"A Cold Confession: Exposing my Addiction" with Doug Batchelor

karen was wandering on the way to church he said what are you talking about a cold confession and that's because today i'm going to be making a cold confession i'm going to be sharing something very personal with you and making a confession you've heard it said before confession is good for the soul but very bad for the reputation and that may be the case today but your pastor was addicted and involved in substance abuse for over 30 years yeah yeah you guys they got the substance there on the screen right now now you think i'm kidding some of this may be a little bit tongue-in-cheek but there is a point but i had a very serious problem with an addiction to ice cream now when i get done you describe you let me know what you think that if it fits the definition i don't know exactly when it began but i know it started a long time ago and my substance abuse started innocently enough and i want to make it clear right from the beginning i am not saying that ice cream is a sin is that clear but it got to the place where it was for me the bible says in first corinthians 10 31 therefore whether you eat or whether you drink do all to the glory of god and i certainly was not doing it to the glory of god now i don't know if any of you remember a day where years ago they had an ice cream man that would go up and down the neighborhood and the bell would ring and the song would play i don't remember what the song is anyone remember the good humor man do you have happy memories on those hot summer days and you'd hear that music it was like the gates of heaven had opened up right and you'd hear that music playing and this little white truck would come out all the kids would crowd into certain set spots in the street and just about throw themselves in front of this vehicle and um he would step out and usually he was friendly and there in the truck he had his dried ice it was always so amazing to me he showed me a piece of the dried ice and and the fog billowing out and he'd pull out these exotic treats and i remember some of my favorites were they had one called a rainbow rocket it was a double popsicle had two sticks that went up through it you could break it and have a share with a friend so i often would split a rainbow rocket i'm sure it was full of colors and chemicals and things but it was delicious it's probably all corn syrup they had another one that was orange with vanilla inside it was an orange popsicle with vanilla anyone they still make those do you know they still have ice cream trucks in some neighborhoods in sacramento have you heard them and the thing that's so funny i remember i was at bonnie's house not long ago and i heard one coming around the neighborhood and he was playing the song which is little brown jug any of you know what i'm talking about a little hahaha he little brown jug how i love thee which is about a jug of whiskey i thought what kind of song is that for kids come right there you know there's an addiction issue connected with this so they still have dealers that go through the neighborhood but it goes way back and i remember that it was so important to me i couldn't understand why my grandmother would not give me 10 or 25 cents that's all it was back then every day and she said it's a treat you can't have it every day and i'm ashamed to tell you that i vividly remember stealing money from my grandmother she is one of my earliest memories she hung her black leather purse over the doorknob of her bedroom and inside her purse she had another little purse that had one of those very difficult snaps on it he had to twist it was the change purse and she caught me one day i don't know how many times i did it more than once that's where my life of crime began it was for ice cream money you see and uh yeah i my grandmother was tough i remember sticking out my tongue one time and she said boy you got such a pretty tongue do that again i stuck out my tongue and she slapped me underneath my chin and made me bite down on my tongue which really hurt and i never forgot that and i never stuck out my tongue at my grandmother again but my grandmother was pretty tough anyway she caught me stealing that's all i'm going to say about that but it was for ice cream money well i took my it was just you know it was a small obsession at that point when i got to new york city parents divorced and maybe i was looking for comfort but one of the highlights of the day was when i would snuggle up with my mother and my brother and we would eat ice cream and watch the wonderful world of disney or the ed sullivan show or some one of those programs we only had three channels back then we had the coat hanger on top of the tv with the tin foil to improve reception in our apartment anyone remember and then when i went to live with dad why there was a spell also at military school even in military school i remember that um once a week we did ice cream and i look forward to that day and it came wrapped up and it was neapolitan it was an ice cream sandwich with chocolate strawberry and vanilla in it and i would relish that i would beg and bribe the other cadets if i could get their sandwich i'd give them any of the food they wanted on my plate if i could get their ice cream and then i went to live with dad and that's when it really started to get serious is uh in florida we actually had i know you don't think of miami beach having milkman but we had a milkman and i looked it up online to see they're still in business the company was called macarthur dairy and they would bring the milk to the door and my stepmother would fill out a um a form and it wasn't every day but like every other day he he would bring the order but this was really neat in miami beach the milkman not only brought milk they brought fresh greased tropicana orange juice in a jar a glass jar and they would squeeze it that day and and you'd get fresh oranges and they brought ice