See here for Part 2 and here for Part 3.

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.

In this series on Overcoming Spiritual Bondage, I will share the approach I’ve developed as I’ve sought to gain victory over addiction in my life. While my own journey is still in progress, I’ve secured enough victories that I feel comfortable acting as a guide to others.

If you are not a Christian, I invite you to read through this series and open your mind to the possibility that the Bible contains the keys to your freedom and that God stands waiting to help you, if you will simply do things His way and not yours.

What is Spiritual Bondage?

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 (a “sin” being a willful violation of God’s commandments) 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. 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: 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.

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.

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, alcohol abuse, excessive gambling, excessive shopping, and excessive sugar consumption.

If you have prayed to God for release from an addiction or compulsion and not received it, you are dealing with spiritual bondage, not merely a sinful lifestyle. 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.

Sinful lifestyles, on the other hand, are habitual sins built around the pursuit of pleasure and can therefore be abandoned without significant issue. Christians are often amazed at how easily and quickly they can let go of such a significant pattern of habitual sin in their lives when they first join the faith. 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.

The Trap of Sin

To escape spiritual bondage, you must first understand the divergence between the path of faith and the path of sin.

When you join the Christian faith, God calls you to a process of sanctification, whereby you renounce your sinful behaviors, take accountability for your sins, confess your crimes and betrayals to your victims, and address the pain and trauma underlying your unhealthy or destructive behaviors. This is initially very difficult, which is one reason why so many people get stuck in early stages of Christian maturity or even abandon the faith altogether.

Over time, however, the more you clean out the junk in your closet and live in accordance with the commandments of God, which are designed to help you thrive, the more you experience the righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit that underpin the kingdom of God (Romans 14:17). You feel more secure, more at ease, and decreasingly afflicted by life circumstances and the problems of your past. The faith becomes like an investment that compounds over time, eventually yielding great blessings. As you approach peak maturity, you become a guide to others, experiencing the great joy of helping others find Christ and the liberty He offers.

Sin, on the other hand, starts out very easy. When entering an addiction, for example, you drink or use or eat or buy or watch something illicit in nature or in amount (sometimes something can be appropriate in moderation but sinful in excess), and you feel fantastic. All your suffering vanishes and you feel great, excited to go back and do it again.

Except, after a few days or weeks, you don’t feel quite as good. The happiness and soothing of suffering are less, so you increase how much you use. When you do so, you feel great again… for a short while, until once again the good feelings decrease.

As you continue into this cycle, without even realizing it, you begin sacrificing things that were never part of the initial bargain. It gets expensive, bad for your health, deadly to your personal relationships, possibly even illegal. Eventually you end up crossing every boundary you swore you would never transgress. Pretty soon, if you don’t quit, if you go dark and deep enough, everything you’ve built in life will shrivel and die (James 1:15), and then you will die physically as well (Romans 8:13), one way or another.

Spiritual bondage is thus a trap, drawing you in slowly while hiding its true intentions and power, until it’s too late for you to walk away. You become so dependent on your addiction or habit, you begin to sacrifice everything you care about to chase the high.

Thus, what the Christian faith and spiritual bondage have in common is that both expect you to go deeper and walk further down a path the longer you stick with them. The key difference, however, is that the Christian faith brings you everlasting life (John 3:16), while the path of sin is the way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (Proverbs 14:12; Proverbs 16:25).

What this means is that you don’t really have a choice. Your addiction or compulsion or other sinful habit is lying to you: it promises that it will make you happy if you continue with it or return to it, but it will only lead you into misery and death. You thus have only three options:

• Continue down the path of your bondage, with your misery and suffering increasing and increasing until you end up spiritually or even physically dead.
• Waver at the crossroads between faith and sin, unable to progress with either until you renounce one and embrace the other.
• Commit to putting your sin to death and walk the path of faith, doing what God calls you to do until you obtain deliverance from your bondage.

Indeed, there is no third path besides faith and sin: as Paul says in Romans 14:23, “Whatever is not from faith is sin.” And because “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), your only hope of peace, contentment, and healthy relationships with loved ones comes from faith, and by faith I do not mean just intellectual belief in God and the Bible, but the hard work of sanctification that I will explore in the remainder of this series.

The Root of Spiritual Bondage

As we go through this series, 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 will discuss coming clean in Part 3).

To help you solve the puzzle, I’m going to tell you 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 you 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 face Goliath, 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, not your own. 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.

The three things that can push you into the arms of a spiritual bondage are guilt, shame, and life stressors. We will explore these in detail in Part 3.

Additional Notes

Two additional things to be aware of:

First, it is certainly the case that if you’re in spiritual 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 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.

Second, as mentioned, spiritual bondage is a form of idolatry. And, as 1 Samuel 15:23 indicates, idolatry is closely related to witchcraft, which is closely related to magic.

This makes sense if you really think about it. After all, if you are addicted to food, drugs, or alcohol, you are using substances to generate happiness that isn’t tied to the natural function of your body or the reality of your life circumstances. How is that significantly different from using a magic potion? Or if you are addicted to pornography, you are using rituals to do the same thing. How is that significantly different from spells or enchantments?

In the Bible’s worldview, all magic is evil (there is no such thing as “white magic”) and involves progressively sacrificing things you care about in order to gratify sinful desires. If you give your heart to God, however, He will replace your sinful desires with pure desires that lead to life, not death. Thus, God is calling you to figuratively burn your magic books, as the believers in Ephesus did (Acts 19:11-20). This leads into the topic of conversion, which I discuss in the next part of this series.