Overcoming Spiritual Bondage

This article supplements the sanctification section of How the Gospel Works by giving a thorough and effective guide to overcoming addictions and other unhealthy compulsive behaviors using the power of the gospel.

Overview

The world offers two extremes for dealing with addictions and unhealthy compulsive behaviors: embrace, celebrate, and identify with them, or reject all responsibility and see them as a disease or something otherwise completely out of your control. Christianity offers a middle ground, grounded in the concept of “agency,” which means you have both the ability and the responsibility to overcome your spiritual bondage. It is great news that you can overcome your addictions and compulsions, guaranteed, but also bad news that no one is going to fix them for you. Until you take responsibility for addressing the root of the problem, you have no hope of true escape before death. At most you can hope for a temporary victory that eventually results in a relapse and an inevitable binge cycle.

It is certainly the case that if you’re in bondage, you were harmed, neglected, or abandoned by those in your life who were supposed to care for you, protect you, and show you how to be healthy and happy. This is not fair. You may even wonder why God did not protect you, if He cares about you so much, but as hard as that is to deal with (I will explore this more in my discussion about death and suffering), the fact is, He does care for you, He is with you right now, and He can bring you freedom in this next season of your life. Do not let how unfair the situation is sap you of the will to take ownership of the problem. God will guide you, and He will bring others into your life to assist you as needed, but you have to be the driving force to make this happen.

Note: Victory is not achieved by controlling your external circumstances. You will always have trials and difficult seasons, and you must learn to deal with them as God intends, not through sinning. The good news is that you can be like Jesus, who encountered incredible challenges but was never dragged around or bullied by them. Even being murdered could only keep Him down for three days.

If you have prayed to God for release from an addiction or compulsion and not received it, you are dealing with spiritual bondage, not a sinful lifestyle (discussed shortly). You cannot pray your way out of bondage. Instead, you can pray your way into clarity about the path you must walk to find freedom. That’s why you’re here. But you’re not going to find immediate, supernatural release from spiritual bondage that lasts forever. You must deal with the underlying problems to achieve permanent release.

This is an essential component of spiritual maturity. As you mature as a Christian, you will progress from God constantly taking care of things miraculously to Him stepping in mostly when you cry out for help solving unsolvable problems. This reflects how a parent handles all logistics for a baby but not for an older child. Hence, your early victories in Christ may be largely passive, but eventually God is going to guide you through the hard work of facing and overcoming your spiritual brokenness. He will be by your side every step of the way, but like the Israelites conquering the Promised Land, you must be willing to face what stands in the way of your spiritual inheritance and overcome it by faith.

Some people, even Christians, will find this approach intolerable, preferring to either wallow in despair or turn back to containment or minimization techniques that have never secured true freedom when they’ve been tried in the past. That’s because escaping spiritual bondage requires the courage to face things you’ve previously decided not to face and to confess things you’re scared to confess. While you should feel compassion for yourself about the factors outside of your control that led you into bondage, you mustn’t disavow your role in your bondage or refuse to take responsibility for freeing yourself.

Fortunately, this path will always be available to come back to when you’re ready for it. Unfortunately, until you do so, you won’t find true freedom any other way (any technique or process that works will be relatively close to this one), so you will be stuck where you are until you return.

One thing’s for sure: you’re not going to get what you want just by wanting it really hard. Anything good in life can only be attained through hard work, which in this context doesn’t mean willpower, but rather diligently applying yourself to the process of escaping bondage. If you can decide that you’re not going to rest until you have the freedom, happiness, joy, and sense of purpose promised you in Christ, rest assured that you will attain it.

The Role of Others

Your freedom from bondage does not require anyone else to change their behavior, even a spouse or parent. You can show others the way through your success, and you can teach those interested to follow in your footsteps, but you cannot force others to change, nor should you refuse to change yourself if others do not go along with you. Respect the autonomy of others and take responsibility for yourself.

Furthermore, you don’t need help from anyone else to find freedom from bondage. Some recovery programs teach (dangerously) that “you can’t do this alone.” The problem with this attitude is that it can make you feel helpless or unable to succeed if you find yourself without support. However, working with others does make this process much, much easier.

Experts (even non-Christian experts on topics like exploring your personal history to understand the origins of your addictions) can give you knowledge in an instant that might take you months or years to figure out on your own. Support from peers who are also struggling or from those who have overcome bondage themselves and are now helping others can considerably lighten your load and strengthen you with encouragement. They also can pray for you after you confess your sins to them, which can be a fast pass to healing (James 5:16).

In summary, you would be wise to seek help from others, but you don’t strictly need them. As Galatians 6:2-5 states clearly, we can bear each other’s burdens, but each of us will bear our own load. If you are unable to find the support you need from others, God will make up the difference.

I have identified and laid out ten steps below that you can follow to overcome any spiritual bondage.

Step 1: Convert

If you wish to be free from sin, you need help from the God who died to save you from your sins (Matthew 1:21). Converting to Christianity does so much more than just “save you from Hell.” It gives you access to spiritual power, resources, and tools to find healing from the suffering you have brought on yourself from your own foolish choices or that was inflicted on you by the evil actions of others. In the faith, you have the opportunity to find a peace that surpasses understanding (Philippians 4:7) and a spiritually (not materially) abundant life (John 10:10).

Note that I said “opportunity.” Being in the faith does not guarantee these things. The blessings of the faith are found through sanctification, which requires stepping out in faith and with courage to obey God’s callings to you. If as a Christian you refuse to face and overcome your sin by God’s power, you will remain in spiritual limbo until you decide to listen and obey God.

If you haven’t read it yet, I strongly encourage you to review How the Gospel Works, because it is the foundation for the approach I am laying out here. Once you understand how the Christian faith works, I would call your attention to a few aspects of it that will be highly relevant to overcoming spiritual bondage:

If you are not in Christ, the Bible says your mind is set on the things of “the flesh” instead of the things of the Spirit (Romans 8:6). This means, whether you realize it or not, that you are committed to sinning. By contrast, those who are in Christ still sin, but they fight against their sin, instead of allying with it and identifying with it.
You cannot truly escape something without first renouncing your allegiance to it, which cannot be done without the liberty provided by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Corinthians 3:17). From the moment of our conversion, the Holy Spirit miraculously and powerfully intervenes in our lives to help us overcome sin and live in accordance with God’s will, which is always for our good (Romans 8:28). Obviously, this has significant implications for our attempts to escape spiritual bondage.
As I will discuss shortly, to escape guilt, you need freedom from condemnation. To escape shame, you need to become a new creation of intrinsic worth and value that cannot be sullied by the words or actions of others. And to overcome overwhelming life stressors, you need a courage that requires knowing that God is for you, not against you. Only in Christ can you have these three incredible blessings.
Efforts to develop health for the body are important, but spiritual development is more important (1 Timothy 4:18). Nothing done for your good in this life is worth anything if it leads to destruction in the next (read Matthew 18:8-9 for a blunt presentation of this reality by Jesus). If you’re not pursuing God, you’re missing the forest for the trees by pursuing health of any other kind without pursuing spiritual health first.

A word on studying the Bible: the most popular English Bible translation is the New International Version (NIV), which is fine for a starter Bible. My personal favorite is the New King James Version (NKJV), which is a good one to have as you go deeper into the faith. I highly recommend using Bible Gateway, which gives you free and instant access to every major translation (you can easily switch between them using a dropdown) and is my online Bible tool of choice.