cream now we always knew when he was coming because you can't leave your ice cream out on the porch for very long and um you know i didn't i was living with my dad and my stepmother and my stepbrother my brother was sick and i was struggling during those years one of the treats for me was i would take a half a pint of ice cream and pour in tropicana orange juice and mix it all it reminded me of those orange things the good humor man had it was really good but it got to where my stepmother started saying who ate all the ice cream because i was eating all of the ice cream i mean i started doing it every day and i really enjoyed it it was the highlight of my day but then things really turned from bad to worse because summer came and i needed to find a job and guess where i got a job i got a job working at baskin robbins karen and i were in miami beach not too long ago i took her by tried to find where the old ice cream shop was and i guess it's not there anymore in lincoln mall but i worked at 31 flavors and the owner was elise scott and i remember when he hired me i was only like 14 15 years old he really liked me because i'd been to military school and i was a cleaning fanatic and i kept this store clean and he had this waxing machine and none of the kids knew how to use the waxing machine you know those floor buffers you know how to use one of those you can really get hurt but we used them in military school i said oh yeah i can and so i would buff and wax the floor and everything was just and span and i said when he was hiring me i said now i'm just wondering are we allowed to eat the product he said no problem he says you can eat as much as you want you'll get tired of it i never even got close to getting tired he had now you know baskin robbins is called 31 not because they've got 31 flavors they guarantee having 31 flavors in the store at any given time they have hundreds of flavors and we had new flavors rotating in all the time and i'm not kidding you i would eat a pralines and cream banana split for lunch and then i'd have a hot fudge mocha sundae for dinner and it's amazing when you're a teenager what you can do to yourself and you feel indestructible but i really was it was getting bad i mean i ate a lot of ice cream and the problem was i was not only now a user i was a dealer because people were coming in and now i'm selling it and sometimes people would come in for ice cream cakes for a birthday party and i remember mr scott one day he said doug he said why don't you try you know you you personalize the top of the cake and you write on it and i was no good at that uh any of you ever seen my handwriting people would come to pick up their ice cream birthday cakes and they'd go what does that say says happy birthday william can't you read it and you have to squeeze the stuff out of a tube and while you're writing it was i wasn't any good at that but i worked there until i ran away from home and then it was hit and miss on the road for a little while with ice cream but uh even when i moved up into the mountains in a cave no refrigeration obviously uh it very long way to town grueling height but it was the desert back then they had thrifties drugstores everywhere i don't see thrifty's drugstore is evidently out of business i don't know if you can still get thrifty's ice cream but in all their drug stores they had an ice cream counter do you remember well i'm not kidding do any of you remember when it was a nickel a scoop and you could get a triple scoop for 15 cents go try and find that but when you're living in a cave in a desert and you've got no refrigeration the highlight for me was to go panhandle and see if i could get 15 cents i would beg on the street and say can i please have 15 cents for something to eat i didn't tell them what i was going to eat but it's true i would spend my last 15 cents on ice cream and i remember um i wasn't the only one a lot of the street people it was a big deal and there were others that were living in the desert most of them lived in the first valley i lived way back in in the canyon and i remember i was hanging out on the street one day with my friends and some kid had walked out of thrifty's with a triple scoop of ice cream and he wasn't paying attention and the ice cream guy at the counter you know when it's 50s when you got your ice cream the same guy that worked the cash register he worked the counter and he didn't always know what to do with ice cream and so he didn't press that first scoop has to get pressed down into the cone or it can become detached and he had a triple scoop and his kid walked out on the street and he turned and the thing fell off the cone but it landed not flat it landed still intact with three scoops i kind of reproduced that that's a little bit of photoshop but it looked like that it landed three scoops like the tower pieces sticking straight up and the kid began to cry and the parents all come on in we'll get you another one and they walked in the store i'm standing there with my friends and we're looking at that and i said you know only part of that hit the ground kid didn't even lick it yet and if he did lick it the party licked us apart on the ground the other stuff is still good and while we were processing that before i could act on my thought my friend richie got down on all fours and he began to eat the ice cream off the street like that really i didn't do it but i thought about it because i thought that's some perfectly good ice cream that's going to waste right now and i was mad that richie did it first because i i really had it pretty bad and i wouldn't just eat one triple thing of ice cream i would eat one when i arrived to town and then later in the day i'd get another one before i went up the hill and that would have to last me you know i used to wonder why was it so important to me and i later found out there was a study believe it or not there's medical research journal of clinical investigation