to stop them or to continue them, to start new decisions. There's one last thing I want to read that Joshua read at the end of the book of Joshua. Uh, he said, now fear the Lord. This is Joshua 24:14. Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods of your ancestors, the ones that they worship or to bring it home, forget about the cigarette or the drug or the alcohol, God serve the Lord. But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day, whom will you serve? Are you going to serve the gods of your ancestors, the gods of your past? Or are you gonna do as I'm doing? But as for me and my household We will serve the Lord So that's a choice that we can make when we wake up and we decide who will we serve? I want you guys to all serve Jesus. I want you guys to all be my brothers in Christ. I want you guys to be able to leave here and saying you know what I have made bad decisions. But I'm not gonna let those decisions hold me back tomorrow can be another day. And I can't do it on my own, but I can ask God for some help. I know that this was a 2-part thing on, uh, Addiction and then becoming a God Addict. Last week we talked about Identity. Thank you for bearing with me. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

This is a presentation made at the Sunnyslope House of Refuge in Phoenix, AZ on March 1, 2024. This is Part 1 of 2 and is about Identity. I go over the acrostic word NEST to show that the nest that we build for ourselves in our lives will always be built around our identity. NEST means: Nature, live with a sin nature or saved nature? Eternity, are we eternally saved or damned? Servant, do we serve God or Satan? Trust, do we trust in the world or do we trust in the Creator? FULL TRANSCRIPT:  MIKE BAKER: And he's a teacher, but, ...., Vin, you've been coming here how many years now? VIN: It's been coming on two years now. Two years. MIKE BAKER: Yeah. And, ...., Vin's got a, I'm gonna let him explain what his background is and so forth, but tonight he's, we're gonna talk about, ...., you've got a pass out there that has been given to you and so forth. So, let's pay attention. What I'd like you guys to do, put your cell phones in your pocket, please. Make sure they're turned off. And Jake, don't call anybody, okay? Ha ha ha ha. VIN: Alright. Well, I would like to open in prayer if that's cool with you guys. Alright. Dear Lord, Jesus Christ, thank you for bringing all these men together here this evening. Please bless the words that come out of my mouth. Let it enter into their ears, and let it affect their hearts. So that when they leave this room this evening they will, have a heart change that will reflect Jesus Christ in their life towards others. We love you, Jesus, and we thank you for dying on the cross. And we thank you for loving us. And because you loved us, we now love our brothers and we're going to go out there and we're going to try to serve one another and by serving one another, we truly start to understand what it means to be a Christ follower. In your name we pray, Amen. MIKE BAKER: Introduction. This is Vin McReynolds. VIN: So, it's a 2-part lesson. You get to see me tonight, and you guys get to see me next Thursday. The title of this lesson is going to be called Jonesing for Jesus. This is Part 1. I'm going to be talking about identity. So, if I'm going to be talking about identity, I probably need to introduce who I am. My name is Vin. It's short for Vin Diesel. And I'm half Vietnamese. I'm half Irish. That's my identity. That's how I introduce myself to other people. I'm the guy with blue shades most of the time, but it's getting dark outside. I'll take them off. I'll let you guys see my eyes. Yeah, most people don't get to. I identify as a Christ follower. So, not everyone in this room can do that, not everyone in this room will do that, but there are those of us in here who can also identify as being a Christ follower. And that's what we're talking about tonight. So, when I first became Christian, I called Jesus my Lord, my master. I was a slave to Christ in a good way, a willing slave. I chose to serve him with all my being. I wanted to do anything to please him and that fire never got extinguished. That was seven and a half years ago, but before I made that decision, before I re identified myself as being a Christ follower, I was a drug addict. I was verbally abusive to my wife. I was verbally abusive, emotionally abusive to my daughter. They both hated me. I was a chef in a kitchen that, ...., brought me away from the house 16 hours a day. I was happy. I identified whenever I introduced myself, I'm a chef. It's something I was proud of, even though my home life was falling apart. So, between the drugs and my wife and my daughter and everything, ...., falling apart in my life, I hit my rock bottom. And rock bottom for everyone is different. Rock bottom for me, personally, is just when I stopped digging. I hit my rock bottom. So, now, I teach addiction recovery classes. It was actually because of Ron. Everybody knows Ron. ...., I came here a couple of years ago and he's talking about this thing called Celebrate Recovery. And I'm like, what the heck is that? You know? And, it has to do with, ...., Christians coming together in fellowship. And non Christians too. Coming together and learning about a man named Jesus. And, how this person, Jesus, is also God. In the flesh. And how he can help us get through our hurts and our habits and our hangups. He can give us freedom from that. So, I was interested. I was hooked. I was like, what is this all about? Cause I have a funny story when I was addicted to drugs. My funny story is I thought everyone who became a Christ follower suddenly got over their drug addiction. Suddenly no longer had cravings. Cause that's how it was for me. I was like, wow, I should have became a Christ follower a long time ago. But then I started seeing other people who were Christian. Struggling, having cravings, having desires to do cigarettes, to do alcohol, to do all of these drugs that just hurt them and tear them to pieces and drop them below the standards that God wants us to reach for, because God is the highest standard. So talking to Ron, learning about Celebrate Recovery, learning about this guy named John Baker and how he came up with a 12-step program that was Christ-centered and had Biblical comparisons, but he also had Eight Principles that were based off of a Beatitudes. And those Eight Principles, if you don't know what the Beatitudes is, it's in the New Testament, it's in the Gospel of Matthew. Really cool stuff. It's a short read. ...., but it has to do with things that we're not used to doing. Things that, if you are a part of this world, you wouldn't normally think made sense. To love, love people that you wouldn't normally love. To call the weak strong. All of these things are foreign concepts, especially to me, a non-Christian. I told you I was half Vietnamese and half Irish. My Vietnamese mother raised me Buddhist. I, I was all about reincarnation. If I ever wanted to do something bad in my life, knowing that, you know, it could come back to me later, because there's some form of karma also in the Buddhist religion. Hey, you know what? Maybe my next life will deal with that. Maybe I can do this wrong thing today and my next life will have to deal with the consequences. But that didn't seem real to me. That seemed kind of fake. I needed something that could help dig me out of a hole that could help me in this life, not the next life. And that's when I looked at the sky and I was like, God, can you help me? And he gave me a sign. He gave me a sign that I couldn't ignore. He gave me a sign that I had to listen to. He gave me a sign that moved me to change, to become a new person in my life, to stop doing this sinful behavior, to stop doing this drug addict urges, these desires, these cravings that were just completely selfish and to want to be a better me, to want to be a better human being because I was not a very good person. You could watch my entire testimony. I made a 12 minute testimony on the website. I had to put the G in there. It's 4Given.me if you want to learn more about me. It's 12 minutes. I like to tell people because it's 12 minutes of your time. It's valuable. ...., I don't want you to hit play and be like, how long is this going to go for? It's just 12 minutes. So, Jonesing for Jesus, finding our identity in Christ is what I'm talking about tonight. And Before I found my identity in Christ, I had to believe that Christ was God. I had to believe that Jesus Christ, Son of God, was God incarnate. Incarnate, fancy word, for in the flesh. He was here with us. In Matthew, it says that Jesus was called Immanuel, which is God with us. And there was an angel that was talking to Mary that said, You're gonna have this kid, and you're gonna name this kid Immanuel, and You go through the gospel of Matthew, and they never called him Immanuel, ever. What's up with that? But one of the last verses in the Gospel of Matthew was Jesus himself Saying that I am with you. I am, which was a play on the name of God, which is Yahweh, with you. I am with you, which was the name Immanuel. So the very last verse in the Gospel of Matthew is I am with you. I think to the end of the age or something. So, once I came to the realization that God loves me, God sent his Son, his Son was God, and he came here to save me. I started having to wonder, what do I need saving from? I didn't ask to be saved. I'm hearing these people talking, these Christians around me, these Bible thumpers, talking about, ...., salvation and how some guy died for me. I didn't ask anybody to die for me. I didn't want anybody to die for me. So to make sense of it in my mind, it was like a, ...., a hero. Someone who sees that maybe a train's gonna hit you or a bus is gonna hit you and knocks you out of the way. And takes the impact upon themselves, maybe a secret service agent or something who would jump in front of a bullet for you. I didn't ask him to do that, but he did it for me. I didn't ask that person to save me from that bus that was going to plow into me and kill me. But yet that hero did that for me. So Jesus is a hero. He's a superhero. He saved me from eternal damnation. Where do I get all this from? It's in the Bible. There's Bibles in the center of each table here. When I first became a Christian, I was very curious. about this, this God. I never actually became, on the day I believed in God, a Christian. I became a God believer. Then I picked up the Bible to learn more about God. That's what the Bible does. It's a story about who God is. And I started in the beginning with Genesis, and I went all the way to Revelation, and I got addicted to it. There's that word, addiction. I work with a lot of people trying to recover from addiction. I chose to have a new addiction in my life. I became addicted to God. So as I identify in my life with who am I? I'm still trying to figure out who is God? And when I got to Matthew, and I started reading the New Testament, and I started hearing that they were going to put this guy on a cross, and they were going to hang him with, with nails in his arms, and his feet were nailed to this, this, this, this tree. I, I suffer from anxiety, and I closed the book. And I didn't touch it again for another week. I was just like, they couldn't have done that. They couldn't have done that. Later on, I remember, seven and a half years ago, I opened up the book and I'm like, I gotta see what happens. These guys can't have just killed Jesus. And then as I read more and it resonates and it hits me in my heart and I start to realize, you know what? This is real. This ain't fake. This is real. And it was one person's account of Jesus that affected me that first time. It was Matthew. Then you, there's four gospel accounts. There's Mark, Luke, and John. That's like, you know, someone witnessing a car accident and there's like four different witnesses. These are witnesses. To the life of Jesus. So then I would read these other testimonies and I would become affected by these other testimonies and it would still resonate and affect my heart. And once my heart was changed, my life was changed, and my life was changed into a new identity. So, having identified in the past as a drug user, as a chef, as a dude who wears blue shades, as some tough guy, as a guy whose wife hates him, has a daughter who doesn't want to be in the same room as him, I've now changed my identity. It's like working for a new company. You know, you work for Walmart or Walgreens or wherever you work. You know, you either hate your employer or you love your employer. You're either going to be good at your job or you're going to be terrible at your job. And you know when you're in a room by yourself and you're thinking to yourself, Who am I? Am I a good employee? Am I a bad employee? You know. I don't need to point fingers. You know if you're going to work hard for that company. You know if you believe in, in, in the employee handbook. If you love the, the, the system of rewards that that company gives you and you're going to work your butt off or you're going to slack off. You're only accountable to yourself and God if you believe in God. If you don't believe in God, you're only accountable to yourself. But the thing is, when we're accountable to ourself and we're making our own decisions, what happens when we make the wrong decisions? Are we going to experience the consequences in the next life? It doesn't matter. Nothing's going to affect me here. Not