We are going to have a short series called Overcoming Sin Addiction and we are going to look at how to do this from the second chapter of Jeremiah. I would like you to take your copies of God’s word and turn to Jeremiah 2. The series theme comes from what God says through Jeremiah in verses 23-25.
“You are a swift she-camel running here and there, a wild donkey accustomed to the desert, sniffing the wind in her craving— in her heat who can restrain her? Any males that pursue her need not tire themselves; at mating time they will find her. Do not run until your feet are bare and your throat is dry. But you said, ‘It’s no use! I love foreign gods, and I must go after them.’” (Jeremiah 2:23-25 NIV)
I want us to notice this picture before we begin this lesson. God describes the people craving after their sins, unrestrained like an animal in heat. God is calling for them to stop. But the people’s response is in verse 25. They say that it is no use. They love their foreign gods and have a compulsion to go after them. Sin is being pictured as an addiction. The people can’t stop. They cannot be restrained. They throw their hands in the air and say that it is no use. The addiction is too great and they run back to their idols. How did the people of God get to this point? How have they turned from God and are so buried in their sins that they cannot stop sinning? What is God’s solution for the people to overcome their sin problem? This is what we are going to look at for the next few lessons. Let’s return to the begin of Jeremiah 2 and let’s look at how God is going to give us the cure we need for sin addiction.
Remembering The Past (Jeremiah 2:1-3)
God begins his message to his people by remembering their devotion that they had at the start. God is remembering how the people of Israel loved him and followed him through the wilderness. God is remembering when God set Israel free from Egyptian slavery and caring for them in the wilderness. Israel was holy to the Lord and the Lord was with them. Now this is interesting to think about for moment. God is remembering the devotion of Israel in the wilderness. Do you remember Israel being faithful and highly devoted to the Lord in the wilderness? We read about their rebellion and wanting to return to Egypt when they were in the wilderness. We read about the people complaining against God and against Moses in the wilderness. We read about the people creating the golden calf and worshiping it while in the wilderness. So what is God saying? Here is what God is doing. The sin addiction is so great and the hearts have been so turned away from God that he now fondly remembers Israel’s devotion in the wilderness. The sinning is so severe that the wilderness is the good days of Israel’s devotion.
What Happened? (Jeremiah 2:4-8)
So God has a question for his people. What fault did you find in God that caused you to stray so far from him? What did God do to justify the people turning away from God and running so far from him? This is God’s challenge. What did I do to give you the excuse to run away from me. What did God do to lose our devotion to him? Now I want us to stop here for a moment and think about this question. Would God say this to us? Would God ask us this question? Would God say that he remembers our devotion at the beginning? What happened? What changed? What did God do to lose your devotion so that you ran far from him? Now listen to what God says next in verse 5.
They pursued what was worthless and became worthless (Jeremiah 2:5 CEB)
God says when you follow after worthless idols, you become worthless. When you pursue worthless things, then we become worthless ourselves. God wants us to understand that sins corrupt us and ruin us. We are very resistant to this idea. We do not think that sins are affecting us. We do not think that our sinning changes. We do not want to admit that our sins change the way we think and act toward worthlessness. Romans 1 records the descent into worthlessness that sinning causes.
But there is something else that God said in this sentence that we might be bristling against. How can God say that we become worthless when we follow after worthlessness? But I think we can illustrate the idea from daily life. What makes something worthless today? I submit to you that we deem things worthless when they no longer fulfill their created purpose. When your phone does not hold a charge, it is now worthless to you because the phone can no longer fulfill its created purpose. When your shoe breaks, it is worthless because it no longer can fulfill its purpose. What God is trying to tell us is that we cannot fulfill our created purpose when we turn from God and go after worthless things. We are supposed to be reflecting God to the world as salt and light. But sin makes us worthless in that we are not carrying out our created purpose. We are created in Christ Jesus for good works (Ephesians 2:10). But sin makes us worthless in that we are not carrying out our created purpose. We become a people who do not look to God, turn to God, or represent God. You see this in the rest of this paragraph. God points out in verse 6 that the people did not ask for the Lord. In verse 8 we read that the priests did not ask for the Lord either. So they came into the land and defiled the land. The leaders rebelled against the Lord and prophets worked for Baal rather than the Lord (Jeremiah 2:8). They made themselves worthless and unusable as an instrument in God’s hand.
The Foolishness of Sin (2:9-13)
Now what God is going to do is bring his charges against his people (2:9). But as he brings these charges I want us to see how God is speaking in a way to convince us to end our sin addiction. God is going to show us the utter foolishness of continuing in sin. So here are three pictures to convince us of our foolishness in sin to move us to break the sin cycle.