this is a study done in 2011 a team of researchers led by lucas van ondenhove university of belgium they were publishing images of brain activity during times of sadness and they had 12 volunteers that had their brains scanned with an mri and also agreed to have a feeding tube put into their stomach then they were shown images and played some neutral or sad music and shown neutral or sad images and then they would rate how they felt on a scale of one to nine and when they were feeling sad they would then inject in their stomachs a solution some of them got a salt solution they didn't know what was going in their stomach some of them would get a fat solution that would be similar to what you would find in ice cream and then they would evaluate them afterward and they found out in almost every case those who were sad after being given the fatty solution it says the effect was significant in a pharmacological sense the fatty solution reduce the intensity of sad emotions by almost half which is about as much as any prescription antidepressant can achieve and so you were wondering why you thought ice cream was comfort food they finally done research to say that it actually does work as an antidepressant so i guess you could say i was addicted to antidepressants but it came in the form of haagen-dazs and it was pretty serious now you think i jest you know the bible says that a little bit of certain things is okay but something can be taken to an extreme and it becomes sin ecclesiastes 10 17 blessed are you o land when your king is the son of nobles and your princes feast at the proper time for strength and not for drunkenness i mean it was to excess with me and then even when i moved out of the cave i lived for a while i had a meat business lived in palm springs i am not kidding you i would eat ice cream every night and i would more than once eat a half a quart once i ate a whole court i stayed up late and i listened to cal worthington commercials on a little black and white tv didn't even know who that was cal worthington go see cow now that is depressing isn't it but you know when you're like 19 20 years old it's amazing how much you can eat karen and i can't believe it now that both the boys are gone to college we open the refrigerator there's still food in the refrigerator it's amazing but i mean i really was i had a problem and then even after i moved into the hills in kovalev and i got baptized this is when it i think got really serious um you know when you give up your addictions and you only got a few left you overcompensate and as i gave up the drugs and the smoking and the drinking all i had left was the ice cream then you really go overboard and i remember living up in kovalev i would quote the bible and i'd say god is taking us to a land flowing with milk and honey god believes in ice cream this is heavenly food i mean why would he say that he's going to take them to a land of milk and honey and then i went to the store and i found haagen-dazs honey vanilla i said praise the lord this is biblical and i had scripture for it but you know there's a verse that says if you found honey proverbs 25 16 have you found honey eat only as much as you need lest you be filled with it and vomit some things that are good that are meant to be a treat that god would bless you can do to excess now this is a very important principle of what i'm sharing with you today and i know you're laughing and i'm meaning for you too and some of what i'm saying is tongue-in-cheek but i'm sharing this odyssey with you because it relates to real life what i'm sharing with you is true i'm not making this up i mean i was addicted for years i look back and it's just over there my life was defined i had my tonsils taken out when i was eight years old my mother just couldn't figure thought i had bad tonsils i was just eating so much dairy i couldn't breathe didn't realize i was allergic to it so moved up in the hills and even in kovalev i would drive half an hour round trip to town no one hour round trip one hour half an hour each way thank you dear i've got a witness here to get my ice cream and and i'm ashamed to say that i think i also was influencing others even when karen and i began to date i'd uh say you want to split some ice cream and i'd get vanilla almond and i'd eat swiss vanilla swiss salmon yeah i'd eat the ice cream she'd eat the chocolate-covered almonds i remember john loma cain was really weird you know we'd be on the road doing evangelistic meetings how about some ice cream john that's a bad influence so we go get a a pint of hog and us and and we'd sit down and usually we're in a hotel because we're doing meetings and and uh i said don't you want somebody say no just not yet yeah i want some save me some and so i i'd eat it so how much do you want just you know about half just save me some so i'd eat mine i said don't you i'd set it down he waited till it melted he liked it melted then he'd eat it i had another friend when i'd be on the road we'd take the haagen-dazs thing and we'd take a knife and he said i'll split it with him we just cut it in half and someone would eat out of one half and someone would eat out of the others but any of my friends were close to me know at the end of the day i went on a hunt i went on a safari looking for ice cream and i'd go a long way because uh i to me it represented comfort or something i don't know i couldn't stop by the way in spite of that verse that says he's bringing us to a land flowing milk and honey that doesn't mean god wanted us to mix it all together and eat it at once and the book counsels on diets and food it says some use milk and a large amount of sugar on their mush their cereal or oatmeal thinking that they're carrying out health reform but the sugar and the milk combined are liable to cause fermentation in the stomach and thus harmful which means i probably went to bed drunk a lot from ice cream and then i realized finally it had gone