my problem. It affected that dude over there. It didn't affect me. My daughter hates me right here right now, but you know what? That's her deal. My wife hates me, but that's her deal. What's going to help us right here in this life? What's going to make us want to change? What's going to make us stand up and be men? Instead of just being tied down to cigarettes and drugs and whatever it is that we call master. Why can we call those things master of our life, but we can't call the God, the creator in heaven, master? So, once you find your identity, you can build your life around that identity. You can build your NEST. Once you build your NEST around your identity, I would prefer everyone in this room having identity focused around Christ. But if you can't do that, well, let's go through this. I made an acrostic. Anybody here go to Celebrate Recovery? Yeah, Sunday's here with Ron, it's kind of cool. Illuminate. Illuminate. Yeah, that's right. I cook for that. You know, I cook for that. How's the food? Food's good, right? That's right. Food's good. Go to Illuminate Church on Fridays at 6 p. m. I cook the food. I'm never there because I run a different Celebrate Recovery in Prescott Valley. Every Friday. I've been doing that for over a year. So once you do work like this, if you call it work, it becomes fun. You enjoy it. Sounds like, oh, wow, every Friday you cook for 100, 150 people, and then you, you, you, you leave the food in Scottsdale and you run over to Prescott Valley, you teach a class and you come back home. I'm home usually by 10 p. m. That sounds like a lot of hard work. I am energized when I do that. I am pumped when I do that. When I am serving God, and when I'm teaching others about this guy named Jesus, I am pumped. And when people say my food's good, I like that too. I make the cookies. Sometimes my daughter makes the cookies. My daughter doesn't hate me anymore. She doesn't hate me anymore. She helps me make cookies. So, an acrostic is taking the letters of a word and making them stand for something. It's a mnemonic. A mnemonic is a way to remember something. So how are we going to remember that you are building a nest with your identity? Well, nest is the word I chose to make my acrostic. The N stands for nature. Are we going to submit to our sin nature? That's something that is, is spoken about in the Bible a lot, or are we going to submit to our saved nature when we accept Jesus Christ into our lives and we have a changed heart? There's a Bible verse for that. Someone want to volunteer to read that one? Anyone? No? Okay, read it, man. Read it loud. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23. For all have sinned. So you can't say, ah, you know, I don't need to be saved. Ha ha, I'm not a sinner. For all have sinned. All. Well, I don't believe in the Bible. You know what? Read it. Read it. The people who say I don't believe in the Bible didn't read it. Read the Bible. I don't care if you go for like the Message, ...., paraphrase. I don't care if you go for the NIV. ...., if you go for the ESV, NASB. I don't, there's all these different translations and it kind of blows your mind. I read them all. I'm a God addict. I want to know who this guy God is and I want to know why he sent his son. I used to cook food and take pleasure in doing drugs and make my wife angry and my daughter hate me. But my identity in God makes me want to read and know who this person is. If you love someone, you want to know about them. Valentine's Day just passed, right? You're gonna be like, here's your gift of chocolates. What's your name? What's your name? No, you're gonna you're gonna know her name. You're gonna know her favorite color because you love that person. Because I love Jesus Christ. I want to learn more about Jesus Christ. There's nothing wrong with that. I was just joking around with my buddy here and he was telling me. You know, bro love and a brotherly kiss and all that stuff. You read that in the Bible. It sounds kind of weird, but ...., once you become Christian, we become brothers. That's your identity. Your identity with me is that we're related, spiritually related. I love discovering I have a new family. It's really cool. The E in nest. So the word is nest. We're building our identity. We're building a nest around our identity. The E stands for eternal. In the Bible, if you read it, I know a lot of people say, yeah, yeah, I've read it, but actually read it, it's really cool. We are eternal beings. We are eternal beings. So, if your argument is, when I die, that's it, and I'm gonna kick the bucket and that's it, well, if you read the Bible and you start to realize that's not it, you will be eternally damned if you don't accept Jesus Christ into your life. Now, what happens if you do accept Jesus Christ into your life, and you say, He's your Lord, and He's your Savior, and He's your Master, He's your King, He's your God, and you serve Him, willingly, as a slave to Him? Because that's just what you desire in the morning. Instead of your morning cigarette fix, you just desire to please God. You desire to hit your knees on the ground and get calluses on your knees. You pray so much. You want to serve this God to the point where you, you, you just, you wake up energized. You don't even need coffee. And then you will have eternal salvation. That's in the kingdom of God. That's what they call heaven. The S in our nest, because we're building a nest around our identity. The S is servant. So, we're all building a nest, whether you're a believer or non believer. And, as your servant, do we serve God or do we serve Satan? Are we going to pursue the things of this world? Or are we going to pursue more godly things, more spiritual things? Am I going to be kind to my neighbor? Am I going to love my enemy? That sounds so weird. Am I going to give thanks and praise to God for all things, even when I'm in the midst of turmoil? When I am experiencing a crisis in my life, just last year, my ceiling had caved in and there was nothing but, ...., fiberglass insulation all in my living room because the A. C. condensation went into the crawl space in my, in my ceiling. And I had just finished praying in the other room, maybe five feet away, four feet away. And I heard this crash and I come out to the room and I'm looking at my ceiling. There's this gaping hole and there's this huge mess and it's like six in the morning and I've been practicing this. So this is not hard. This is not easy for most people. It's actually very hard for most people. But because I had been practicing, I said, thank you God. Thank you God. That I was in the other room, four feet away. Thank you God. I knew exactly what happened right when it happened. I was like, thank you God for giving me an AC. Yeah, it caused this mess, but thank you. To give thanks and praise a week later, an hour later, a month later. That's cool. It says that we should in the Bible, but to give thanks and praise to God right in the midst of that disaster, in the midst of that trauma, in the midst of that crisis, that's something else. My transmission went out the other day when I was going to Prescott Valley and back. That's a large commute. I had made it home. I was maybe a hundred yards from my house, and the transmission just went kaput. It was done. It was gone. The car wouldn't move forward. It wouldn't move backwards. I had to call AAA. And while it was happening, in the midst of my disaster, I was like, thank you, God. Thank you, God. I don't know why I'm thanking you exactly. Thank you for getting me really close to my house before this happened. But thank you, God. So if we can actually do things like that because we identify as Christians in our lives, Life gets better. So you tell me here. If something in your life happens very bad. It happened. Let's just say it happened. It was done. ...., A loved one died. Your wife left you. She cheated on you. You cheated on her. Something bad happened in your life. It happened. It's done. How you react to it. Thank you God? Or how you react, this is terrible. Boo hoo me. I feel sorry for myself. How you react will affect your future. It will affect your outlook for the next hour, for the next day, for the next week, for the next month, for your life. It will affect the people around you, the people who are looking at you trying to say, you know what, what's this guy gonna do next? My daughter saw me look at the ceiling because it was a loud crash. And when it comes down to the ground and there's like fiberglass insulation everywhere, she comes running out, what's going on? And I'm like, I don't know, sweetie, thank God though. And so I was able to give a witness to my daughter, where I give thanks and praise. I'm not just speaking it, I'm doing it. Because nothing I could have done at that moment in time would have changed what happened when that ceiling collapsed. It happened, it's done. How I react to it, it can change everything. Okay, when you stub your toe and you hit something, you punch something, you throw something, you damage something, you break a wall, you break a door that did nothing for you, it just increases your expenses in your home. You have to replace that drywall, you have to replace that door, you have to replace whatever that appliance was that you broke. How you react to a negative situation is going to affect your future. But, trust is the last part of this nest. Do we trust in the world or do we trust in the Creator? Has the world done us well? Are we all in a halfway house right now? ...., has the world done you well? Have, have the choices that we made, the decisions we made in life made us super ultra rich? Everyone loves us? No, we're here right now because we've made decisions in our life that brought us here. Those decisions could be good. Those decisions could be bad. It could be the world out to get you. It depends on where you're at in your mind for why you think you're here. I think you're here because God placed you here. I think you're here because there's a purpose in your life that hasn't been accomplished yet. And you can do great things in your life because God is powerful. If you let him be powerful in your life, If you step aside. and let him take charge. God is amazing like that. I've been married 22 years now, celebrated in January. My wife is awesome, but she was ready to leave me. So God is a God of restoration. He never restores us exactly the way we thought we should be restored or when we thought we should be restored. But I'll tell you what, he does restore and it's better than the restoration that we imagined for ourselves. So, we can go through the bullet points, maybe some people have been following around and looking at it. But, read it on your own. I do want to say though, that if you find your identity in Christ. And you train yourself up to be that Christian. And you have fellowship with other people. Which is like, basically, a lot of people in a room, talking about Jesus. Iron sharpens iron is the saying. We get to know one another. We build relationships with one another. I become accountable to you. You become accountable to me. And we become better people in life. And we do life together. When that actually happens in your life, you can't wait to go out and serve others. You can't wait to say I identify as a mentor at the Sunnyslope House of Refuge. You can't wait to say I teach a Celebrate Recovery which is just a Christ-centered 12-step recovery that teaches guys about Jesus Christ. It opens the conversation. It lets people understand that there's a God in heaven that loves them. That sent a hero to block that bullet. To push him out of the way from the bus. Because we weren't going to do it on our own. That identity in Christ can't just be a switch that you flip inside of you. That, that salvation happens because God does something in your heart. If I could have pulled myself out of my hole on my own, I would have. But I couldn't. It took a work from God. A supernatural God. A heroic God. To give me the strength to get over those addictions. To change my life, to become a new me. My daughter hugs me sometimes. And there was a few years where she wouldn't. So these days I kid around and I say, Let go of me. Enough of the hugs. I'll tell you guys. In my head, I don't want to let go. There was a time she didn't want to be in the same room as me. She hated me. So we can affect our own lives. By boo hooing ourself. Or we can affect our own lives by realizing that we've already given control of our lives to inferior little g, lowercase g gods. But there's a big G God, the only God that we have not given control of our lives over to. We've given control of our lives over to the drugs and over to the cigarettes and over to the alcohol but we haven't given control, complete control of our lives over to the big G God, the real God. We've only given our control over to the idols in our life. We've got to get rid of those idols and we've got to accept that God is our, is our, is our Creator and he sent His Son to save us. So next week in this sermon, if you want to call it a sermon, I'm not a preacher. Jonesing for Jesus, Part Two. ...., we're going to talk about the image of God and how we're made in the image of God and how we are addicts to the core of our being and we were designed that way. We are not accidentally addicts. We were designed to be addicted to God, but we found everything else to be addicted to, and that's what we're going to talk about next week. But thank you for your time this evening. I greatly appreciate it.