Step 2: Identify Your Sin

Before you can overcome spiritual bondage, it is important to clarify what spiritual bondage is. In American culture, we classify a variety of compulsions as addictions, but some, like a habit of gossip, we might consider more of a character flaw, moral failing, or vice. This unnatural segregation is further compounded when we break out each addiction into its own category (alcohol, sex, narcotics, etc.) and treat them all separately. This unfortunately leads to people thinking they are special or strange because they are “addicts,” which can amplify shame or lay a heavier burden on those stuck in such bondages.

In truth, while different sins function differently and appeal to people for different reasons, all violations of God’s law that become habitual and a centerpiece of one’s identity and lifestyle are candidates for spiritual bondage. As we will discuss in the next step, whether a habitual sin qualifies as spiritual bondage has more to do with its role in your life than the nature of the sin itself. For now, suffice it to say that habitual sins become spiritual bondage when they become a source of comfort, purpose, and/or hope. Spiritual bondage is thus a form of idolatry, which is the replacement of God in a person’s life with something that is part of creation.

Because it is the nature of fallen mankind that all people are sinners (Romans 3:23) – and if you say you aren’t, you are a liar (1 John 1:10) – you have sin in your life. Furthermore, if you have not developed a mature faith and are not following closely in Jesus’ footsteps in all aspects of your life, you are going to have one or more patterns of sin in your life that are habitual in nature, not merely incidental or occasional.

You may already be aware of what your habitual sin is, but if you need clarity, God gives believers two witnesses to testify to all things concerning Himself: the Bible and the Holy Spirit. These should both be consulted, as without listening to the Holy Spirit, you may end up in heresy while studying the Bible, and without studying the Bible, you may be deceived by false spirits while listening to the Holy Spirit (1 John 4:1).

Studying the Bible and praying should bring you clarity about where you regularly violate God’s Law. If you still need further assistance, consult a Bible teacher (e.g., a pastor) or just ask a loved one who cares about you. If you give them permission to be blunt and open, you will probably get some honest guidance real quick.

When judging whether a behavior of yours qualifies as spiritual bondage, look for habits that drain your energy, make you feel guilty or ashamed, cause loved ones to be upset with you, or caused loved ones to be concerned for you. Example bondages include pornography use (or other sexually immoral acts like soliciting prostitution or having affairs), drug abuse, excessive gambling, excessive shopping, and excessive sugar consumption.

Compulsive disorders such as OCD or anorexia might in certain cases fall under this umbrella (though this would require a different classification scheme for mental health problems than what is popularly used right now), but I do not pretend to be an expert on such disorders. The criteria for habitual sin could perhaps even be widened to include malignant behaviors like harming others (e.g., physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, molesting children, etc.), in which case these treatment principles might still apply, but confession to legal authorities and voluntarily submitting to restraint from interaction with victims might apply as well.

If you are a Christian who has been trapped in sin for a while and don’t know how to escape (a very common situation), it’s possible God told you the way to escape in the past, but you ignored Him. At this point you may have forgotten doing so, but what might have happened is that you asked for the way of escape, He called you to do something that terrified you or that you were unwilling to do (like the rich young ruler in Matthew 19:22), and you decided not to listen. At this point, you’ve done this long enough that you’ve quenched the Holy Spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:19), to the point where you can’t hear Him anymore.

You have therefore been stuck ever since He first called you to step out in faith and begin making things right. If you promise Him sincerely you will do whatever He tells you to do this time, and ask Him for guidance, He will oblige. However, don’t be surprised when He gives you the same instruction He gave you before. His instruction won’t change, but your response must.

Step 3: Try to Quit

This may seem obvious, but if you haven’t done it before, when you identify a pattern of behavior in your life that the Bible calls sin, attempt to quit. Rid yourself and your home of the sin and any associated paraphernalia. Avoid places and people that would draw you back into your sin. Most importantly, pray to God for freedom and then see if you can stop your behavior through sheer force of will.

This simple exercise separates spiritual bondages from sinful lifestyles. Sinful lifestyles are habitual sins built around the pursuit of pleasure and can therefore be abandoned immediately upon entering the faith. Christians are often amazed at how easily and quickly they can let go of such a significant pattern of habitual sin in their lives. They are then equally discouraged at how other habits of sin (spiritual bondages) prove so incredibly difficult to escape by comparison.

The reason why is that, unlike a sinful lifestyle, a spiritual bondage is built around trauma, pain, fear, guilt, and/or shame. It is not something you do simply for enjoyment, but as a way of dealing with things you cannot face otherwise. Therefore, you will not find immediate deliverance from spiritual bondage; instead, the other parts of your life have to orient around healing, including your relationships, your career, your physical health, your spiritual habits, etc. Without going through that journey, you will forever remain powerless to escape.

Step 4: Educate Yourself

If you attempt to quit your habitual sin and find yourself compulsively relapsing, you are dealing with spiritual bondage. You must now begin the journey of healing that will not only provide you relief from your compulsion, but also deeper healing and a closeness to God you’ve never experienced before.

As Sun Tzu advised, “Know thy enemy.” If you’re going to overcome an obstacle, you must understand what you’re up against. Moreover, your sin is thriving on your failure to properly understand and explore how it works and what it represents spiritually. You need to bring it into the light so you can see properly how to slay it.

First of all, every sin represents a spiritual crime and is ultimately an offense against God, who created you and therefore has the fundamental right to dictate your behavior. In Psalm 51, David confesses and processes a grievous sin: he slept with a close friend’s wife (Bathsheba), accidentally got her pregnant, then murdered his friend and married his newly widowed wife to conceal his sin. This act caused a rift between David and God that God bridged by sending a prophet to call David out and publicly expose his crime. In the psalm, David is reconnecting with God and asking Him to cleanse him from the inside out and forgive his sin.

In verse 4, however, David makes a startling statement: “Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight.” Now, David is not denying that he has harmed his friend or his friend’s wife. He is simply underscoring that the first and most important problem with sin is its violation of our relationship with God, who created and sustains us and everything else in the universe.

Once we understand this aspect of our sin, we can turn to the next major issue: entitlement. Because we have no right ever under any circumstance to willfully sin, when we do, we are harboring some kind of entitlement that justifies this behavior in our own eyes. We think we are “owed” something that doesn’t belong to us, or we think we are special and don’t have to abide by the same rules as everyone else. You must seek to uncover what lies you are telling yourself to support your sin.

Next, we must recognize how our sin harms others. Let’s say, for example, that you cheat on your spouse with prostitutes. On the one hand, you harm your spouse by violating the oath you swore to be faithful to them, meaning you are betraying their trust and faith in you. You also risk exposing them to an STD you might contract from one of your other sexual partners. On the other hand, you degrade and abuse the prostitutes by treating them like objects instead of people with inherent dignity who deep down yearn for a decent life, but are instead ensnared in sexual sin, continuously violated, most likely lifelong victims of sexual trafficking, probably harboring the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, and are now most likely addicted to drugs or alcohol to numb the horror of their existence.

Finally, you must be honest about how you harm yourself. In this example, you are hypersexualizing your psyche, such that you look at every potential object of your lust with sexual hunger. Moreover, you may be developing erectile dysfunction (if you are a man) or other forms of sexual disinterest in your married sex life. And of course, you could contract an STD, potentially causing permanent illness or injury.

