Can I Get Healed of Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, Pornography and Homosexuality?
No!
You can get healed of illnesses stemming from these things, but you cannot get healed of these things themselves.
Why not? Doesn’t Jesus heal ALL diseases? Yes, He does. But these things are not diseases! They are SINS! You can definitely be set free from all these things, but you cannot be healed of any of them! Trying to apply healing Scriptures to beat sins is just as much a mistake as trying to apply dominion-over-sin Scriptures to beat diseases.
To get rid of a disease, you get healed. To get sin out of your life, you repent. These are two completely separate things. You don’t have to repent for having the flu and you can’t get healed of being a lesbian. You’ll never repent (and thus get free) until you know that you’re sinning! Once you repent of your sin, you open the door for God to free you from your sin and heal you of the physical consequences of your sin. He is perfectly willing to do so. Just getting healed of consequences is not enough if you’re going to keep doing what produces more of them.
Before we go any farther, let me clarify that when this book talks about homosexuality, it refers to willful engagement in actual physical homosexual acts, NOT to merely feeling an attraction to a same-sex person and being tempted to engage in such acts. If mere temptation were a sin, we would all be in trouble, as probably every heterosexual knows what it feels like to be attracted to an opposite-sex person and be tempted to pursue illicit heterosexual acts outside of marriage. The act would be sin, but the temptation alone is not – it is common to man (1 Corinthians 10:13). ALL of us have fleshly desires that must be kept under with the Holy Spirit’s help (Romans 8:13, Galatians 5:16). Having an urge to do something does not justify it if the Bible says it is sin. Obviously, school shootings are sin; a shooter’s strong urge to do it does not justify it.
Jesus has compassion on you if you are involved in any of these snares of the devil. He wants to liberate you from these forms of bondage! He’s already paid the price for your freedom. However, He will not excuse or affirm (much less “celebrate”) your sinful behavior. You need to see these things for what they are. The Bible never says, “No one with asthma shall inherit the kingdom of God.” Asthma is a disease, not a sinful choice. The Bible DOES say that no drunkard or homosexual will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). Thus, being a drunkard or a homosexual is a sinful choice, not a disease, so God treats these things differently from diseases. If these things represent your habitual lifestyle (rather than being mere temptations or areas where you slip but repent and really want help), and you have no remorse for engaging in them, you are not really saved and you need to get saved FOR REAL. (Please read How to Be Saved from Your Sins.) Trying to beat these sins in your own strength without Jesus’ help is unlikely to succeed. You need to have a new nature that doesn’t want to indulge in sin. Being born again is the only way to get that new nature.
Since I brought up 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (which is echoed by Ephesians 5:5-7), you need to understand that these sins do not cause anyone to lose his salvation. An unremorseful lifestyle involving these sins is proof that someone is not saved in the first place. They are effects, not causes, of someone’s lost state. If you’re looking for help in any of these areas, you are not a deceived unbeliever who identifies with and promotes ungodly lifestyles! As a Christian, you should identify with righteousness and your dominion over sin of all kinds. Even a Christian could temporarily fall into one of these sins, but Paul’s statement, “Such WERE some of you” shows that as a Christian, these sins do not identify or define you anymore.
Take Sole Responsibility for Your Sin
An important step to being set free is understanding that you are not a “victim” of some kind of “disease.” You have made a sinful choice. You have failed morally. You have no one to blame but yourself. As long as you try to cast the blame elsewhere and consider yourself a victim, you will never deal with the real issue. The world has been deceiving people for a long time that alcoholism and drug abuse are diseases and that those who sin in these ways are “victims” of addiction. Ignore the well-meaning but unbiblical platitudes offered by some “recovery” programs. “Addiction can happen to anyone! You shouldn’t feel a stigma associated with addiction!” I beg to differ. People who don’t drink never become alcoholics. People who avoid pornography never become porn addicts. Only people who buy illegal drugs from criminals become hooked on illegal drugs. You SHOULD feel bad about such habits – bad enough to be desperate to be free from them. And the good news is that Jesus offers you freedom!
The fact that you failed does not mean you have to live your life identifying yourself as a failure. You can be sure that your born-again spirit – the real you – is NOT a failure! The real you has never sided with sin since the day you got saved.
The world tells you that pornography is a victimless habit. The world tells you that homosexuality is just another valid “sexual preference” among many.