Sharing a testimony at Celebrate Recovery in Scottsdale 2024:   📍 📍 📍 📍 My name is Vin, short for Vin Diesel. But, uh, I went to a culinary school just, uh, just down the street over on Shea and 114th Street. And it was about 10 years ago. Um, I was heavily addicted to methamphetamines and you don't want to go through a culinary program addicted to meth or addicted to anything for that matter. My life was It was chaotic. I never knew from day to day what I was going to do or why I was going to do it. I couldn't control my emotions, my wife. Uh, I've been married as of this January 1st. I've been married 21 years. Thank you. But, uh, it is by the grace of God that he gave me healing. He gave me freedom from my hurts and my habits and my hangups. I hit rock bottom. Rock bottom is basically the point at which I stopped digging that hole for myself. And when I realized that I couldn't do it on my own and that I needed help, I cried out to God to give me I didn't know it at the time, but salvation. I just said, help me. Help me God. I can't do this on my own. And I'll tell you what. God is powerful, if you let Him be powerful in your life. So, I'm gonna back up a little bit. Seven and a half years I've been clean from methamphetamines. And, at the time I, uh, I would come home 1 or 2 in the morning cooking at restaurants, really nice restaurants. Um, and my daughter at the time, I think she was like four years old, she would wake up at two in the morning and she'd just, uh, wait at the door for dad to walk in at two in the morning. It was the saddest thing I've ever seen. Because I would be high or inebriated on something. And, uh, I think I fought one night with my wife. It was just, it was awful. I was pretty sure that was the end of my marriage. And, uh, I remember thinking I was sneaky, and doing all these drugs, and nobody knew. Trying to keep secrets. But the thing is, everyone knew. And, something powerful said to me just this last Saturday by my, uh, 7 year old daughter. She said, We were at the soup kitchen, St. Vincent de Paul, over at Sunny Slope, and we were looking for the homeless. And she says, "What do homeless people look like, Dad?" And it stopped me, because I was, I thought it was obvious, you know? But apparently not to a 7 year old. And it got me to thinking, "What does an addict look like?" We can be sneaky. We can dress nice. We can pretend that we're not on drugs. We can tell everybody that we're fine. But it's all a lie. So, it's not necessarily how we look that makes us who we are. It's how we behave. It's how we treat one another. And a lot of times we can't figure that out, and so we build relationships with one another, and we get to know who people are. The best answer I could give my daughter when she said, what do homeless people look like, is that, well, they're a little bit dirtier than some people, but that's not always true. And they carry backpacks, but that's not always true. And they'll be standing on the street, but that's not always true. Well, what does an addict look like? About the same. So, I swore I would never do drugs again. Seven and a half years ago. And before that, eight years ago, I swore the same thing. Nine years ago, I swore the same thing. Ten years ago, I swore the same thing. Why did it stick? Seven and a half years ago. Cause I looked up at heaven, at a God I didn't believe in, and I said, "Can you help me?" I surrender. I give up. It's over. I can't do this anymore. This is a disgusting life. To want something more than you want to please your own kid. To want something more than you want to please your own wife. It's sick. It's evil. I was raised Buddhist. Karma. Reincarnation. But at that time, I wasn't thinking about my next life, the way my mom taught me. I was thinking about my life right here, right now. How do I change? How can I get help? And I asked for God to give me a sign. I demanded He give me a sign, and he did. He gave me an powerful sign, a sign that I couldn't ignore, a sign I had to take action with. Something I had to do after I saw this sign was, quit doing drugs. Figure out who this God is that I now dedicated my life to serving. Who are you? I sat down and started reading the Bible. I told my wife when I left that morning that it's over. When I came back that morning, I said, Sweetie, I'm so sorry. I'm gonna change. This was right after God gave me that powerful sign in my life. And she looked at me and she said, "Whatever. I don't care. I don't believe you." Through the tears in her eyes drying on her face. But as she saw me reading the Bible, and she saw me start to get to know who God was, and how I would switch from one version of the Bible to another version of the Bible, trying to figure this stuff out. Because when God gave me a sign that I could do nothing but respond to, it wasn't that I immediately became a Christian, I wasn't. I just immediately believed that there was a God and He loves me. But as I read the Bible, and I got to the Gospels, I realized that there was this God, named Jesus Christ, and He died for me. I didn't want Him to. And I cried. Why did you die for me? So, the best I could make sense of it was like a, a hero, like a cop, jumping in the way of a bullet. That's ready to take me out and kill me. I was on the, I was on the fast track to nothing. And Jesus stepped in the way and said, you know what? I'll take this for you. I'll take the hit. I'll die for you. I had to repent from my evil ways. I have to say I'm done with meth, I'm done with drinking, I'm done with being mean, I'm done with making my daughter cry, I'm done with making my wife cry, and it's time to change. So as I'm reading the Bible and I'm trying to figure out the new me, because I don't even know what this is all about, I became Christian. I remember I cried the first time I got through the Gospel of Matthew. I remember I closed it when they put him on the cross. I thought it was just horrible. I didn't want to go on. I was like, this is horrible. I suffer from anxiety. I shut the book and I put it away for a week. I was like, they can't kill this guy. Really? And then I opened it up again. I had to figure out what happened. And I read Mark, Luke, John. Made it all the way through the Revelation. And I did it all over again. I read the Bible maybe 12, 13 times. I'm now a student at Phoenix Seminary. I graduate this semester. I'll have my Master's in Ministry. I'll have my Emphasis in Counseling and Family. But let me back up again. Six months I've been reading the Bible. My wife, she comes up to me, she says to me, "You know what?" "You remember that day when we fought? And you came back and you told me, 'Hey, I've changed.' And I told you I didn't care?" And I got really excited, and I was like, Absolutely, I totally remember that day. That was the day that everything changed for me. I prayed to God that day. And I was so excited, I interrupted her. I didn't let her finish what she was about to say. I told her, you know, I asked for God to give me a sign, and He gave me this powerful sign. And so, I came home, and I was excited, but I didn't know how to tell you I've changed, and you didn't believe me, so I had to show you. And it was just this powerful prayer that changed my life. And she's looking at me, and she's not really smiling. And she says, "You know what?" "I prayed that day, too." And my wife, she was raised Christian. When she got engaged with me, she said, Are you Christian? And she was gorgeous. She was beautiful. She was kind. She was sweet. And I lied through my teeth, and I said, Absolutely. I'm Christian, too. That's how we got married on a lie. She figured it out right away. I wasn't really a Christian. But she was with me. We were unequally good. I had to figure out what that word meant. I had to look it up. When you put two oxen together, one's big and fat or skinny or whatever. One's tall, one's short, and they've got this bar that goes between the two of them. It's an old farming term where you're gonna plow the field, but if you're unequally yoked, they can go in circles. They won't move at the right speed. They're not suited to be attached to one another. I wasn't suited to be attached to my wife. And she was the most beautiful Christian woman I'd ever met. And I destroyed her. And she said she prayed that day. She prayed that day. She prayed that day. And she cried. She said, "God, please release me from this marriage." Please release me. Let me out of this marriage. And she had this strong, powerful feeling inside. She's telling me this story and the hairs on my arm are standing up and she's telling me, you know what? God told me "no." And I started crying 'cause I couldn't stand the marriage I was in. But she's read her Bible too. She knows that God doesn't look kindly on divorces and she's trying to respect that, but she still wanted to leave and then she had one more prayer. She prayed to God. She said, if you won't release me from this marriage. Can you please just kill him? Let him die. As he drives home and he takes his daughter to school, can you let him get into an accident? Can you let him not come home? Can you let me never see his face again? Take him away from me, please God. And when I saw you walk in the door, I was really sad. But then, I've been watching you for this past six months. And you died that day. You died that day. I cook food sometimes for Celebrate Recovery. But my passion is to tell people about a man I met named Jesus. My name is Vin. You can talk to me anytime you see me. Sometimes I wear a funny hat. I'm glad I finally got to meet all of you. I've been doing this for about a year. And it's good to see faces that eat the food that I cook. Thank you for listening. I do appreciate it.