That all represents what your sin is right now. But spiritual bondages escalate. Eventually you will have to go deeper and darker than you ever thought you would, breaking through taboos and boundaries, to find the same sense of comfort, in whatever form your comfort takes (pleasure, peace, excitement, etc.). If you go dark and deep enough, your spiritual pursuits will shrivel and die (James 1:15), and then you will die as well (Romans 8:13).

There are plenty of resources, including Christian ones, about common spiritual bondages (e.g., drugs, pornography) that you can find that can help you with your education process, but you must be ready to embrace the elements of them that are helpful and reject the aspects that might accidentally cause increased shame or feelings of helplessness.

The one book I’ve found that was both extremely insightful and completely compatible with this approach to overcoming spiritual bondage is Overcoming Overeating by Jane Hirschmann and Carol Munter (the article I’ll link to shortly on fasting alerted me to it), which deals with compulsive eating. Because of our culture’s toxic approach to food and weight, and because everyone eats, I would recommend it to everyone. Otherwise, there’s nothing else I’ve yet found that I can fully endorse.

There are lots of truths that will appear amongst most such guides to addiction and other unhealthy compulsive habits, such as:

Deep down, you may be far less willing to abandon your bondage than you realize. When you truly get the opportunity, you will realize how much it has come to define you and become a dependable part of your life, even though you may hate it intellectually. You will need to confront this unpleasant truth to be free, addressing this harboring of the enemy within your soul by attempting to get around the side of your sin and come face-to-face with it, so you can see it clearly.
Most likely those who care about you (parents, spouse, children) have been pleading with you to stop hurting yourself. If so, you have sinned against them by disregarding their pleas.
You may need to hit rock bottom to truly make the commitment required to escape bondage. Have you ever heard the phrase “moment of clarity”? It refers to that moment when addicts become suddenly aware of their situation from an objective outside perspective. For one moment, they stop defending or protecting their addiction, stop turning blame around on those trying to help them, stop excusing and minimizing their behavior, and they realize exactly what they’re involved in. Once this moment happens, they usually develop a burning resolve to quit, because addiction feeds off a victim mentality and a refusal to take accountability. Once the lie is exposed, it is hard to maintain.
If it is not you but rather a loved one enslaved to some destructive bondage, you can educate them and express your concern for their welfare or how they are hurting you with their behavior, but they have to make the decision to be free themselves. You cannot force or manipulate them into freedom. Be in prayer that they would have a moment of clarity.
When you submit to bondage, you pursue temporary happiness by indulging your base instincts and maximizing your pleasure, but you don’t end up with contentment and fulfillment. Instead, you end up miserable, exhausted, in broken relationship with others, and ultimately looking for an escape. Sin only pretends to be helpful. At this point, you have at least some awareness that your bondage isn’t achieving what you initially started using it for.

There are additional aspects of spiritual bondage that most resources you may come across will either not discuss or will not put together into a complete picture:

Temptation comes from your own evil desires, not God (James 1:13-14).
Your bondage began with a choice to yield to such temptation, at which point you chose comfort over courage. Bondage continues as a voluntary action that reinforces your original choice, even if you desire to no longer make this choice but are instead spiritually enslaved.
While you are spiritually enslaved, you still have agency and must take responsibility for your choices. It is not a disease (even if there’s a “genetic component,” it’s a generational curse). You can choose to stop if you access the freeing power of Christ’s redemption. You are not a victim, because a victim is not complicit in a sinful act and therefore does not need to repent. Do not let yourself be coddled or adopt a victim mentality, or else you will never be free.
A victim mentality reinforces guilt and shame, because your guilt increases every time you sin, and feeling victimized increases the sense of shame (because shame is induced by mistreatment, which is synonymous with victimization). It can also lead to resignation and giving up, if you come to believe none of your efforts can lead to freedom.
Guilt is justified if you are willingly engaging in evil. The proper response to this justified guilt is repentance.
Shame is a natural response to mistreatment and cannot be simply hand-waved away. I will discuss shortly how it can be properly dealt with.
Some forms of spiritual bondage, like sexual immorality, are not discussed openly in Christian communities, but are instead “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Moreover, many Christians believe that repentance and conversion alone will lead automatically to an end to such behaviors. These two factors magnify the shame Christians feel in their difficulties when they try and fail to free themselves from bondage.
When you submit to God’s healing process, the only way out of your bondage is through the painful reality and consequences of your situation. I describe it as “God performing open-heart surgery without anesthesia.” It hurts like heck, but it leaves you healed in the end. I urge you to persevere.

Step 5: Summarize Your Bondage

Once you have the necessary information about what your bondage is, I would suggest writing down a summary of your bondage and your commitment to be free. In this summary, include what your bondage is, why it’s wrong, how you have harmed others, and how you’ve harmed yourself. Be sure to include the lies you’ve told your loved ones and the promises you’ve broken.

You should also describe what you’ve done in the past to try to quit that has failed: all the cold turkey willpower-based efforts, the endless rehabs, the attempts to structure or minimize your behavior. Write down a statement in which you recognize that none of them have ever worked and that you’re done trying them. (Note: a rehab program might still be helpful for you going forward, if you take ownership of your recovery and address the spiritual aspects of your bondage in the process).

Finally, write out the pain you feel. Pour out your frustration, anger, grief, despair, and sense of hopelessness. Dictate a solemn pledge to do whatever God tells you to do to be free and express that you are placing your absolute faith in Him to lead you to freedom.

I would not suggest sharing all the details of your summary with your spouse, as it can fracture an already damaged relationship (I will discuss coming clean shortly). If you bring in others to help you, you can share some or all of it with them as is appropriate and helpful.

Step 6: Accept Your Situation

This step may seem a little odd, but it is still extremely important. Once you have summarized your current situation and where you’ve pledged to direct your energy to find freedom, you need to accept your situation for what it is. In other words, now that you’ve abandoned the failures of your previous path, understand where you need to head, and are following closely behind Jesus, at this moment you are where you are, and that’s OK.

This does not mean accepting yourself the way you are or the situation the way it is but rather accepting that you are the way you are, and the situation is the way it is. Your mistakes and folly have led you to where you are, but God’s going to take you somewhere new and better. You may lose things you value in the process (especially the trust of loved ones when you come clean), and there may be harm done to yourself or others that cannot be fully healed in this life, but you’re on your way to the best outcome possible for your current starting place.

This also does not mean “loving yourself the way you are,” believing that your bondage is good, believing it’s a disease and therefore outside your control, or accepting that you’ll never quit. You are simply recognizing that you cannot force yourself into spiritual freedom, nor can you make up lost time in an instant. The only way out is through healing, and now you’re on that path. Therefore, you can breathe easy and accept yourself and your situation without condemnation.

It’s going to take what it takes to be free. It is what it is. Whatever you’ve done to quit before hasn’t worked, so you’re never going back there, because it’s not the path to freedom. You’ve made a commitment not to quit by willpower, but rather to pursue health in accordance with God’s love for you and your willingness to love Him and love yourself and others accordingly. Therefore, if you follow through, you will succeed.

If you are worried about following through, ask God to give you determination and steadfast purpose. At every step in this process, when you feel overwhelmed or hopeless, pray for courage and endurance. Remind yourself and God that you are done with your bondage and ready and willing to do whatever it takes to be rid of it. Like your savior Jesus, you must endure this trial, despising the shame of it, that you may attain the joy promised you (Hebrews 12:2), willing to suffer with Jesus that you may be glorified with Him (Romans 8:17).

