Breaking the Power of Addiction – the Ache Within

He eats with sinners. From the perspective of those religious leaders, that’s all that needed to be said. In the ancient Near East, to sit down and eat with someone was the ultimate sign of acceptance. They saw Jesus accepting sinners. They assumed that meant he accepted sin.

So Jesus responds with a story. It’s a story about a Father and his two sons. The younger of the two sons demands his inheritance and goes and wastes it in wild living. We know this parable by the title, The Parable of the Prodigal Son, but Jesus doesn’t call it that. It is a parable about two sons. We almost exclusively teach that his parable is about the younger son coming back home and his Father forgiving him and how God forgives wayward sinners. It is about that. But it’s about more than that. It’s about the nature of being lost.

You can be lost in more than one way. In fact, look at this section of the Gospel – this parable comes with a whole bunch of parables about “lost things.” Jesus wants us to get a message: God finds lost things; and there is more than one way to be lost.

In our parable, the younger son is lost in one way, but his older brother is lost in another way. We’ll say much more about the elder brother in few weeks. Focus now for a moment on the younger son. He’s what we expect being lost to look like. He’s rude. Demanding your inheritance from your Father in that culture was just not done. It was the ultimate sign of disrespect. This division of the estate didn’t happen until the father died. To ask for it while your father still lived was the same as to wish him dead.

“The younger son was saying that he wants his father’s things, but not his father, “ Timothy Keller notes. “His relationship to the father has been a means to an end of enjoying his wealth, and now he is weary of that relationship. He wants out. Now. Give me what is mine he says.”


By custom, the younger son wasn’t entitled to anything anyway. Every thing usually went to the eldest son. So the younger son is rude and he breaks the rules. He continues to break the rules of family and good conduct by leaving his responsibilities to his father. He breaks the rules with how he lives. Basically, he goes to Vegas. He shows no good sense. He shows no moral fiber. He burns through his inheritance in a short period of time. The word prodigal means recklessly extravagant. He has become the prodigal son without regard to what rule he breaks or who he hurts, even himself.

But here’s the thing: sin is not just breaking rules, it is breaking relationship. It is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as the son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.

This parable is not about addictive behavior per se – although one might rightly see an addictive personality or two at work here. This parable is about the true nature of sin. And it is crucial, if we would break the power of addiction in our lives that we understand what sin really is.

If you want to look back even further, it’s Adam and Eve after that bite of the apple. They didn’t just break a rule, they turned away from the One who loved them. Though God would not forget about them and they would not forget about God, nothing was the same. The relationship was broken. The rest of their lives, they would wonder what went wrong and how could it be fixed.

This is the curse of the Fall – this ache within that is our separation from the One who loves us. It has been described as a God-shaped hole in every person. That hole is not just an idea or a belief, it’s an ache. It hurts. It’s as real a pain as if someone cut you with a knife or broke your leg. The pain is keen and it doesn’t seem to ever go away on its own.

An addict is a person who compulsively tries to dull that ache within – by any means necessary. Addiction is simply self-medication. Medicate that ache away with alcohohol, drugs, sex, greed, food – the Church used to call these addictions the Seven Deadly Sins. They are deadly because what we hope is medicine for a broken heart will in the end stop our hearts. Take good things – food, sex, wine – and make them ultimate things, which they are not. An addict is an idolater.

“All things are permitted for me,” St. Paul writes, “but not all things are beneficial to me. All things are permitted, but I will not be dominated by anything.” 1 Corinthians 6.12

Paul then uses the examples of food and sex. He says he won’t let good things become idols in his life. If they had the word addiction then, surely Paul would have used it here.

If you talked to the family of an addict they would of course talk about how large the method of addiction loomed in their lives. But it’s important to emphasize that at its heart, addiction is not about the thing. It’s about an understanding of self. It’s about a broken relationship with God.

I have spoken many times before about my father’s alcoholism. With only a little self-pity I will say it’s hard to grow up as a teenager with an alcoholic father. It’s like you’re living with two different people and you are never quite sure which one is showing up. My father was a gentle man with a sense of humor, when he wasn’t drinking. I admired him - I genuinely enjoyed being around him, when he wasn’t drinking. When he was drinking, someone else showed up, someone mean and surly who seemed to be angry at the whole world. I can’t point to one episode as particularly heinous or descriptive- it was cumulative, like a mold growing in a dank basement.

It was easy to say then that the alcohol was the problem. And yes, if I could have taken it away I would have. I would have preferred to have my dad at my baseball games rather than at the bar. But I also know that in his sober best, my quiet, gentle father had an ache within. He had a broken heart. In fact, in the eulogy that I gave at his funeral some fourteen years ago, I said I hoped he found what he missed, what his heart was really yearning for.

Unless and until we know we are loved, we have no sense of self.


In the movie Toy Story, Woody knows he is special because he is his owner, Andy, ‘s favorite toy. Yet his sense of self is threatened when Andy seems to have a new favorite in the form of Buzz Lightyear. Woody tries to take Buzz down a notch. He tells Buzz he isn’t real. “You are a child’s play thing!” But Buzz is real because he is loved. The response Buzz gives to Woody is both comical and trenchant – “You are a sad, strange little man. You have my pity.” Woody is to be pitied because he doubts he is loved. Buzz is the opposite – he is sure of himself because he has no doubt he is loved.

Love shows us our true selves. No addiction can replace that.

Folks, there is hope for the broken-hearted. There is hope for addicts and sinners of every description – which is to say, there is hope for you and me. Over the next month we will continue to look at God’s word of healing and salvation for that ache within.