📍 What do we crave when we wake up in the morning? A cigarette, a news headline, coffee? Do we fall our knees and pray? You can sit at the dining table. What do we have to do? And we're not satisfied until it's done. If we don't do it, we'll be left throughout the day, longing to do it, wanting to do it, feeling like that thing was unfinished in our life. Well, if you find the thing that you do most habitually. And if you want to avoid that word addiction, the thing that you do over and over again, just look at it for yourself personally and just think to yourself, am I glorifying God when I do this? When I, when I read scripture, am I glorifying God? When I pray, am I glorifying God? When I spread gossip, am I glorifying God? When I, I don't want, I don't want people to get guilt trips, you know, cause there's, there's, there's drinking Christians and then there's, I don't want to tell you that I drink. But Jesus did, but does your addiction rule over your life? That's what makes it an addiction. I don't care if you have a beer or two and during the holidays, it's just whatever. There's people that have food addictions. And how can you tell if a person with a food addiction relapsed, You can't. So what I'm saying is know your heart, know what you desire, know that you're addicted to energy drinks, know that you're addicted to cigarettes, know your addictions, know what rules over you. Ask God to take it from you. And as you ask God to take it from you, you're praying. And as you read scripture that says you can have God take it from you and that he's not going to give you challenges You can't overcome... My favorite life verse when I was just getting over addiction says 1st Corinthians 10:13, No temptation has overtaken you. That is not common to man. God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation you will also provide the way of escape that you might be able to endure it. So the number one thing, a person who is suffering from true addiction is, WHY did you give this to me, God? It's like the finger pointing blame game. Why did you give me this addiction? God's answer is I gave you this. Ability to be addicted because you're supposed to be addicted to me. But I realize you're in a deep hole here and you, you are addicted to energy drinks or beer or cigarettes, and I'm going to give you a way out. Pray to me, read my scripture and you'll find your way out. There's nothing he puts in our path that tempts us, that we don't have a way of escaping. There's nothing that God puts in our way that we cannot overcome. Now, keep in mind, it's not us that is overcoming our addictions on our own. We put ourselves in that problem on our own. But it is God that gets us out. And so, again, what do you wake up craving in the morning? What do you have to have before your day is complete? Evaluate it. See if it glorifies God. It's okay to be an addict, but it's not okay to, to, to serve lesser gods because that's idolatry. Be God Addicts.