Step 7: Come Clean

Once you’ve accepted and made peace with your current situation, it’s time to come clean to those you’re accountable to and apologize for any harm you’ve caused others. This includes coming clean both to God and to other people.

Sincerely apologizing to God is the highest priority (as we’ve discussed previously) and is the definition of what “repentance” is. Acknowledging and confessing your violations of God’s laws and goodness are critical to moving onto a new path. Also, because God is forever anxious to reconcile with sinners, He promises to accept your apology and help you move forward without judgment or condemnation. As David says in the previously mentioned psalm of confession, God will never despise a broken and contrite heart (Psalm 51:17).

Next comes the hard part of confessing to others. True repentant apologies are scary, because you cannot control how the other person will react, and you must respect however they choose to respond, no matter how angry or unforgiving they may be. If you find yourself demanding (either in your head or with your voice) that the other person forgive you simply because you apologized, then you aren’t truly apologizing.

Furthermore, confessing out loud makes it obvious how gross our pattern of sin truly is. After all, sin thrives by festering in the concealed cesspools of our wicked hearts. When we bring it into the light to disinfect it (1 John 1:7), it becomes obvious how paltry our justifications and entitlement mentality truly are.

Ever tried to explain logically and dispassionately to someone out loud why it was OK to violate their trust or harm them without cause? It comes out pretty wobbly and weak. At any rate, at this point, you’re leaning into the idea that there are no such valid justifications and that you’re taking complete responsibility for your failings. Having to confess to others is such a painful experience that you won’t readily go back to something that would make you have to confess all over again.

Now, you don’t have to share every detail, nor do you have to disclose everything to a loved one right away if you still need help getting a grasp on the situation and how to address it. You can use discretion in what you share or delay a full disclosure until later, as long as you adhere to the following guidelines:

In the end, your loved one or victim must be completely aware of how you’ve harmed them, at least at a high level.
You are not kicking the can down the road and attempting to put off confession indefinitely but are rather using wisdom to determine the appropriate time to confess.
You cannot delay at all if doing so would make it awkward or difficult to get the help from others you need (professionals and/or allies).

When you confess, make amends as possible, seek forgiveness, and pursue reconciliation. Accept that you may not get perfect understanding and a lack of consequences but still hope that God would move others to show you mercy and compassion. Understand that in the worst cases, you may have done enough damage to a relationship to make it permanently injured or irreparably broken. The one relationship you won’t lose is your relationship with God, who will never leave you nor forsake you, which means you can be strong and of good courage (Deuteronomy 31:7-8).

Step 8: Fast

Now that you’ve confessed, it’s time to cure your sinful habit once and for all.

Seem a bit sudden? Like you haven’t gotten to the meat of the treatment approach yet? The truth is, typical addiction treatments are backwards, because they seek to remove triggers in order to heal the addiction. In reality, you need to conquer the addiction first, because you can never ensure your equilibrium won’t get unbalanced beyond your ability to handle it. Breaking the bondage is the easy part – dealing with the underlying problems afterwards is the hard part.

How do you break the bondage? With a three-day fast. I have used the technique developed by Frank Viola with great success. Follow every step to the letter in How to Break an Addiction.

This process will create a disconnect between you and your sin, reconnect you with God, and give you the power to stop engaging in your sinful habit once and for all. It also demonstrates how serious you are about this, both to yourself and to God.

At this time, if you haven’t already, you also need to fully cleanse your environment of the source of your sin, any associated paraphernalia, and any unhealthy relationships or arrangements that encourage or support your sin.

Note that the three-day fast is a one-time thing for each spiritual bondage. You will not need to do this regularly. I occasionally fast for a single day to get answers from God on difficult topics I am wrestling with, but a full three days should only be needed when you intend to alter the trajectory of your life.

Be sure to understand: once you’ve broken the power of your bondage and have the ability to refuse to engage in it, you will start suffering when you experience triggers for your bondage. After all, you have not healed the underlying problems yet – that happens in the next step. Until you fully resolve the issues that drew you into bondage in the first place, you are going to be in pain when you experience something you used to use your bondage to soothe yourself in response to.

However, with most bondages, you can now “stop using” and simply endure the pain when it comes and goes (and it will go if you relax and turn to God in prayer). Now, there are some bondages (like food) where the sin is based not so much on what the behavior is but rather what it represents in your life, and, in these cases, it is not always immediately clear what it means to “stop using.” In other words, your goal may not be to quit sugar completely, but to only eat anything your body prompts you to eat in response to a genuine feeling of hunger, sugar or not. Similarly, you may not need to cut off toxic people in your life completely but rather set up and enforce healthy boundaries.

For objects of bondage that are inherently sinful (like pornography), you can and should quit completely at this point. I assure you, once you solve the underlying issues, it will not be difficult to “stay clean.” In the meantime, 1 Corinthians 10:13 promises that with every temptation that comes upon a Christian, God makes a “way of escape.” If you seek God in prayer when you’re tempted, now that you’ve fasted and broken the power of your bondage, He will show you how to endure it.

Of course, if you choose to return to your bondage in the face of a powerful temptation, you don’t need to yank the train off the tracks. Remember, this is a journey. Recommit yourself to pursuing God above all else and use the techniques in the next step to analyze the temptation and heal from whatever drove it. If you have performed your three-day fast, you still have the power to say no. You will only need to fast again if you have not merely relapsed but actually given up on this entire journey for a time. If you have remained committed to the healing process, you can simply pick yourself up and keep on moving forward.

I would highly recommend not “measuring your sobriety,” by which I mean keeping a precise log of the last time you used your bondage of choice. This technique merely produces shame and a sense of starting all over if you decide to go back to your bondage, even for a single day. If you have been on a healing journey for a while, and God presents you with some internal pain that you are too afraid to face and thus choose to escape from using your bondage instead, your journey does not start over. It continues forward uninterrupted, with you now tackling the new obstacle you hadn’t been forced to face before. Do not reset the clock on your sobriety.

It’s critical to understand that spiritual freedom is about being, not doing. The goal is not to stop engaging in your sinful habit, but rather to become the kind of person who neither wants nor needs to engage in it. This is hard for us, because “becoming” and “being” are hard to measure and quantify. From the outside, a person white knuckling a temporary sobriety might look the same as someone enjoying complete relaxation and freedom from their sinful impulses, but the internal experience is completely different. Don’t worry about measuring your success, other than by how close you feel yourself drawing to God through this process.

One technique that you might find helpful in dealing with temptation and overpowering impulses is the F.A.S.T.E.R. relapse awareness scale. This scale helps you recognize when you are headed for a major temptation before you get there. If you can spot the signs ahead of time, you can head it off at the pass by reorienting yourself in prayer and in the truths I will discuss shortly about God and your bondage.

Remember: If you fail or fall, God is not ashamed of you. He does not condemn you (Romans 8:1). Instead, He pities you as a father pities his children (Psalm 103:13). He loves you. His love is immeasurable (Ephesians 3:17-19), and He is near you in your broken heartedness (Psalm 34:18). He will heal your broken heart and bind up your wounds (Psalm 147:3).

Important note: if you’re going to use stop using an addictive substance, be aware of any hazards you might encounter. With alcohol in particular, you may have to taper down and not quit cold turkey, or you could suffer serious side effects. Educate yourself about the effects of withdrawal.

