Cigarettes in Hell

The LORD is with you while you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you. 2 Chronicles 15:2

As I’ve mentioned previously, I grew up in a Christian home with a pastor for a father. Raised in church, I was well-insulated from those who had any obvious life struggles. I simply understood that real Christians didn’t wrestle with things like drug addiction, pornography, or infidelity. The Christians I saw on Sunday morning had their lives all figured out. Once though, while at a gas station downtown, I was astonished to see a guy from our church casually smoking a cigarette. When I brought it to my parent’s attention, I was shocked that they seemed to know. Worse, they didn’t seem all that upset. This guy, a prominent member of our church, was a charlatan. He pretended to be a Christian, but he was headed for hell. Christians don’t act like that.

My parents never purposefully taught me this, but still, I grew up understanding that Christians didn’t struggle with addiction and that those who did struggle weren’t really Christians. So, when confronted by the terrible consequences of my own opioid addiction, I was more than a little lost. Christians don’t act like this. My entire life, I’d claimed faith in God, believing that I was on his side and that he was on mine. How then, could he have allowed me to become addicted and suffer terrible consequences? God, it seemed, had abandoned me.

Today’s verse helps me understand my predicament. In the passage, we’re promised that God is on our side. It’s a beautiful promise, one of the greatest in the Bible, but the promise is conditional. God is on our side as long as we are on his. God is with us if we seek him. When we pursue God and his will for our lives, we stand with God and he stands with us. When, however, we go our own way, we abandon God and we suffer the consequences.

My drug addiction was just one of the consequences of a life spent following my way. Sure, I believed in God, but I followed me. My life wasn’t focused on Christ, but rather, it was focused on the immediate gratification found in my appetite. God didn’t abandon me. I abandoned him. This didn’t mean that I was never a Christian. It just meant that when I followed me, I turned my back on God and I suffered the consequences. Thankfully the reciprocal is true as well. As the passage promises, when I seek God, I find him. Daily now, that is my first and most important job – to point my life at God, abandoning my way, to make sure that God is on my side because I am on his.