📍 📍 I want to start by briefly introducing myself. You're already seeing up there the  sermon title is Jonesing for Jesus, Turning 📍 Our Sin Addiction Into a God Addiction   📍 That's where my passion is.   📍 📍 A little bit about me. I am Vin—Vin McReynolds.   📍 I grew up in Flagstaff.   📍 I am half Vietnamese and I am half Irish.   📍 My father was in the Vietnam War.   📍 He met my mother there,  came back in the early seventies. I have two brothers before me. I am the last of three.   📍 My father, awesome guy taught me to do well in life, taught me to behave myself,  taught me to be a man.   📍 Amazing guy. Never ever taught me to do anything wrong. Never taught me to steal, never taught me to cheat, never taught me to do drugs.  He raised me right.   📍 Yet, as I grew up, I was bad.  My mother, amazing lady. She comes up to about my shoulder. She's a Vietnamese lady. Strongest lady I know. I greatly admire her. When I, I introduce who I am, I love to talk about my mother. My mother shaped me.   📍 📍 Never ever taught me to do anything wrong.  Yet, as I grew up, I was bad.   📍 📍 ......... After work, I would go with everybody at work and would   📍 do drugs and I would drink  and my daughter at the time. She was, uh,....I.... Want to say three, four years old. She would wait up till two in the morning. And she would greet me when I came home and I would be inebriated or high on something.   📍 And I just couldn't stand my life. And I cried out to God. I was like, God, I got to change.  My wife and me were fighting like cats and dogs. We weren't getting along. ...., my marriage was in a shambles. I was almost, ... I'm sure we would have been divorced in no time. So, ... just to make short of my testimony story, how I came to be who I am. I asked God for a sign and he showed me one.   📍 It was a moving sign. It was a deeply personal sign, and it made me want to change.  It affected my heart, and it made me want to have a new identity,   📍 a new identity in Christ.   📍 "When two or more people gather in my name..." [Mat 18:20] ...There is the church. We have these little churches every Friday night, just in that building down there.   📍 📍 We talk about Jesus. We don't talk about how I can fix you, because I can't. We talk about how Jesus can give you freedom from your hurts and your habits and your hangups.   📍 📍 It's a Celebrate Recovery class. ..., I'll throw in some personal anecdotes and things that happen to me throughout the week. You'll come to know me over time. ..., it's an amazing thing.   📍 It's different than church where you guys are sitting here and you're looking at me and I'm just lecturing, we interact, we have a large group. And then later on, we break into small groups and we get deeply personal.   📍 📍 We need to be real.  We need to have conversations about the struggles we have. We can't say everything's all good because it's not. The thing I hate the most in church is saying, How are you? And you tell me I am fine. And maybe someone who overheard you might know your business. They might be like, No, he's breaking up with his wife. No, his kids hate him. No, he's struggling with drugs. I could be the clerk at the convenience store. I was like, You can't be doing fine. You just bought a suitcase of beer last night. You know, I mean, but at church, I'm doing fine. I'm good. I'm good. We're not good. We can't pretend we're good. We gotta be real. That's why I like those guys down there. Celebrate Recovery. What are we celebrating? Our lives are broken. We have struggles. We, we, we, we just don't know left from right. We don't know up from down and we're gathering together. We're eating some food. We're having fellowship with one another. What are we celebrating? That's what we're celebrating. The togetherness, the fellowship, the relationships that we build with one another, because this guy is going to call me out and this guy is going to call me out.   📍 We try to figure out what sin nature is doing to our lives, what sin nature is doing to tear us apart. And why do we even have it? So that's what I'm talking about today.   📍 It's the things that we have our identity in when we talk about who we are. So often today I see people that say, you know, I am this or I am that.   📍 📍 And sometimes it has to do with gender.   📍 📍 Sometimes it has to do with their profession.   📍 📍 Sometimes it has to do with being a father,   📍 📍 being a spouse.   📍 It's what you identify with. It's who you are.   📍 📍 Well, if we can find our identity in Christ, a lot of our problems, I believe will disappear.   📍 Think about this question.   📍 📍 Who is the master and who is the slave?   📍 In Romans 7:15, Paul says, for I do not understand my own actions for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. So basically, if you're asking yourself who's the master and who's the slave,   📍 📍 📍 📍 you're asking yourself, "Who is saying jump?" And   📍 📍 who is saying, "How high?" Okay?   📍 So, ..., when I started being   📍 📍 a, Believer in Christ, when I started becoming a Christ follower,  I decided that Jesus Christ was going to be my master. But what does that mean today? Sometimes it has negative connotations of slavery and stuff like that. I am talking about slavery, but the slavery of one that we choose for ourselves,   📍 that we gladly serve someone who is above us, who has all the power above us, but rightfully so.  Because this person has our best interests in mind.   📍 Without this person watching over us, we will be a disaster. We will fall so far. We won't know how to get back up.  That's why classes like Celebrate Recovery exist to reintroduce ourselves to our creator, to reintroduce ourselves to   📍 the one who can give us freedom from those hurts and those habits and those hangups.  So in Proverbs 25:4 it says, That, ............ take away the dross from silver and the Smith has material for a vessel, but we all want to refine who we are to make ourselves into better versions of who we are.   📍 And there's this stuff inside of metal. It's called dross. And that's the, ..., the yucky impurities that, ..., we need to remove from the metal in order to   📍 make it into something like a pure silver or a pure gold.  We want to get rid of the dross, all of the negative impurities in our life. And so, ..., refining is the process of making pure what is not pure, ..., but what does that really look like?   📍 Well, I think it's actually doing what God wants for us instead of what we want for us. It's being less selfish in our lives.  It's trying to ask God, what do you want for me? Instead of, God, give me this, give me this, give me this, if I even claim to believe in God.   📍 So.... Smoking cigarettes?   📍 📍 25 years I was smoking a cigarette,   📍 you know, and I used to think, Hey, you know, I'm smoking cigarettes   📍 📍 because it reduces my anxiety.   📍 📍 Well, if you believe in the Bible,  1 Cor 6:19 talks about respecting our bodies. Your body is a temple for the Holy Spirit within you. The Holy Spirit dwells within you. You don't want to have this smoky dwelling for the spirit, you know, and you don't want it to smell like a bar after you've been drinking cigarettes and, and, and alcohol and the Holy Spirit's living in you, it's just kind of a messy situation there, but let's say you're not, you know, going into a Bible verse. So let's just imagine   📍 that..., "studies have shown" that smoking increases anxiety.  So the thing I was using to reduce my anxiety and smoking a cigarette was actually increasing all of those anxieties in my life. It was making things worse. So what did I know? I knew nothing. So when I rely upon my own desires and what I want for myself, I start realizing that I am wrong. I don't know what's right. God does. And if I place my trust in him, if I lean on God and his understanding for what is, is going to be a meaningful, bright. ....AMAZING future with, ... two beautiful daughters and an AMAZING wife and all the people that I meet. He has this plan that when I was doing drugs in the kitchen or, ... smoking cigarettes or drinking that I would never have imagined for myself until I just surrendered to God so that he could take control over my life so that he could guide me and use me as a tool and point me in the direction that he wanted me to be. And when I serve God, man, all my anxieties are gone.   📍 There are gods in our life, whether we admit to them being gods or not. And I, I call them lowercase "g" —little "g"— gods, the alcohol god, the god of, of, of sex, the god of gambling, the god of the food addiction, these little "g" gods. Those are the idols in our life that we introduce into our lives that we, ..., we are,   📍 ... worshiping at the altar.  When I smoke a cigarette, I am giving five minutes of my time at the altar of the smoking god. ... when I'm drinking a 6 pack or a 12 pack, I'm giving that time in my evening or morning, depends on how bad of an alcoholic I am, ..., to that altar of the beer god, the alcohol god. So God put this ability in me to be addicted to cigarettes and to be addicted to alcohol. And so when, when I'm boo hooing myself and feeling sorry about my addictions and why, why God did you put this in me to be addicted to   📍 alcohol and   📍 cigarettes and   📍 all these drugs and   📍 anger, you know,  because I want to make it more relatable to everyone here.   📍 So again, if it's not drugs, if it's not alcohol, there are so many things that we fill our lives with that, we become addicted to it. It's the thing that we constantly do. It's the thing that we think about when we wake up in the morning, it's the thing that we can't have enough of—that it rules over our life. I'm not talking about the guy who smokes a cigarette and he's done. I'm not talking about the guy has one or two beers and he's done. I'm talking about the guy who has one or two beers wakes up in the morning. He needs more. I'm talking about the guy who smokes a cigarette and then he goes and buys a pack and finishes it. I'm talking about the person who, you know what, maybe made this perfect and then goes on to make this perfect and make this perfect. And then you know what, they're here till two in the morning, making everything perfect. I'm talking about the person who just heard about the gossip from over here and then spread more gossip over here and then spread more gossip over there. Whatever is in control of our lives, that we gave rule over our lives, so that they're in charge of our lives. Those are the addictions that I said to myself, Why God did you give me this addiction? Why God am I an addict? And God answered me.   📍 The questions I asked earlier is like, you know, what are you addicted to? Do you let your addiction rule over your life? Do you submit to your addiction? Do you live your life in service to your addiction? And again, you know, who is the master and who is the slave?   📍 We are made in the image of God and we were not mistakenly given this addiction nature.  Whatever it is, find something in yourself that you can relate to, that you do constantly. It's the thing you wake up in the morning thinking about. It's the thing you're not happy about until you get done. And think to yourself, is that my addiction? Is that what rules over me? Is my life not complete until I do that thing? Whatever that thing is. For smokers, I need that morning cigarette fix. For an alcoholic, I'm going to drink at 8 in the morning. Let's do it.   📍 But, if we identify ourselves as Christian,   📍 if we find our identity in Jesus Christ,   📍 do we wake up and we need to read the Bible?   📍 Do we wake up and we need to pray?  However you choose to pray is your business. Whenever you choose to pray, that's your business too. But if it's the first thing you feel like doing, if that's what you crave, if that's what you desire, if that's what moves you when you wake up, thank you, God, I'm alive. You might be addicted to God, which is cool, which is way cool. It's good to be addicted to God.   