At one time in my life I was a mental health therapist and worked at various treatment/counseling centers and psychiatric hospitals. At one adolescent, residential treatment facility, the “patients” could get to the point in their treatment plan to receive a home visit. Of course, some level of trust had been built with me and with their parents, but we would always go over what they were going to do when they attained this brief level of freedom. I was always surprised when either before they left or when they came back, they had the belief that they could go back to their old friends, to the old hang-outs, to the old way of life and be successful in not going back to their old, unhealthy habits!
How many times have we danced too close to the fire of our own triggers or our own “unhealthy habits”? Maybe not anything that would get us committed to a treatment facility, but unhealthy and unholy nonetheless! That extra glance? That “other” way of driving home from work?
God’s word gives us a way out every time. I love how the Message version puts one of those scriptures:
Romans 6:12-14 – That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God.
Be strong, Brothers, and be free in Christ!
Barnabas Man 