Also, remember that you don’t have to do this alone. There are plentiful resources of therapists, recovery programs, support groups, etc. However, you need to have a clear understanding of their role in your recovery. Most recovery programs and providers don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle put together to properly deal with addiction, so if you start using their services without intentionality, you may flounder in a state of despair and stagnation, or even define yourself by your addiction and feel hopeless. Instead, identify resources who can help you explore and understand past trauma and the patterns of addiction you have developed as a result (discussed in the next step), or provide you with medical assistance for tapering off an addiction (like methadone or nicotine patches), or help you get in touch with your walled off emotions, or provide pastoral care or helpful life counseling, or just be an ally and friend as you address your problem. Seek out the helpers you need and use them wisely.

Step 9: Resolve the Underlying Problem

For this step, it would be helpful to think of your bondage as a puzzle to solve, rather than a miserable trial to endure. As long as you’re being open and honest with those who care about you, you can demonstrate that you’ve applied yourself to solving the problem with God’s help, and eventually you will.

I’m going to say something that may come across as unkind, but it’s essential to finding freedom: spiritual bondage has cowardice at its root. At some point, you decided to avoid dealing with a problem in life and instead turned to something that would numb the pain and shut out the feeling of being overwhelmed, eventually resulting in a seemingly inescapable habit, impulse, or addiction.

As you are learning to face your problems with courage, you can and should maintain compassion for yourself. You should maintain awareness of all the factors that stacked the deck against you and made it hard for you to choose to be brave. Nonetheless, you need to become brave now to be free. You need to overcome your demons with God’s help.

However, you are not going to do this by your own strength. Before we proceed further, please read 1 Samuel 17, which tells a story that most Americans are familiar with, the tale of David and Goliath. The details of the story help us understand how the Bible depicts sin.

In this story, Saul is the king and leader of Israel. However, the nation oppressing Israel, Philistia, sends a massive soldier, a literal giant, to challenge Israel to send a champion to face him. Whichever champion slays the other will win victory for his nation. Unfortunately for Israel, Saul and all his soldiers take one look at Goliath and are too afraid to face him. Therefore, Goliath taunts Israel every day for 40 days, mocking Israel and Yahweh, Israel’s God.

In this way, Goliath represents your spiritual bondage. Every time your bondage tempts you and you fail, it mocks your God, asking you how powerful your God can possibly be if you can’t stand up to it. And every time, you are “dismayed and greatly afraid.” Most importantly, this goes on forever until you find a way to defeat it.

Returning to the story, things change for Israel when David comes to visit his older brothers (being too young to serve in the army himself) and hears Goliath’s mocking. Unlike the rest of Israel, he sees the problem from a divine perspective. Instead of seeing Goliath as too mighty to face, he sees Goliath’s taunting as intolerable for the God of Israel. Therefore, whoever stands up to Goliath in faith cannot possibly fail to defeat him.

When no one else is willing to do so, David does so himself. He doesn’t even bother wearing a suit of armor, instead arming himself only with a weapon he is used to using while shepherding, a slingshot. As you probably know, he defeats Goliath with just that slingshot.

The point of the story is that God’s people can overcome problems (including spiritual bondage) not by assessing the problems from a human perspective and relying on their own strength, but by choosing to fight battles for God’s glory and in God’s will. When they do so, God fights for them. There are plenty of stories in the Bible where God throws enemy armies into a panic, rains down stones upon them, or causes enemy soldiers to slay one another. The common element is that He does so when His people go into battle by faith.

Similarly, you will overcome your bondage by God’s power. David was a “type” (symbolic precursor) of Jesus, and Jesus fought and overcame sin by God’s power. As His people, we follow Him and do the same. You don’t need to have stupendous willpower (strength), nor powerful training and techniques (armor and sword). You just have to step out in faith as the person you are today, asking God to help you win this battle.

To enter the battle, you must first realize that if you are in spiritual bondage, then at some point in the past, you encountered something that you were unable to face emotionally. Instead of conquering it with God’s help, you turned to some pattern of sin to soothe yourself in response to the suffering. Eventually, rather than engage in sin every time you suffer, you most likely began sinning habitually to prepare for the suffering you know is coming (preventative soothing vs. responsive soothing). By now, you have been in bondage so long you may not even be aware of what you are medicating and avoiding dealing with in the first place.

A spiritual enslavement may be so deep seated it takes exploration, prayer and fasting to uncover the reality of the situation, especially if you are dealing with an unresolved trauma or wound you received in your childhood, before your sense of identity was solidified and secure. No matter what it is, there is something you are covering up that needs to be exposed and processed using spiritual maturity. Until you do, you are spiritually stuck at the point at which you deviated from God’s path into the darkness of idolatry.

Unfortunately, if you were exposed to pornography or drugs or another unhealthy behavior before or at the same time you first encountered difficult problems in life, you might be completely lacking in healthy alternative coping mechanisms for dealing with negative emotions. You will need to develop those now.

Let’s explore the three things that can push you into the arms of a spiritual bondage: guilt, shame, and life stressors.

Guilt

If you did something of a significantly evil nature at some point in your past, then unless you know how to use Christ’s atoning sacrifice to wash the scarlet stain of sin as white as snow (Isaiah 1:18), you are going to be left in a state of unresolved anxiety and unhappiness, which I refer to as “guilt.” In this case, you engage in spiritual bondage in an attempt to disconnect your psyche from these feelings.

Let’s consider the options for dealing with your guilt:

Option 1: Suppress it and refuse to acknowledge it. This is unhealthy, because you know deep down what you did, and you cannot obtain freedom and health by denying your past.
Option 2: Force yourself to believe that your actions weren’t wrong. Of course, to be intellectually consistent, you would have to reprogram your mind to convince yourself that your actions were morally acceptable and that you’re willing to live a life in which you cannot be angry at anyone who does the same thing.
Option 3: Force yourself to believe that there is no such thing as right and wrong at all. In this case, to be intellectually consistent, you cannot ever be mad at anyone who harms you or your loved ones in any way. That’s a very hard road to go down.
Option 4: Create a double standard, where it’s OK for you to do what you did but not for anyone else to do it. This requires an extreme and permanent arrogance and haughtiness, because you have to believe you’re special and the rules that apply to others don’t apply to you.
Option 5: Try to move on and live with no regrets. Unfortunately, you can’t truly live with no regrets because, deep down, humans understand that justice must be served.
Option 6: In Christianity, the substitutionary atonement (Christ dying for our sin) allows for justice to be served while saving us from suffering the punishment we deserve. When you repent, you experience God’s forgiveness, and your debt is wiped clean. You no longer carry it around with you, because your sin has been removed from you as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). At that point, you will begin to feel convicted to make things right with whomever you have wronged. To deal with this, simply pray for God to make clear to you what you must do to make amends. You may need to confess, apologize, restore something taken, repay a debt, etc. Once you have done that, you will be completely free from the feeling of guilt and will be able to move on.

Right now, you may be experiencing deep confusion, because if you converted to Christianity later in life or were raised with a twisted version of Christianity, your belief system of origin may have proclaimed that what you did was morally acceptable, even though you knew instinctively from the Law of God written on your heart that it was wrong, and you haven’t reconciled the disconnect. Studying the Bible will help you figure out these moral contradictions.

Furthermore, there may be “reasons” you sinned, which explain why you did what you did. But reasons are not excuses. You can exercise compassion toward yourself without rejecting the fundamental responsibility all men have to obey God 100% of the time. You must still repent and work through your wrongdoing.

At this point, you should have abandoned preventative soothing, and therefore you are feeling impulses to sin when circumstances or thoughts trigger your buried sensation of guilt. Thus, to uncover the source of your guilt, you must wait until you are triggered and then analyze the thoughts or circumstances you experience when triggered.