📍 If something rules over your life, it's not just a little bit of control, it becomes absolute. It's what, ..., it's what I think about constantly until I finally get it. I don't have a good day if I don't talk to God. I don't have the most fulfilling, most wonderful day, even if I went out and had a good time at the park with my kids and my wife. If I don't pray to God, God, please protect us in this park. Please keep us safe. Please keep us healthy and strong. Guide me. Help me not to lose my temper. I'm addicted to anger, by the way.   📍 These little "g" gods, ... they want to take everything that we give them   📍 until we wither and we die.   📍 We'll give them our time,   📍 we'll give them our money   📍 We'll give all of our attention  to this little "g" god, this addiction, this idol that we place in our lives. These idols that we were told in the   📍 Old Testament, those are part of the Ten Commandments, have no false idols.  And we put those false idols in charge of us. But we're asked because God put this in us. He put this addiction in us. He did. He put this addiction in us so that we would be addicted to HIM. He made us in his image. If we are made in God's image, why am I addicted? God put addiction in me. He's like, here, you get a little bit of this. You get a little bit of this. And here's some addiction. So you can become a God addict. I want you to love me. I want you to adore me. I want you to wake up in the morning craving me. I want you to have to have me. And like fallen people, that's what we are. We're fallen people.   📍 We went and worshiped rocks and stones   📍 and we worshiped ... things that we made with our hands   📍 and then we worship alcohol and we worship drugs.   📍 We worship any, codependency addiction that we have  or any, any, any drug addiction, sex addiction, you name it. We worship everything under the sky, everything worldly here in this place, except for God. And God's up there saying, I made you to be addicted to me, but you found everything else except me to worship. These false idols are not supposed to be in control of our lives. They don't even have the brains. They don't have the know how to take care of a human being, to know what we need in life, to know what we desire in life, to make us better people. These little "g" gods, these little idols. They just want to take until we die and we will die. God wants us to worship him. The BIG "G" God, the Capital "G" God. We're supposed to wake up in the morning and we're supposed to pray to him. I don't care how you pray. If your knees are getting bad, sit down and pray. I don't care if you haven't read Scripture before. Start reading Scripture, mark up your Bible, understand who it is that we worship, understand who God is because God is powerful. If you let him be powerful in your life.   📍 God is the only addiction that we should have. That's right. ... He is faithful. He gives back to us better than anything that we've surrendered to him. He ... he multiplies the blessings that he gives to us because he's got a good plan for our lives. His will for our lives is better. His will and his plan is better than our own. He's a good God. Just surrender to him, trust in him and life will be good. The thing that I run into in Celebrate Recovery is that's a huge leap of faith. People don't understand that they're already worshiping little "g" gods. They're already worshiping a lesser power. And one of the 12-Step things that people― that the 12-Step programs ask you to do is to surrender yourself to a higher power, meaning you've already surrendered to lower powers. Get someone who can rule your life, who is able to show you what is good in your life to better you, to make you into a human being that you were supposed to be one that images God that is addicted to God. But .   📍 We stumble, we fall.  It's okay, you know, just catch ourselves. Repent, have faith in God that he's going to take care of you and repent from your ways.   📍 If I'm taking painkillers because of my back pain, I'm smoking cigarettes because I feel anxiety and I drink to relieve the pressure of a hard day because I deserve to unwind and to treat myself. Maybe it's just a disease, right? Isn't that what people say? These addictions are diseases. My food addiction is a disease. My smoking is a disease. My drinking, my alcohol addiction is a disease. That's a great reason, right? That's a reason to say, well, I'm going to deflect. I'm going to deny what I am, what I want, what I desire in my heart. And I'm just going to say, the doctor said it's a disease, so it's okay. No, it's not okay. It's not okay if we have this thing that's called a disease. I think it's just a modern day verbiage for people trying to come up with an explanation to an age old problem. The problem is why do we do these things that we can't control? Why do we do these uncontrollable things? Why do I drink when I don't want to drink? Why do I smoke when I don't want to smoke? Why do I want to do these things that take and take and take from me, but they never give back to me ever? Ever. I've never had a cigarette give me a single good thing. I've never had a drink give me a single good thing back to me. It took my money, it took my relationships. It took, it took my respect from my kids for me. These things take and they don't give. God gives back. God wants to see me be the best man I can be.   📍 We need spiritual redemption. We need healing from our brokenness. We need to be lifted up from our fallen state and we need to be loved ABSOLUTELY. Not judged for the things that we've done in the past. I've done a lot of them. We can't keep carrying the junk with us. That's, that's the thing. If you feel shame, you're just going to carry it with you. God forgave us. He forgave me for the things I already did. The things I'm going to do. He forgave me. I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, but he forgave me. I don't need to carry that shame with me. It's too heavy of a burden. We need freedom from the things that hurt us and the habits that we use to fill the void inside of us. We need to clear it out of us. We need to have a clear path for us from all of the hangups in our life. They just stand in our way. We need that forgiveness that God gives us that we can shake off that shame and we can be WHOLE in our lives because we're incomplete broken creatures, but we need to submit to a HIGHER POWER. It's one of the 12-Steps. Don't submit to lower powers. They don't know how to take care of human beings. God knows how to take care of human beings. We're made in his image. We need to be honest with ourselves and we need to swallow our pride. We need to admit that we already do serve lesser gods. Each one of us, whatever that lesser god is, we already serve lesser gods. I think they're like little demon gods, little "g" lowercase "g". We need to embrace the help of God. BIG "G", the help that he's been offering to us since the day he created us.   📍 We're not to have other idols of God, because we are the living idol of God himself. We're made in his image, and he loves us, and he cares for us, and he pursues us every waking moment. When we are wayward, he seeks us.   📍 When we are, missing, he leaves the 99 to come find us, which is really cool.  We're God's representatives, and he's asking that we hold ourselves to a higher standard, because he is the highest standard. And we're not to lower ourselves, cheapen ourselves, lessen ourselves disrespectfully and dishonorably. We are to represent God because we are made   📍 to reflect who God is.  We shouldn't smell like a brothel if we're representing God. We shouldn't nitpick at people's imperfections if we represent God. We shouldn't try to tell other people they need to be perfect when they're struggling in life because we're perfectionists. We shouldn't tell people that... we don't forgive them because they wronged us because that's not what God would want. God forgave us. Because God forgave us, we need to take that forgiveness and forgive other people. I truly believe that when you can forgive others and take the forgiveness that God gave to you, that is when your life begins. Life begins when you forgive others. Forgiveness is when life begins.   📍 So, God thinks about us all the time. He's always near and he never leaves us. He has this steadfast love for us. Steadfast love is dependable loyalty.   📍 We are always looking to satisfy our own needs, and all God really wants us to do is to seek him and to pursue him and to serve others―as a way, as a means―to do that. And when we actually serve other people, we're serving God's will, and we create this relationship with God that we didn't have before.   📍 That's how we serve God―by serving one another. As we serve one another and get to know one another, we get to know what God's grand plan for us is, and somehow we get to know who God is and we know that he loves us. ALL of us.   📍 What do we crave when we wake up in the morning? A cigarette, a news headline, coffee? Do we fall our knees and pray? You can sit at the dining table. What do we have to do? And we're not satisfied until it's done. If we don't do it, we'll be left throughout the day, longing to do it, wanting to do it, feeling like that thing was unfinished in our life. Well, if you find the thing that you do most habitually. And if you want to avoid that word addiction, the thing that you do over and over again, just look at it for yourself personally and just think to yourself, am I glorifying God when I do this? When I, when I read scripture, am I glorifying God? When I pray, am I glorifying God? When I spread gossip, am I glorifying God? When I, I don't want, I don't want people to get guilt trips, you know, cause there's, there's, there's drinking Christians and then there's, I don't want to tell you that I drink. But Jesus did, but does your addiction rule over your life? That's what makes it an addiction. I don't care if you have a beer or two and during the holidays, it's just whatever. There's people that have food addictions. And how can you tell if a person with a food addiction relapsed, You can't. So what I'm saying is know your heart, know what you desire, know that you're addicted to energy drinks, know that you're addicted to cigarettes, know your addictions, know what rules over you. Ask God to take it from you. And as you ask God to take it from you, you're praying. And as you read scripture that says you can have God take it from you and that he's not going to give you challenges You can't overcome... My favorite life verse when I was just getting over addiction says 1st Corinthians 10:13, No temptation has overtaken you. That is not common to man. God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation you will also provide the way of escape that you might be able to endure it. So the number one thing, a person who is suffering from true addiction is, WHY did you give this to me, God? It's like the finger pointing blame game. Why did you give me this addiction? God's answer is I gave you this. Ability to be addicted because you're supposed to be addicted to me. But I realize you're in a deep hole here and you, you are addicted to energy drinks or beer or cigarettes, and I'm going to give you a way out. Pray to me, read my scripture and you'll find your way out. There's nothing he puts in our path that tempts us, that we don't have a way of escaping. There's nothing that God puts in our way that we cannot overcome. Now, keep in mind, it's not us that is overcoming our addictions on our own. We put ourselves in that problem on our own. But it is God that gets us out. And so, again, what do you wake up craving in the morning? What do you have to have before your day is complete? Evaluate it. See if it glorifies God.   📍 It's okay to be an addict, but  it's not okay to, to, to serve lesser gods because that's idolatry. Be God Addicts.