First, look at Jeremiah 2:10-11. God makes a worldly observation. He points out that the people of the world do not exchange one god for another. They do not exchange one idol for another. The people of the world just accumulate more gods and more idols. But that is not what the people have done. They exchanged glory for worthlessness. They have turned from the best thing in the world to the worthless things of the world. The apostle Paul made this point in two different ways in Romans 1. Listen to what he said to us about this foolish decision.
Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (Romans 1:22-23 ESV)
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (Romans 1:24-25 ESV)
Notice how Paul is describing the foolishness. You are exchanging the glory of the immortal God, not for another glory, but for an image of people or animals. You are exchanging the truth, not for another truth, but for a lie. You are exchange worship of the Creator, not for another creator, but for the created. It is a bad trade. It is a really bad trade.
When I was in elementary school, my parents sent me with a lunch that included rice cakes. Now rice cakes back then are not like today. They did not have flavors back then. It was this dry, large circle rice cake that had no flavor. But there were kids who did not know any better and they saw me at lunch with this rice cake. They wanted to trade their Chips Ahoy cookie for this rice cake because the rice cake was so much larger. So I would gleefully make the trade. They would take one bite of that rice cake and they would not trade with me again. It was a bad trade and they knew it. They would not fall for that again. They exchanged the glory of the cookie for the lie of the rice cake. It is a bad trade and this is what God is trying to show us. God proves this with another illustration in verses 12-13.
God calls for creation to be shocked and appalled over what God’s people have done. God says the people have committed two evils. First, they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water. God is telling us that he is the place for refreshing, life-giving waters. He is the spring of living, flowing waters. We like that. We want to buy bottled water that says it flows from a natural spring of water running down a mountain. But then God says that is not where the foolishness ends. God says the second evil is that they dug out cisterns for themselves instead. A person would make a cistern where there was not flowing drinking water. So you would dig a bowl into a rock to try to catch some of the rain water that would fall during the rainy seasons. Now think about the comparison. The people have exchanged the refreshing, flowing river that you can walk up to a simply drink for doing the hard work of digging in a rock to catch water that sits there pooling up. It does not make any sense. This is like exchanging the filtered refrigerator water that you just walk up to with a cup and drink for digging a pothole in the street in front of home to try to catch rain water. Who would make such a trade? It is a nonsensical exchange. But God says that this is exactly what sin is. If you want to break your sin addiction, please think about your sin decision in this way. You are taking good, clean, cold water for warm, pothole water in the street.
But actually that is not right. Keep reading verse 13. God says that the cistern you dug out is broken and cannot hold any water. So you are trading the living, cool waters of God for digging out your own hole to catch rain water, but your hole is broken and won’t capture any water. What is the message? The message is that only God can satisfy. Your potholes can’t satisfy. You are working and getting nothing for it. Even if you could get what you are trying to capture with your cisterns, that water is not remotely as good as flowing living waters. Only God gives satisfying waters and we are foolishly exchanging that for unsatisfying, road water. We are giving up the cookies for the dry rice cake. My people have committed two great evils. You did not want what God has for you and you would rather have the lesser than the greater. You do not want the spring of living water. You want to dig your own broken cistern. This is the picture of sin and God is appalled and we should be as well.
Three Ways To Break Sin Addiction
So let’s end the message by looking at the four points God gives us in this paragraph to break our sin addiction. First, God is not the reason for our sinning (Jeremiah 2:1-5). There is no fault you can find with God. Everything God has done is for your good. All God has done is care for you and bring you to this moment. God is not to blame. No charge can be brought against him. Our sin is not looking to God in our lives (Jeremiah 2:6-8). God says the problem is that you are not looking to me. You are looking to yourselves.
Second, sin is making us worthless in God’s hands. We are not fulfilling our created purpose when we are giving our lives to sin. To state this another way, you are not what you are supposed to be. You are not doing what you are supposed to do. When life seems empty and mundane, we can see that the problem is that we are not living to our God-given purpose of salt and light.
Finally, see that our sinning is a shocking, terrible exchange. We are exchanging the truth for a lie. We are exchanging glory for worthlessness. We are exchanging cool, clean, flowing drinking water for stale, lukewarm pothole water. We are exchanging the best life for the worthless life. Jesus told us to come to him to feed the thirst we have because only he can satisfy.
Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:13-14 ESV)
Sin is saying that God is not the answer and will not satisfy what we need. God is telling us we making a terrible exchange if we leave him and no longer seek him for all we need and instead look to sin. Break the life of sin by seeing you are trading everything away for nothing that will last or help.