It may be helpful to work with a professional (counselor, therapist, pastor, etc.) to accelerate your investigation, as well as to help you learn healthy coping strategies for dealing with overwhelming feelings that might come up as you dig into your past. Important: Don’t go it alone for major issues, don’t stop medical treatments without consulting your medical team, and always get immediate help in serious situations (like calling a hotline if you feel suicidal). Focus on getting a care team you trust, and then you’re responsible for organizing your care properly and using whatever input they give you in a wise manner. You will only go wrong by not firing someone you don’t trust or by letting someone else, even someone well intentioned, determine your care for you (unless you’re a minor, in which case your guardian can take a leading role).

If therapy seems shameful to you, think of it merely as hiring someone who specializes in processing and healing from trauma. You would hire a doctor if you broke a bone because, unless you are a doctor, you do not specialize in healing broken bones. Similarly, you are not born knowing how to deal with a damaged psyche, so hire a professional. Just be sure to avoid anyone who insists that you disavow all guilt and renounce all moral responsibility for the picture you’re putting together around your bondage.

Once you have identified the source of your guilt, you simply apologize to God, acknowledging that you had no right to sin (no matter how understandable it may have been) and asking Him to apply Christ’s sacrifice to your spiritual debt. You may have to do this several times as new layers and nuances of guilt come up, but soon you will feel a sense of release and freedom, because Christ’s sacrifice does cancel out our guilt.

Once you feel that release, you may still have subsequent attacks of guilt and condemnation. Find Bible verses that reference the cleansing power of God’s forgiveness and recite them to yourself as a mantra in those moments. Psalm 103:12, Isaiah 1:18, and Romans 8:1 are good examples. You need to convince yourself that your repentance really has freed you from the burden you were carrying. And, because it’s true, you will not have tension and stress brewing under the surface anymore from an unacknowledged truth buried under a comforting lie.

Shame

In my parlance, guilt is the pain of remembering something awful that you did, while shame is the pain of remembering something awful done to you. Both are the result of trauma, which is an event or action that causes ongoing psychological harm.

Regarding shame, our sense of identity is much more passively determined than we often realize or like to admit – in other words, how people treat us communicates to us how we deserve to be treated. When others treat you like you’re worthless, particularly in your formative years, you come to believe (often unconsciously) that you are worthless, and you end up feeling suppressed, inferior, and/or helpless.

Shame-inducing harm can be active (abuse) or passive (neglect). It can also be individual (inflicted on just you) or collective (inflicted on an entire group you belong to). Let’s look at some examples of trauma that can induce a sense of worthlessness:

A parent who disregards or abandons his or her children is telling them they are worthless (individual neglect).
Any authority figure who physically or sexually abuses a child is communicating to them that the authority figure’s emotional or sexual self-gratification is more important than the child’s dignity, and hence the child is worthless (individual abuse).
Parents who spend their earnings on alcohol over the material needs of their children communicate to the children that they are worthless (individual neglect).
A nation that invades, conquers, and exploits another nation communicates to the people of the colonized nation that they are without inherent dignity and are therefore worthless (collective abuse).
Avaricious politicians who betray and exploit their constituents to amass money or power are telling the people they are supposed to be representing that they aren’t worth protecting (collective abuse or collective neglect, depending on circumstance).
A racial group that discriminates against another racial group is treating the latter group as if they are of less inherent worth than the former group (collective abuse).
People who grow up in impoverished neighborhoods or ghettos have been left behind by their own politicians and citizens from other locations within the same nation, thereby growing up being told they are not worth helping out (collective neglect).

Shame therefore comes not from mistreatment, but from accepting what the mistreatment says about you. The mistreatment itself is not the source of your ongoing suffering, but rather your impaired sense of identity. Anyone who has dwelt for a long time on a negative comment made offhand by a complete stranger knows how hard it is to cope with the harmful behavior of others. This is the key to shame: how you think about yourself is dependent on how others treat you. It is not in your control – it is in the control of others.

The key to conquering shame is not to shut out the harmful message, but rather to override it with a higher priority message. Think about if, while growing up, a kid at school insulted you, and you felt bad. However, when you got home, you told your father, and after listening thoughtfully, he explained clearly and rationally why the kid who insulted you was completely wrong, what his real motivations for insulting you were, and how you could best deal with his abuse in the future. Your initial wounded identity would be upgraded and matured to a level that could now deal with insults of a similar nature without being harmed again.

This is what God can do for us, if we let Him. Jesus was mistreated worse than anyone else in history (because He was sinless and didn’t deserve anything negative that was ever directed toward him, much less a brutal political martyrdom), but He knew who He was and whose Son He Was, so He died with His head held high. In fact, on the cross, He was not only not wounded by His murderers, but He prayed for them as they were murdering Him (Luke 23:34). That is what the highest level of identity security looks like.

Interestingly, religious radicalization exploits the concept of identity security. Religious extremists and cultists give systemically oppressed or neglected people a sense of worth and dignity, which is why people will willingly blow themselves up or set themselves on fire for a religious cause. Such radicalization serves no good in the hands of the wicked, but a healthy and godly version of this is what you will use to overcome any spiritual bondage that is rooted in shame.

To do this, you must first acquaint yourself with what the Bible says about you and your inherent worth. You must learn how humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27), which is the foundation of our inherent worth and dignity. You must learn that God pities Christians as a father pities his children (Psalm 103:13). You must learn that the very hairs of your head are numbered, because of how much God values you (Matthew 10:30-31). You must learn that nothing can ever separate you from God’s powerful love for you (Romans 8:38-39). Search the Bible or use Bible study aids to find more such verses (there are plenty).

Then, as with guilt, wait until you are triggered and see what thoughts and feelings come up. Whatever comes up, spew out all the darkness within you: “I am worthless, I am selfish, I am stupid, I am careless, I am dirty, I am damaged, I am [insert blank].” But then, speak to what the Bible calls your “being,” which encompasses your mind, psyche, and body, and tell it, “But God loves me anyway.” I call this “applying kindness to the wound.” When we affirm to ourselves our worth in God’s eyes, we rewrite the lies we were told through the neglectful and abusive ways we were treated as we grew up. This gives us strength to overcome compulsive behaviors, as the pain and darkness we are medicating with our compulsions become less frightening and intense the more we see ourselves from God’s perspective.

As you speak to yourself, adapt the declarations to match the pain. So, if your father told you that you were no good, then say something like, “Even though my earthly father told me that, my heavenly Father thinks I was worth sending His son to die for. He loves me dearly, cares for me deeply, and watches over me day and night. My earthly father was wrong when he said that to me. It’s OK that those words wounded me as a child, but I know now that it was a lie. Even though my earthly father was a disappointment, I can still have an incredible relationship and bond with my heavenly Father, first in this life and then forever in the next.”

You should also use this technique of “speaking to your being” to repair your relationship with your heart, mind, soul, and body. Recognize that you have harmed yourself by engaging in spiritual bondage and have consistently used force and abuse to try to manipulate and control yourself. Apologize to your being and tell it that you love it, appreciate it, care for it, and are going to start working with it to accomplish your goals from now on, instead of trying to strong-arm it in a disassociated manner. Just as God cares for you tenderly, you are going to start caring for yourself tenderly.

Note that modern affirmative techniques focus on self-love or self-affirmation, but God’s love is what’s important. After all, the worst people in the world on some level slavishly love themselves. Our self-love is not what matters. What matters is that the perfect God tenderly and kindly loves and cares for us. Our own love cannot override the lies that trauma have embedded in us, but God’s love can.

Now, this process will not be easy. You have to look your pain in the face instead of seeking to soothe it with a hit of your compulsion of choice. But every time you face the aching pain inside and soothe it with the truths the Bible teaches you, the pain recedes. Eventually, it will become decreasingly intimidating and increasingly manageable. Then, to the extent that your bondage was grounded in shame, you will find freedom from it.

Once again, as with guilt, consult a professional as needed to accelerate your investigation into the wounds of your past. Just be sure to find someone who supports this particular approach to overcoming your shame. You can also research meditative practices if you need help connecting your conscious mind with your body (e.g., controlling your breathing or tensing and untensing parts of your body) and/or psyche (e.g., clearing your mind and letting go of thoughts that pop up and consume your attention).

Note also that a major misconception about Christianity amongst those who don’t know the faith well, because of the many false versions of Christianity in America, is that Christianity is all about piling guilt and shame onto believers or using guilt and shame to control their behavior. However, as a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), you are freed from guilt and shame. The Bible clearly teaches that maturity of Christian faith is about living this freedom, not being beaten over the head by abusive spiritual authorities about all your sinful impulses and personal failings.

The Validity of Feelings and Emotions

This approach of overriding shame with higher-level truths is an example of what the Bible refers to as “being transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Replacing the lies of the world with the truths of God in your personal belief system and internal worldview is essential to replacing sin with righteousness and spiritual slavery with liberty.

A major blocker to this is the assumption that our feelings and emotions are always valid (we want to “speak our truth”). But beliefs can be misguided and can thus produce inappropriate feelings and misplaced emotions.

Let’s look at an example of how this might work:

Physical stimulus: I see a cop’s lights and hear a siren and realize I’m being pulled over for speeding.
Belief: I am entitled to drive as fast as I want to wherever I’m going.
Feeling: I’m being wronged by this cop, who is getting in my way.
Emotion: Anger at the cop.

A different belief can produce a different feeling in the exact same situation:

Physical stimulus: I see a cop’s lights and hear a siren and realize I’m being pulled over for speeding.
Belief: Speeding laws exist to keep everyone on the road safe and protect all families in the community, and it is only right that I obey them like everyone else.
Feeling: This cop is justified in pulling me over, and I’ve gone and caused myself a big hassle and expense.
Emotion: Disappointment in myself for breaking the law and anger at myself for the hassle and cost of dealing with the ticket.

Note that Western culture, including Western Christianity, is often very anti-emotion. It classifies many emotions as “bad.” However, all emotions were created by God for specific reasons and, when combined with correct beliefs (those stemming from a Biblical worldview), are always helpful. Every emotion has a purpose. For example, anger exists to motivate you to combat injustice (you are angry when something that isn’t right occurs), and grief exists to help you process the pain of loss.

Therefore, if your emotions are unhelpful, the problem isn’t the emotion, it’s the crooked beliefs leading to misguided emotions. For example, as shown above, someone with a strong sense of entitlement may get angry at anyone who threatens their autonomy, no matter how justified the latter may be in doing so. You must fix such bad beliefs and learn to feel all appropriate emotions, no matter how negative they may be.

Grief and Forgiveness

When processing the harms of your past, you will inevitably be faced with the reality of the ideal upbringing or childhood you were denied through the harm you faced. This represents a loss, which is what the mechanism of grief is designed for. Anytime you have lost something, whether a life you wished you could have had or a loved one or your health (if you have a permanent injury), you must grieve it.

God designed grief to be the spiritual equivalent of vomiting: you have something toxic inside of you that you must expel to recover to full health. Unfortunately for Westerners, it’s impossible to grieve without crying. Stoicism will leave you perpetually poisoned, just as if you suppressed your vomiting reflex after eating bad food. You don’t have to grieve publicly if you find it too embarrassing, but you must certainly do so privately.

I recommend using a process I call “turbo-grieving,” which involves getting it all out quickly, going through the anger and the bargaining and the moaning and the weeping and the despair as fast as possible. It’s very intense, but I’ve been able to grieve significant losses and disappointments in sometimes as little as an hour just by completely giving in to every aspect of the grieving process, no matter how unpleasant. When I’m done, I feel at peace and able to shift my focus to the good things I’ve been privileged to experience, rather than continuously dwelling on the negative.

Of course, occasional sadness and feelings of loss will continue past the end of your grieving. Make sure you always let yourself cry when the impulse comes upon you, even if you have to excuse yourself to a private place to do so.

In addition to grieving, you must forgive anyone who harmed you. God does not simply recommend this, He demands it (Mark 11:25-26). This does not mean accepting or justifying the behavior of the one who harmed you. Instead, it means stepping into the comfort and healing that God offers you. Without forgiveness, you can never be truly healed, nor will you be able to let go of your anger, hatred, and bitterness.

If you struggle with forgiveness, remember that one of two fates awaits the one who harmed you:

They will understand the true extent of their wrongdoing and feel stricken with guilt, repenting to God of their evil ways. They will then receive the healing and divine forgiveness neither they nor we deserve.
They will suffer an eternal punishment so horrible that if we truly understood it, we wouldn’t wish it on anyone, no matter how much pain they’ve inflicted on us.

Once forgiveness and compassion have been extended to the ones who harmed you, you have grieved the losses of your past, and you have communicated to your psyche that you are worthy, full of dignity, and beloved of God, and that any harm speaks to the weakness of the one who harmed you and not to your own inherent worth, you should experience freedom from shame, and you will no longer need your spiritual bondage to combat it.

Life Stressors

Once you deal with any guilt and shame that underlie your bondage, you will have freedom. However, if you’re not careful, you may find yourself returning to your bondage to deal with a completely different emotional or spiritual problem (compare Matthew 12:43-45). To find freedom again, you must deal with the new problem.

Unlike a childhood wound, life stressors are very much in the present. You are again dealing with something that feels overwhelming and unconquerable, but this time the situation is ongoing, rather than a past unprocessed trauma. It could be something in your marriage, family, work, health, finances, relationships with friends, etc. You must address the fact that at some point you began sinfully soothing yourself instead of facing the stressor that won’t go away.

The approach to this type of bondage should be familiar at this point: quit your preventative soothing, wait until you are triggered, and notice what causes you to want to soothe. This time, however, you are not merely processing an old trauma but are facing a present problem with courage. You must recognize something unhealthy in your life that you have failed to deal with. For example, you might be experiencing mistreatment, exploitation, harm, or abuse. You may feel trapped in a situation or taken advantage of by a partner, an employer, a friend, etc. Alternatively, you might be experiencing some kind of pain, either physical or psychological (like boredom or loneliness). No matter what, you must find a way to deal with the problem without escaping.

Note that the problem may not be fixable solely by your own power. That is where God comes in. With man, fixing your situation may be impossible, but with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26). You must therefore turn to God in faith and pray to Him to make a way where there is no way, much as He made a way in the Red Sea by parting the waters after Moses led Israel out of Egypt. Be sure to persist in prayer and “annoy” God into granting your request (Luke 11:5-13; Luke 18:1-8).

Regardless of whether God needs to make a way or whether you simply need to confront something scary head on, God will ask you to take a leap of faith and do something you are anxious about or afraid of doing. This is because the true cause of your suffering is often not your external circumstances, but rather your lack of agency. It is rare for your situation to be something truly inescapable where you are playing no role in your suffering, even if you don’t realize it.