📍 So again, if it's not drugs, if it's not alcohol, there are so many things that we fill our lives with that, we become addicted to it. It's the thing that we constantly do. It's the thing that we think about when we wake up in the morning, it's the thing that we can't have enough of—that it rules over our life. I'm not talking about the guy who smokes a cigarette and he's done. I'm not talking about the guy has one or two beers and he's done. I'm talking about the guy who has one or two beers wakes up in the morning. He needs more. I'm talking about the guy who smokes a cigarette and then he goes and buys a pack and finishes it. I'm talking about the person who, you know what, maybe made this perfect and then goes on to make this perfect and make this perfect. And then you know what, they're here till two in the morning, making everything perfect. I'm talking about the person who just heard about the gossip from over here and then spread more gossip over here and then spread more gossip over there. Whatever is in control of our lives, that we gave rule over our lives, so that they're in charge of our lives. Those are the addictions that I said to myself, Why God did you give me this addiction? Why God am I an addict? And God answered me.

The questions I asked earlier is like, you know, what are you addicted to? Do you let your addiction rule over your life? Do you submit to your addiction? Do you live your life in service to your addiction? And again, you know, who is the master and who is the slave?   📍 We are made in the image of God and we were not mistakenly given this addiction nature.  Whatever it is, find something in yourself that you can relate to, that you do constantly. It's the thing you wake up in the morning thinking about. It's the thing you're not happy about until you get done. And think to yourself, is that my addiction? Is that what rules over me? Is my life not complete until I do that thing? Whatever that thing is. For smokers, I need that morning cigarette fix. For an alcoholic, I'm going to drink at 8 in the morning. Let's do it.   📍 But, if we identify ourselves as Christian,   📍 if we find our identity in Jesus Christ,   📍 do we wake up and we need to read the Bible?   📍 Do we wake up and we need to pray?  However you choose to pray is your business. Whenever you choose to pray, that's your business too. But if it's the first thing you feel like doing, if that's what you crave, if that's what you desire, if that's what moves you when you wake up, thank you, God, I'm alive. You might be addicted to God, which is cool, which is way cool. It's good to be addicted to God.

If something rules over your life, it's not just a little bit of control, it becomes absolute. It's what, ..., it's what I think about constantly until I finally get it. I don't have a good day if I don't talk to God. I don't have the most fulfilling, most wonderful day, even if I went out and had a good time at the park with my kids and my wife. If I don't pray to God, God, please protect us in this park. Please keep us safe. Please keep us healthy and strong. Guide me. Help me not to lose my temper. I'm addicted to anger, by the way.

These little "g" gods, ... they want to take everything that we give them   📍 until we wither and we die.   📍 We'll give them our time,   📍 we'll give them our money   📍 We'll give all of our attention  to this little "g" god, this addiction, this idol that we place in our lives. These idols that we were told in the   📍 Old Testament, those are part of the Ten Commandments, have no false idols.  And we put those false idols in charge of us. But we're asked because God put this in us. He put this addiction in us. He did. He put this addiction in us so that we would be addicted to HIM. He made us in his image. If we are made in God's image, why am I addicted? God put addiction in me. He's like, here, you get a little bit of this. You get a little bit of this. And here's some addiction. So you can become a God addict. I want you to love me. I want you to adore me. I want you to wake up in the morning craving me. I want you to have to have me. And like fallen people, that's what we are. We're fallen people.   📍 We went and worshiped rocks and stones   📍 and we worshiped ... things that we made with our hands   📍 and then we worship alcohol and we worship drugs.   📍 We worship any, codependency addiction that we have  or any, any, any drug addiction, sex addiction, you name it. We worship everything under the sky, everything worldly here in this place, except for God. And God's up there saying, I made you to be addicted to me, but you found everything else except me to worship. These false idols are not supposed to be in control of our lives. They don't even have the brains. They don't have the know how to take care of a human being, to know what we need in life, to know what we desire in life, to make us better people. These little "g" gods, these little idols. They just want to take until we die and we will die. God wants us to worship him. The BIG "G" God, the Capital "G" God. We're supposed to wake up in the morning and we're supposed to pray to him. I don't care how you pray. If your knees are getting bad, sit down and pray. I don't care if you haven't read Scripture before. Start reading Scripture, mark up your Bible, understand who it is that we worship, understand who God is because God is powerful. If you let him be powerful in your life.

God is the only addiction that we should have. That's right. ... He is faithful. He gives back to us better than anything that we've surrendered to him. He ... he multiplies the blessings that he gives to us because he's got a good plan for our lives. His will for our lives is better. His will and his plan is better than our own. He's a good God. Just surrender to him, trust in him and life will be good. The thing that I run into in Celebrate Recovery is that's a huge leap of faith. People don't understand that they're already worshiping little "g" gods. They're already worshiping a lesser power. And one of the 12-Step things that people― that the 12-Step programs ask you to do is to surrender yourself to a higher power, meaning you've already surrendered to lower powers. Get someone who can rule your life, who is able to show you what is good in your life to better you, to make you into a human being that you were supposed to be one that images God that is addicted to God. But .   📍 We stumble, we fall.  It's okay, you know, just catch ourselves. Repent, have faith in God that he's going to take care of you and repent from your ways.

If I'm taking painkillers because of my back pain, I'm smoking cigarettes because I feel anxiety and I drink to relieve the pressure of a hard day because I deserve to unwind and to treat myself. Maybe it's just a disease, right? Isn't that what people say? These addictions are diseases. My food addiction is a disease. My smoking is a disease. My drinking, my alcohol addiction is a disease. That's a great reason, right? That's a reason to say, well, I'm going to deflect. I'm going to deny what I am, what I want, what I desire in my heart. And I'm just going to say, the doctor said it's a disease, so it's okay. No, it's not okay. It's not okay if we have this thing that's called a disease. I think it's just a modern day verbiage for people trying to come up with an explanation to an age old problem. The problem is why do we do these things that we can't control? Why do we do these uncontrollable things? Why do I drink when I don't want to drink? Why do I smoke when I don't want to smoke? Why do I want to do these things that take and take and take from me, but they never give back to me ever? Ever. I've never had a cigarette give me a single good thing. I've never had a drink give me a single good thing back to me. It took my money, it took my relationships. It took, it took my respect from my kids for me. These things take and they don't give. God gives back. God wants to see me be the best man I can be.