too far now i'm embarrassed to tell you this but um when i traveled uh and i stayed a hotel one of the first things i do is i'd find out where's a 7-eleven because 7-eleven carries haagen-dazs for ben and jerry's ben and jerry's was not as good but i always felt like i was supporting a couple of druggies with ben and jerry you know they had ice cream called cherry garcia named after the yeah anyway so i'd go to a 7-eleven i'd look for one and one time when i was going to a hotel to do a meeting and bonnie said well they've got a shuttle that goes to the airport i said well i'm going to need a rental car well you won't need i said well you know i might need to get something to eat and you know what i was thinking hotel was too far away from ice cream it was at this conference center and i needed a car so i could get ice cream and then when i realized that here i had rented a car and amazing fact supporters were paying for me to have a rental car so i could get ice cream i felt guilty and so i refunded the money and it occurred to me that ice cream cost me 35 a pint i'm not kidding it was that bad only once or twice that i ordered room service eight dollars for ice cream and then you want to tip the person who brings it because i tell them please hurry because they bring it to you all melt and then it's no good and i realize this is just starting to this has gone too far i thought i got a problem and so i started praying about it i said lord i gotta stop eating ice cream certainly anything that is preoccupying my day you know my father was an alcoholic and i think i've got that nature my father would plan his day around alcohol when he made lunch appointments he wouldn't just take a person to a restaurant because he liked the food the restaurant had to first and foremost have alcohol then he'd figure out what else they had and then after work he'd stop at the bar and if he went on vacation it had to be somewhere where there was a bar and if you went on a fishing trip or if he went racing or whatever he did there was always the ice chest with alcohol his whole life that was just had to be there in the picture and i was realizing ice cream was doing that to me i'd get on tv in front of everybody preach about the health message to do a back handspring and they go home i need a pint of haagen-dazs yes sometimes i'd eat a whole pint the average american eats 42 pints of ice cream a year i was eating about 120. i'm not exaggerating and then i'd go to the doctor he'd say doug cholesterol looks good blood pressure okay i'd say not bothering me and i had all these rationalizations but i knew i was addicted how do you know because i couldn't stop i'd spend my last 15 cents on ice cream i could tell you more stories but i think you get the picture finally i became convinced all right i got to do something about this and then i went through a couple of years of a real struggle i think i went through all of the throws and the twists and the turns of all kinds of addictions i'd stop i'd go a day or two and i feel real good about it and i'd say i'm under control now i think i can just have a little bit and i got to the point where instead of eating a pint a day i got to where it was half a pint today and then i got down to a third one little pint of haagen-dazs would last me three days and i felt like i was doing pretty good that went on for a couple of years not karen's here she's not disagreeing with me bonnie would invite me over and offer dessert she said we got some ice cream and said no thanks because i had good stuff at home so i could turn it down as long as i knew i could have it before i went to bed and if for some reason even if i ate late and i ate way too much it always seemed i had room for ice cream if i didn't have it it was felt i was like incomplete really i don't know why and then i got where i'd go a day or two without eating ice cream i'd go to the market and uh boy it would be a struggle i'd say karen i got to go get some chips or all she knows that's the other thing i'm addicted to but it's under control corn chips and salsa i eat a lot of chips and salsa and so i'd go get the chips and then i'd go up and down the aisle buy the frozen section and look at it and i i'd see it on sale normally it was almost three dollars or more and it would be two for five dollars to go lord it must be your will today because it's on sale and then i figured i'm not gonna buy it anymore unless it's on sale that's how i grappled with my guilt but when i bought it on silent i bought enough to last until the next sale and then you know what made things difficult is one of the members of our church who might be here today i don't want to point her out worked at the supermarket where i shopped don't you love it when the person who's checking you out at the market looks at what's in your shopping cart and says stuff like oh somebody's got a sweet tooth they comment on what you're buying and she noticed several times i would be showing up 10 o'clock at night just for ice cream and then i'd go to the store and i'd look for and i'd see she's down there and i'd sneak around the aisles and i throw it in and look back and say oh she's helping somebody else go check out self-checkout quick i was living a secret life yeah it was pretty bad so i was a hypocrite i'm preaching about the health message and i was addicted to junk food and i know it wasn't good for me even though the lord blessed me with a relatively good constitution you know jesus talks about this where he said woe to you scribes and pharisees hypocrites you devour widows houses and for pretense you make long prayers in luke 11 woe to you lawyers for you load men with burdens hard to bear and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers so i'd preach a sermon on gaining the victory over sin when i was a slave no i the reason i picked this subject i prayed about this i think the lord wanted me to talk to you about this the reason i picked