However, Satan (“the god of this world”) lies about these things. You have to CHOOSE to abuse alcohol or drugs to become an addict. No one else can make you do it. These things don’t just jump into your bloodstream from bottles or pills one day and “make” you be an addict. (The only way you can become an addict without sinning is to take habit-forming prescription drugs as directed. But that is not drug abuse, which is what I’m discussing here.) Pornography has a lot of victims. If you look at pornography, YOU are one victim (but not an innocent one). I used to look at it before I was a Christian, and I can tell you that all it does is clog your mind with carnal filth. By degrading the way that you see people of the opposite sex, it makes it harder for you to relate properly to them. The people you relate to improperly are the next victims. The first victims were the people who posed for the pictures or videos, whether by force or by choice. Their view of sexuality is degraded by the experience. As far as homosexuality goes, the Bible is clear that it is against God’s natural plan. The ONLY valid “sexual preference” is for the opposite sex. Sexual intimacy must be limited to a biological man and a biological woman who are married to each other. We are to FLEE anything else (1 Corinthians 6:18).
Witchcraft is also a work of the flesh in Galatians 5:19-21, and included in the biblical definition of witchcraft is drug abuse. (I’m not talking about taking medicine because you’re sick.) Lust and other sexual sins are also listed in Galatians 5:19-21 (adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness). A person who indulges in pornography is a lascivious person. He ignores what even Job knew to do in a far darker day: “I made a covenant with mine eyes; why should I then look on a maid?” (Job 31:1). He disobeys Psalm 101:3: “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me.” The pornography addict in many cases gets more and more “hard-core” and eventually starts viewing child pornography. He financially supports organized crime and its victimization of the people in the pictures and videos. With Satan’s addictions, what you’re doing now is never enough – you crave more and more until you’re destroyed or you turn to Jesus and get set free.
A disease can come on you without you being personally responsible for it. Alcoholism, drug abuse, pornography and homosexual sex cannot come on you without your conscious choice. Perhaps you were strongly temped, but you still made a choice that the Bible calls sin. (Merely being tempted to do so is not a sin – Jesus was tempted in every way that we are according to Hebrews 4:15. That means that at some point, he faced and beat the temptation to engage in homosexual activity.) Because you chose to sin by disobeying God in this way, the only solution is for you to choose not to sin in this way from now on. This is called repentance – literally “changing your mind!” You must look at your sin and think, “This is NOT OK.”
This flies in the face of everything that modern counselors and magazine articles have to say on the subject. You do not need to get “healed” by a twelve-step plan, even a Christian twelve-step plan. The biblical plan is simple: REPENT, then walk out the deliverance that Jesus has already purchased for you. Don’t let society coddle you with its error that everyone who sins is just a sick person with a “disability” or “disease” that needs to be “healed.” Unfortunately, we have a habit of renaming sin so that it doesn’t seem like sin anymore. It is “politically correct” to say that the homosexual is engaging in an “alternative lifestyle” instead of engaging in an abomination (Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13), the latter of which is biblically correct. A sin by any other name is still a sin! Some pandering preachers prefer to preach Pablum to pacify practitioners of perilous practices, but I will never be one of them.
The Importance of Repentance
Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8), which include alcoholism, drug abuse, pornography and homosexuality! The first thing you need to do is repent.
If you are an alcoholic, you are sinning and you need to repent. God forbids alcohol-induced drunkenness (Ephesians 5:18). You are violating His New Testament command every time you get drunk. Do not attempt to hide behind some excuse that you have a disease of some kind. You are simply indulging in a work of the flesh (listed among such in Galatians 5:19-21). You cannot be healed of the works of the flesh. You must repent of them and live above them by choosing to walk in the Spirit so that you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh (Galatians 5:16). By the Spirit (not by trying harder or making New Year’s Resolutions) you mortify the deeds of the body (Romans 8:13).
If you are addicted to legal prescription drugs taken in the prescribed doses, that’s not a sin for which you need to repent. Jesus still wants to heal your body of its dependence on that drug so that you can be “free indeed.” Of course, He also paid for you to be healed of whatever illness or injury made it necessary for that doctor to prescribe the drug in the first place. It is not a sin to take prescription drugs that were prescribed to you, so if that was what got you “hooked” you don’t need to repent. However, it is a sin to take prescription drugs that weren’t prescribed to you, as that is illegal and the Bible tells us to obey civil authorities (Romans 13:1-2, 1 Peter 2:13-15). If you’re doing that, you DO need to repent.
You may bristle at my emphasis on repentance, but the Bible is clear that repentance is a New Testament command. Jesus said that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached everywhere (Luke 24:47), so we should all preach repentance everywhere.