Therefore, God may instruct you to walk away when you are afraid to leave, set up boundaries and require others to treat you with respect, or change your perspective about a situation that seems hopeless. He will challenge your assumptions about what you are truly required to put up with or what cannot be solved with His guidance and support. Then, once you take the initial action He asks you to take, He will move circumstances around you to create your path forward as needed, perhaps calling you to step out in faith additional times before the problem is resolved.

As God moves you toward deliverance from the overwhelming situation you have been using bondage to avoid, your confidence and faith in God will grow, and you will find yourself with a decreasing need to be soothed, which will reduce and eventually eliminate your reliance on your spiritual bondage.

Additional Notes

In this step, I have focused on processing and moving forward from the past. However, the battle against spiritual bondage is fought in three dimensions: past, present, and future (see Revelation 1:8). You need to transition from healing your past to organizing your present and securing your future. How to address your present and your future is not the focus of this particular article, so I will simply provide a high-level overview of each here as a starting point:
- The present concerns your areas of responsibility. God has entrusted you with responsibilities in areas such as faith (your relationship with God), family, friends, work, etc. As you heal from your past, you must learn from the Bible how to properly satisfy your various responsibilities and focus on fulfilling those responsibilities over pursuing your own selfish desires.
- The future concerns your personal ministry. Spiritual bondage is a major blocker to spiritual maturity, which moves you beyond your own concerns and turns your attention toward how to help others find and grow in Christ (Philippians 2:3-4). Doing the hard work of overcoming your spiritual bondage becomes more bearable as you increasingly see the vision for what God wants to do with your life. Ask yourself (or work with a spiritual coach to figure out), “If I were freed from my bondage today, what would I be seeking to accomplish tomorrow?” Much as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, you must face your own temptations and overcome them before being commissioned to ministry. You will not attain a “purpose-driven life” or sense of deep fulfillment, nor will you feel a deep and constant connection to God, until you free yourself from bondage by the power of the gospel. But when you do, you will.
Constant prayer is an absolute necessity to getting free. You will need to continually reorient yourself toward God and seek His help to deal with setbacks and obstacles, whether external or internal.
There is scientific evidence emerging that suggests that unresolved trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. If you find yourself struggling with guilt or shame that doesn’t appear connected to your own life story, this may be happening to you. Simply allow it to come out with the language that feels natural and repent of the guilt or override the shame as if it were your own.
Even when you have committed yourself to Christ and desire to obey God, your flesh will still seek strongly to perform sin, as described in Romans 7:14-8:17. You escape the power of the flesh by trusting in God, repenting, and doing whatever God reveals to you to do in response to prayer. Even when you have obtained freedom from spiritual bondage, your flesh will continue to occasionally tempt you, though less frequently and less powerfully over time. However, you need no longer identify with the flesh and its desires, and if you persist in holiness in your temptation, it will leave you for the time being, as Satan left Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:11).
Because of the ongoing temptations of the flesh, you must make a regular practice of systematically stamping out sin in your life and rejecting false beliefs that support any sense of entitlement you may have. A technique I find helpful is to visualize the object of a sinful desire being put inside of an idol (for me it is a stone pillar with a spherical knob at the end), then I throw that idol onto a bonfire, and then I repent and pray to God to forgive me for turning to an idol instead of Him for comfort. Every time I do this, the power of the pull of that object of temptation becomes weaker. Eventually, when you do this to everything that has tempted you in the past, you “clean out your closet” and experience significant relief from temptation. Note that this sequence repeats Jesus’ overcoming of the devil in Matthew 4: Jesus becomes “hungry,” the devil appears with a temptation, Jesus chooses to reject the temptation, the devil flees, and then angels minister to Jesus, removing the hunger.
You can’t always be fully healed from the health repercussions of certain forms of bondage, but you can definitely break a sin cycle and let the passage of time and the deaths of several generations erase it from your family’s history. God turned the curse of death incurred by Adam’s sin (Genesis 2:17) into a blessing when He drove Adam and Eve from the garden (Genesis 3:22-24), thereby protecting them from living forever in a state of decay. Adam and Eve in their lives would never be able to escape their brokenness completely, but they could keep their descendants from experiencing it if they acted as responsible parents and rulers, thereby removing it from the earth as much as possible.
David was a faithful man for his entire youth, a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14). But it only took one day of carelessness and indulgence of sin for him to jeopardize everything he had built. His sin with Bathsheba cost him three sons (Bathsheba’s eldest, Amnon, and Absalom), a trusted advisor (Ahithophel), a nephew (Amasa), ten concubines, plus more besides. The Christian life is one of constant vigilance and carefulness. Remember: you are always one day away from failure (see 1 Corinthians 10:12).
If you pursue victory over sin with all your strength and in complete obedience to God, you will not struggle forever. You will have seasons of peace and healing, and even when God leads you back into the fire to refine you in new ways, you will never again descend to the lowest depths you experienced in the past.
Internet filtering for sexual bondage can be helpful, but remember that you also need to fix the underlying issue. Otherwise, you’re just going to find workarounds somehow.
Accountability partnering is typically done wrong. You will not overcome your bondage simply through fear of the shame of admitting you failed. You must be on a process of self-discovery and facing your demons. If that’s your goal, then you can ask others to encourage you or go on a parallel journey with you.
A healthy life is not as pleasurable as sin (Hebrews 11:24-25). However, you won’t want sinful pleasure once you have achieved spiritual maturity. You will find great freedom in not constantly hungering after your sin of choice once you have escaped your bondage.
This process takes time, especially if you are escaping your first bondage (you may have more than one). Be patient, and trust in God. He is teaching you to trust Him.

Step 10: Go Back for Others

As you experience victory, your final step is to go back and teach others to find freedom for themselves. This follows the Bible’s model of transmitted healing: First, Jesus came personally to heal others. Those others were then to preach their healing to others (2 Corinthians 1:3-4), who would preach that healing to still others. In this way, God will heal the world.

We live in a time of great psychological pain and suffering. Even as wealth rises across the world and basic needs are being met to degrees previously unheard of, people are longing for purpose and meaning. The reality is that purpose and meaning are found in service to others. You should start by pursuing your own healing, but once you succeed, you must spread it to others, because other people matter as much as you do.

This is the ultimate message of the life of Jesus: He, being a perfect model of maturity as God, spent His entire life in service to others, never once exploiting others for His own pleasure or gratification, and ultimately dying for the good of all mankind. He invites us to replicate such care and concern for those around us.

It also doesn’t hurt that the best way to learn is to teach. Nothing will solidify your understanding of how to move into freedom like modeling it to others.

Two notes:

Be careful not to get entangled in the sins of others when you get involved in their lives to help them. The Bible warns about this possibility (Galatians 6:1).
You can help others by offering knowledge, compassion, encouragement, and reasonable assistance, but do not enable them. Remember, we must all bear our own load, and if they are not taking responsibility for their own healing and liberation, you cannot do it for them. Always hold those you’re assisting accountable, though you should never condemn them.

Afterwards

Once you have completed steps 1-10 for your first spiritual bondage, repeat 2-10 until you have escaped all your bondages.

Once that’s done, congratulations! You will now be living in a constant state of connection with God and will desire at all times to obey His commandments and His callings on your life. You will deeply trust Him and know He is good. Enjoy your unimpeded ministry to the Lord!