this subject because this is at least something i can confess to you and you're probably not going to get me fired but it was very real i was addicted and i was hiding it and i was wasting money it was expensive addiction but little by little any of you ever heard that song called junk food junkie years ago now this is going to date you if you know the words to this song years ago a guy named larry grossey wrote a song about uh this was back when the hippies began to get into the health food movement and any of you remember yule gibbons and the nature cereal yeah okay this guy wrote this song called mr natural and uh it actually kind of relays the kind of hypocrisy that some people struggle with where you've got your public life and then you've got what's real he said you know that i love organic cooking i always ask for more and they call me mr natural on down at the health food store i only eat good sea salt white sugar don't touch my lips and my friends are always begging me to take them on macrobiotic trips but at night i take out my strong box i keep under lock and key and i take it off to my closet where no one else can see i open the door so slowly take a peek up north and south and then i pull out a hostess twinkie and i stuff it in my mouth in the daytime i'm mr natural just as healthy as i can be but at night i'm a junk food junkie dear lord have pity on me and he's got several verses that tell a similar story about how all of his friends think he's so natural but the last one is actually pretty good he said oh folks but lately i've been spotted with a big mac on my breath stumbling into a colonel sanders with a face as white as death i'm afraid someday they'll find me just stretched out on my bed with a handful of pringles potato chips and a ding-dong by my head in the daytime my mr natural just as healthy as i can be but at night i'm a junk food junkie you know what this is talking about it's kind of living the double life now this plays itself out i'm talking about a problem with ice cream this plays itself out in a lot of different ways you know some of you are going to be really self-conscious if you invite pastor dug over and you have ice cream for dessert don't worry i got the victory praise god it's taken years but i got the victory i'm okay i'm not saying ice cream is a sin shopping online is not a sin for everybody but i know a pastor that he would get online and start buying stuff and he couldn't stop and his house and his garage was filled with products that were not even opened that he bought impulsively either from a shopping channel or some sale online and he had spent all of his money all of his retirement and was deeply in debt now is there any sin in shopping online i've done it this year you can buy stuff somebody's you can save money but some people can't and you may have weaknesses and you think well this isn't so bad but has it gotten too big for you is it taking over in your life is it something that's out of balance in your life something that you're maybe covering up now i got so bad that i was on my knees you would probably never think that someone would have to get on their knees and plead for the victory over ice cream but i did i finally said lord i'd quit for a while then i'd start again i'd say i've got it under control nothing's wrong with a little bit but i couldn't handle a little bit and i finally had to say lord help me and you know it required human effort but i believe god intervened and as i made my efforts humanly the lord then takes it away he gives you a supernatural power this is a statement to that effect the divine combined with the human effort will give to all perfect and entire victory every believing mind will be filled with conscious power the language of the soul will be i can do all things through christ that strengthens me now i just want to tell you in following up from my personal struggle i know you think this is kind of strange but there's a point to it i praise god that you might think it's odd that i praise god because i was a slave it controlled my time it took my money it at the end of the day it had to be part of my day it was like i associate it with comfort it was almost emotional but i was addicted but the lord took it away from me it's been years now now i'm a vegan can you imagine that for years i was using rice dream and almond milk and soy milk in my cereal and told everyone i'm a vegetarian and i was but at night i was a glutton with ice cream daytime on mr natural but you know what real happened and one reason i'm so excited about this when i finally went two weeks without eating ice cream no dairy i started realizing for the first time in my life i was breathing i'm not exaggerating i didn't know i had an allergy to milk so this is not religious i'm just telling you me karen still meets dairy and the kids it's i'm not talking about it's being something religious all my life i was allergic to milk and i didn't know it and i could not breathe the way normal people breathe and i didn't know it i didn't even not know what it felt like because even in the cave i'd go down and i'd get my ice cream it takes a couple weeks before all of a sudden it hit me and i started being able to breathe my head cleared up my sinuses cleared up and once i realized so this is what it feels like to breathe without snorting and coughing all the time man i am so excited that if you offer me ice cream i said oh man i like breathing no way there are benefits and so praise god i mean i am just so thankful that i got the victory in this department but the same dynamics that i struggle with are reeling our lives on something that is a lot more serious some people maybe it's not ice cream maybe it's alcohol there are people that go to church and they go through the motions of being a christian and they've got an addiction to shopping they can't control it they do it for comfort it could be some drug some people sit at the computer