People in sin complain about “judging,” but that’s nothing new – the Sodomites complained about Lot judging their lifestyle (Genesis 19:9)! We judge sin to be sin. We don’t just leave people to wallow in their sin; we let them know that Jesus is their answer! If they reject us, God gives us credit for trying to reach them. However, there is a lie out there that if we just act friendly and never say anything about anyone’s sinful behavior, those who practice it will like us and maybe they’ll want to come to church. Meanwhile, some of them aggressively cram their agendas down everyone’s throats! The devil wants you to shut up so that he can have a monopoly on public discourse on these issues. This doesn’t mean that we make sinful lifestyles the main issue when talking to sinners – the homosexual’s BIGGEST need is to know Jesus and be saved. There are more heterosexual sins going on in the world than homosexual sins. The heterosexual fornicator’s biggest need is to know Jesus, too. However, this Jesus to whom we lead people is the One who says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” (John 8:10-11). We’ve become much better at preaching the first half of that than the last half, but we need to do both.
Realize Who You Are in Christ
God wants to deliver you from ALL sinful habits, including alcoholism, drug abuse, pornography and homosexuality, so He sent Jesus to pay the price for your freedom! You have the right to be free from being a slave of the flesh to indulge its lusts such as the ones specified here. The principle here is not how to be healed of a disease, and the answer is not simply reading healing Scriptures. The Scriptures you need are those that discuss your dominion over sin. These are every bit as important as “Healing Scriptures” and they are the key to breaking the stronghold of sin in your life. You must deal with the sin problem as well as the physical results. Your redemption gives you authority over both.
Many people have been mis-taught that Christians are merely sinners saved by grace. The truth is that when you get saved, you literally become a new person on the inside (2 Corinthians 5:17). You are NOT a sinner anymore. The traditionalists will shriek, “But we still sin, so we are still sinners!” But Christians are referred to as saints, not sinners, in the New Testament. That doesn’t mean that you don’t sin, but it means that you are no longer identified with sin.
A good step is realizing that your perfect born-again spirit is not, never was, and never will be, bound by alcoholism, drug abuse pornography or homosexuality. Those labels are NOT who you are in Christ. Only your flesh will gravitate toward those sins; the real new you will never do so.
If you’re born again, your spirit does not have a sinful nature. Only your mind and body can lead you into sin if you let them.
You may not feel as if you have the power to overcome sin, but you don’t have to feel that power to have it. Once you are a Christian and you make the choice to do things God’s way, God’s power kicks in and He will help you stay out of sin. There is no such thing as a sin so powerful that there is no way of escape (1 Corinthians 10:13).
Drug addictions, booze addictions, pornography addictions and homosexual behavior are all part of the power of darkness from which you were delivered when you were saved (Colossians 1:12-14). In Christ, the statement, “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic” is not true, and no Christian should let that statement pass through his lips. Instead, say, “Once an alcoholic, but now free indeed in Christ, delivered from alcoholism and all the other forms of the devil’s bondage!”
Please understand that the sins I’m discussing are just as much paid for by the blood of Jesus as any others. You are forgiven for them as a believer just as much as you are from more socially acceptable sins like gossip, worrying, complaining, and failing to pray for government leaders. It is not a “big deal” to God to forgive you from these; your forgiveness was already purchased and it is credited to you as a believer. Jesus’ blood paid for your sins. He was made physically sick in your place as part of the curse for those very sins. There is no need to continue to bear a curse that Jesus bore for sins. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).
You are not a debtor to the flesh to live after the flesh (Romans 8:12). Sin has no dominion over you as a Christian (Romans 6:14). As a Christian, you are DEAD to sin (Romans 6:11). You have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires (Galatians 5:24). Victory over sin is already yours; you simply must appropriate it. You can do it!
So don’t say, “I am a victim of the disease of alcoholism.” Instead, say, “I am dead to the sin of alcoholism.” God will back that, since He says to reckon yourself dead to sin (Romans 6:11). Don’t say, “Illegal drug addiction happened to me like it could happen to anyone.” Instead, say, “I am dead to the sin of illegal drug addiction.” Don’t say, “I was born homosexual; my DNA leaves me no choice.” Instead, say, “I am dead to the sin of homosexual sex.” Don’t say, “Addiction to lust-filled videos came upon me and ensnared me.” Instead, say, “I am dead to the sin of viewing pornography.” You get the idea. Build the truth that you are DEAD to sin into your thinking.