We need spiritual redemption. We need healing from our brokenness. We need to be lifted up from our fallen state and we need to be loved ABSOLUTELY. Not judged for the things that we've done in the past. I've done a lot of them. We can't keep carrying the junk with us. That's, that's the thing. If you feel shame, you're just going to carry it with you. God forgave us. He forgave me for the things I already did. The things I'm going to do. He forgave me. I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, but he forgave me. I don't need to carry that shame with me. It's too heavy of a burden. We need freedom from the things that hurt us and the habits that we use to fill the void inside of us. We need to clear it out of us. We need to have a clear path for us from all of the hangups in our life. They just stand in our way. We need that forgiveness that God gives us that we can shake off that shame and we can be WHOLE in our lives because we're incomplete broken creatures, but we need to submit to a HIGHER POWER. It's one of the 12-Steps. Don't submit to lower powers. They don't know how to take care of human beings. God knows how to take care of human beings. We're made in his image. We need to be honest with ourselves and we need to swallow our pride. We need to admit that we already do serve lesser gods. Each one of us, whatever that lesser god is, we already serve lesser gods. I think they're like little demon gods, little "g" lowercase "g". We need to embrace the help of God. BIG "G", the help that he's been offering to us since the day he created us.

We're not to have other idols of God, because we are the living idol of God himself. We're made in his image, and he loves us, and he cares for us, and he pursues us every waking moment. When we are wayward, he seeks us.   📍 When we are, missing, he leaves the 99 to come find us, which is really cool.  We're God's representatives, and he's asking that we hold ourselves to a higher standard, because he is the highest standard. And we're not to lower ourselves, cheapen ourselves, lessen ourselves disrespectfully and dishonorably. We are to represent God because we are made   📍 to reflect who God is.  We shouldn't smell like a brothel if we're representing God. We shouldn't nitpick at people's imperfections if we represent God. We shouldn't try to tell other people they need to be perfect when they're struggling in life because we're perfectionists. We shouldn't tell people that... we don't forgive them because they wronged us because that's not what God would want. God forgave us. Because God forgave us, we need to take that forgiveness and forgive other people. I truly believe that when you can forgive others and take the forgiveness that God gave to you, that is when your life begins. Life begins when you forgive others. Forgiveness is when life begins.

📍 So, God thinks about us all the time. He's always near and he never leaves us. He has this steadfast love for us. Steadfast love is dependable loyalty.

📍 We are always looking to satisfy our own needs, and all God really wants us to do is to seek him and to pursue him and to serve others―as a way, as a means―to do that. And when we actually serve other people, we're serving God's will, and we create this relationship with God that we didn't have before.

That's how we serve God―by serving one another. As we serve one another and get to know one another, we get to know what God's grand plan for us is, and somehow we get to know who God is and we know that he loves us. ALL of us.

"When two or more people gather in my name..." [Mat 18:20] ...There is the church. We have these little churches every Friday night, just in that building down there.   📍 📍 We talk about Jesus. We don't talk about how I can fix you, because I can't. We talk about how Jesus can give you freedom from your hurts and your habits and your hangups.   📍 📍 It's a Celebrate Recovery class. ..., I'll throw in some personal anecdotes and things that happen to me throughout the week. You'll come to know me over time. ..., it's an amazing thing.   📍 It's different than church where you guys are sitting here and you're looking at me and I'm just lecturing, we interact, we have a large group. And then later on, we break into small groups and we get deeply personal.

We need to be real.  We need to have conversations about the struggles we have. We can't say everything's all good because it's not. The thing I hate the most in church is saying, How are you? And you tell me I am fine. And maybe someone who overheard you might know your business. They might be like, No, he's breaking up with his wife. No, his kids hate him. No, he's struggling with drugs. I could be the clerk at the convenience store. I was like, You can't be doing fine. You just bought a suitcase of beer last night. You know, I mean, but at church, I'm doing fine. I'm good. I'm good. We're not good. We can't pretend we're good. We gotta be real. That's why I like those guys down there. Celebrate Recovery. What are we celebrating? Our lives are broken. We have struggles. We, we, we, we just don't know left from right. We don't know up from down and we're gathering together. We're eating some food. We're having fellowship with one another. What are we celebrating? That's what we're celebrating. The togetherness, the fellowship, the relationships that we build with one another, because this guy is going to call me out and this guy is going to call me out.

📍 We try to figure out what sin nature is doing to our lives, what sin nature is doing to tear us apart. And why do we even have it? So that's what I'm talking about today.

It's the things that we have our identity in when we talk about who we are. So often today I see people that say, you know, I am this or I am that.   📍 📍 And sometimes it has to do with gender.   📍 📍 Sometimes it has to do with their profession.   📍 📍 Sometimes it has to do with being a father,   📍 📍 being a spouse.   📍 It's what you identify with. It's who you are.   📍 📍 Well, if we can find our identity in Christ, a lot of our problems, I believe will disappear.

Think about this question.   📍 📍 Who is the master and who is the slave?   📍 In Romans 7:15, Paul says, for I do not understand my own actions for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. So basically, if you're asking yourself who's the master and who's the slave,   📍 📍 📍 📍 you're asking yourself, "Who is saying jump?" And   📍 📍 who is saying, "How high?" Okay?   📍 So, ..., when I started being   📍 📍 a, Believer in Christ, when I started becoming a Christ follower,  I decided that Jesus Christ was going to be my master. But what does that mean today? Sometimes it has negative connotations of slavery and stuff like that. I am talking about slavery, but the slavery of one that we choose for ourselves,   📍 that we gladly serve someone who is above us, who has all the power above us, but rightfully so.  Because this person has our best interests in mind.   📍 Without this person watching over us, we will be a disaster. We will fall so far. We won't know how to get back up.  That's why classes like Celebrate Recovery exist to reintroduce ourselves to our creator, to reintroduce ourselves to   📍 the one who can give us freedom from those hurts and those habits and those hangups.  So in Proverbs 25:4 it says, That, ............ take away the dross from silver and the Smith has material for a vessel, but we all want to refine who we are to make ourselves into better versions of who we are.   📍 And there's this stuff inside of metal. It's called dross. And that's the, ..., the yucky impurities that, ..., we need to remove from the metal in order to   📍 make it into something like a pure silver or a pure gold.  We want to get rid of the dross, all of the negative impurities in our life. And so, ..., refining is the process of making pure what is not pure, ..., but what does that really look like?   📍 Well, I think it's actually doing what God wants for us instead of what we want for us. It's being less selfish in our lives.  It's trying to ask God, what do you want for me? Instead of, God, give me this, give me this, give me this, if I even claim to believe in God.

So.... Smoking cigarettes?   📍 📍 25 years I was smoking a cigarette,   📍 you know, and I used to think, Hey, you know, I'm smoking cigarettes   📍 📍 because it reduces my anxiety.   📍 📍 Well, if you believe in the Bible,  1 Cor 6:19 talks about respecting our bodies. Your body is a temple for the Holy Spirit within you. The Holy Spirit dwells within you. You don't want to have this smoky dwelling for the spirit, you know, and you don't want it to smell like a bar after you've been drinking cigarettes and, and, and alcohol and the Holy Spirit's living in you, it's just kind of a messy situation there, but let's say you're not, you know, going into a Bible verse. So let's just imagine   📍 that..., "studies have shown" that smoking increases anxiety.  So the thing I was using to reduce my anxiety and smoking a cigarette was actually increasing all of those anxieties in my life. It was making things worse. So what did I know? I knew nothing. So when I rely upon my own desires and what I want for myself, I start realizing that I am wrong. I don't know what's right. God does. And if I place my trust in him, if I lean on God and his understanding for what is, is going to be a meaningful, bright. ....AMAZING future with, ... two beautiful daughters and an AMAZING wife and all the people that I meet. He has this plan that when I was doing drugs in the kitchen or, ... smoking cigarettes or drinking that I would never have imagined for myself until I just surrendered to God so that he could take control over my life so that he could guide me and use me as a tool and point me in the direction that he wanted me to be. And when I serve God, man, all my anxieties are gone.

There are gods in our life, whether we admit to them being gods or not. And I, I call them lowercase "g" —little "g"— gods, the alcohol god, the god of, of, of sex, the god of gambling, the god of the food addiction, these little "g" gods. Those are the idols in our life that we introduce into our lives that we, ..., we are,   📍 ... worshiping at the altar.  When I smoke a cigarette, I am giving five minutes of my time at the altar of the smoking god. ... when I'm drinking a 6 pack or a 12 pack, I'm giving that time in my evening or morning, depends on how bad of an alcoholic I am, ..., to that altar of the beer god, the alcohol god. So God put this ability in me to be addicted to cigarettes and to be addicted to alcohol. And so when, when I'm boo hooing myself and feeling sorry about my addictions and why, why God did you put this in me to be addicted to   📍 alcohol and   📍 cigarettes and   📍 all these drugs and   📍 anger, you know,  because I want to make it more relatable to everyone here.