and they're addicted to other things it might be pornography and it's like you live a secret life there's a lot of different ways that it plays out jesus doesn't just come to save us in our sin he comes to save us from our sin and he can and you'll have a peace and a joy when he does that's unlike anything you can imagine romans 6 verse 12 this was our memory verse therefore do not let sin reign my god didn't say that we're never going to stumble and fall he says if any man's sin we have an advocate with the father what he does say though is sin should not reign over you in your mortal body that you should obey it in its lusts and do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin but present yourself to god as being one alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness for sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under law but under grace jump down to verse 17 in romans 6 but god be thanked that though you were slaves of sin you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered and having been set free from sin you became slaves of righteousness i speak in human turns because of the weakness of your flesh for just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness and lawlessness leading to moral un lawlessness so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for holiness and he goes on to say in verse 23 for the wages of sin is death but the gift of god is eternal life through jesus christ our lord you know if you look up higher in the same chapter paul says in first corinthians chapter 10. all things are lawful for me but not all things are expedient you might even find something that inherently may not be bad but it is out of balance in your life and it's taking up your time some people they are addicted to a tv program i know it's hard to for us to understand it do sometimes the things that tempt you may not tempt me you might laugh at what was a problem for me so you got a problem i don't understand it that's not your problem it was my problem who knows why but those same people i know people that are christians a lot of them and at a certain time every day they've got to be where a tv is or they tape it and they've got to watch a soap opera because they've gotten sucked into this artificial i laugh at that i cannot understand how people will look at these actors going through these bizarre things on tv saying oh no was it with her yes it's with her oh dude but did you kill him no i killed and they're going oh they're crying and they're watching all this i've tried to give bible studies to people who they've got the soap opera on they say just a minute and i can't they get i can't understand it but it gets a hold of them and their lives revolve around that program as my stomach turns or whatever it's called and it takes over their life and for most people it's not an issue now i don't know what your pet temptation is we're all different some of you are peter some are james some are john some are mary some are martha the devil knows what it is and he wants to get a hold of you so that it controls you that it so becomes the defining influence in your life instead of jesus being the one who's in control of your life and at some point the first step is you gotta like i did you gotta say this is out of control i got a problem and lord i need your help and it's not a good witness you know when up in the hills near our cabin we've got a few trees that are nice looking trees and i was out walking one day and i remember seeing that this poison oak vine was beginning to go up a rather picturesque oak tree up there in the hills and i didn't think much of it now usually poison oak it just it just kind of crawls along the ground it's not very big or it might get up in the man's anita bushes a little bit but they are vines and unencumbered they will continue to grow and they get pretty massive and a few years later i went walking by that same tree and i noticed that the poison oak vine had wrapped around and was going up into the tree and it was creating a lot of weight on the branches taking over the whole lower half of this very big majestic oak tree which normally would be very strong and independent and i realized that something had to be done or when the snow came it was gonna the weight was gonna take that tree down all it took was a chainsaw and one cut and i knew it would die um even though i made the cut the vine was still hanging there but i wasn't worried anymore because once i knew i made the cut it was gonna die and sure enough as time went by the vine rided rotted it blew out of the tree the tree continued to flourish and stand strong some of us know we've got tendrils and they start small in our lives but they'll continue to grow and wrap themselves around your life and start sapping the strength and distracting your energy and your time from what god wants you to do now i'll interpret your silence to mean that maybe the holy spirit is speaking to you and you know that there's things in your life that are out of balance it may be something that as outwardly as harmless as ice cream it may be something more serious it might be a serious substance abuse or practice or relationship that is unhealthy and you need to say lord i can't do this without your help and you come to jesus and you confess that you need supernatural intervention and the lord can give you the victory and you will rejoice and and it is so nice when you can look back and say free at last free at last thank god almighty i'm free at last it is so nice to know that thing doesn't have dominion over you anymore it's not controlling and defining your life he wants you to have that freedom and that experience

Channel: Doug Batchelor

Views: 33,490

Rating: 4.9275765 out of 5

Keywords: doug batchelor, amazing facts, ellen g white, addictions, how to overcome addiction

Id: BMJDI8rstq8

Length: 42min 28sec (2548 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021