Jesus never “healed” anyone of any of the works of the flesh, and neither did any of the apostles. However, there is certainly precedent for being set free from them in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11! Some of them WERE drunkards (alcoholics) and homosexuals and other habitual sinners before Jesus set them free! Since they were set free of these things back then, you can be set free today!
Freedom from the Resulting Physical Problems
When you deal with the root of a sickness by repenting of sin that caused it, you can also pray in faith to receive your healing of the physical consequences of your sinful choice. Alcohol and other drugs do produce physical dependencies. Pornography is habit-forming, too. (Ask anyone who’s ever been addicted to pornography. Your brain can get “rewired” to crave it.) But God can and will deliver you from all of these self-inflicted problems if you cooperate with Him.
Freedom from the Underlying Problems
People tend to engage in addictive behaviors to fill a hole in their lives that God Himself is supposed to fill. You need to open yourself up to the love of God and let God fill the holes in your life. He will do a much better job than a booze bottle or a joint or a “mature” video that really should be rated “I” for “Immature” because only immature people watch it. Ask God to give you a revelation of His love for you (Ephesians 3:14-19). God wants to fix not only addiction problems but also the underlying issues that drive people to seek escape.
Authority over Demonic Strongholds
A lesbian went straight after coming to the first church we planted. We cast a demon out of her. You’ll find that when you minister to homosexuals, you need to be ready to cast unclean spirits out of them. (There are many other topics related to deliverance elsewhere in this book.) You may have to do that for other people who have really gotten steeped in sin, as well. The presence of a demonic stronghold is still not an excuse for sin, though it can be the result of persistent sin. Note, however, that no demon can ever inhabit a Christian’s born-again spirit; its influence is limited to the Christian’s mind and body.
I was preaching one day and a Native American alcoholic was in the service. He said that he just felt drawn to the place where we were having the service, so he came. I was preaching as usual, and suddenly he interrupted me and screamed that he just couldn’t live the way he was living anymore. He went on to say that he had a spirit in him that pierced him with its talons every time he tried to get free. He had been to counseling sessions where he had described that spirit. They told him that he was a crazy old Indian who needed psychotherapy. But they hadn’t managed to “shrink” the demon’s influence. You can’t get rid of a demon with psychology! I told him that I believed him (which surprised him, because no one else did, and apparently the church he’d been attending didn’t practice deliverance), and that furthermore I knew what to do about it. I had him come up and I cast that foul demon out of him. He was a changed man from that moment forward. Many years later, he was still free! And he didn’t need to go to “anonymous” meetings to stay free, either. (I wonder how “anonymous” things are when they say, “My name is ___ and I’m an alcoholic.” I’ve never heard of anyone saying, “My name is none of your business – I’m an anonymous alcoholic.” Besides, in the small towns where I’ve lived, most people would probably know who you are whether you name yourself or not. The only “anonymity” is that you’re not allowed to tell outsiders who else is there; the outsiders must figure it out for themselves when they see whose cars are in the parking lot on the night of the meeting.)
Jesus gave us authority over snakes and scorpions and all the power of the enemy (Luke 10:19). This means that if you are ministering, and you have the other person’s permission to do it, you can take authority over these bondages and command them to be broken in the name of Jesus. If you are the one in bondage, YOU can take authority over these bondages and command them to be broken in the name of Jesus! Note that this is different from receiving a healing. If you are involved in these sins, repent first before you command them to be broken. You don’t have to “feel like” you can live free. If you wait until you “feel like” you can do it, you’ll never do it. Feeling comes after faith, not before it. God’s grace will always be there so that you’ll always have a way of escape from any sin (1 Corinthians 10:13).
If you are ministering the Word to a Christian addict, make sure that you present the truth that he is not a servant of sin (Romans 6:6), not a debtor to the flesh (Romans 8:12), and DEAD to sin (Romans 6:11). Realizing what the Word says will be of far greater value than having the person just grit his teeth and try harder not to sin, which doesn’t work. You don’t overcome the flesh with the flesh; you mortify the deeds of the flesh through the Spirit (Romans 8:13). Through the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh (Galatians 5:16). That is why “treatment” that doesn’t involve the Holy Spirit will probably be ineffective. Calling on “Higher Power” or “God as We Understood Him” doesn’t provide any permanent solution – there is no current action of the Holy Spirit in Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or any other false religion. The Holy Spirit needs to be central to the person’s liberation. Where the Holy Spirit is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17).
See also: