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 God’s
creatures have one thing truly their own, i.e., themselves.
In a marvelous act of self-limitation God created man in His own
image; giving man the power of choice, subject only to final
judgement at the throne of God. Man’s environment, this
sin-cursed world, exerts tremendous pressure upon the human
will, so that often “what I would, that do I not” (Rom.
7:15); but the capacity to will to serve God remains, so
that through Jesus Christ we can be justified.
Adam’s
sin, or the sin of others, cannot enslave us; it is our own sin
that brings us spiritual death (Rom. 5:12, cf. Ezek. 18:19-f).
Since we can escape the consequences of sin only by avoiding all
sin possible, and by submitting our will to Jesus Christ so that
our sins will be forgiven, it becomes apparent that the basic
struggle of man is to keep himself untrammeled by earthly
things, free to himself to the Lord. (Prov. 4:23 Matt.
16:24). No wonder Paul was so determined: “I will not be
brought under the power of any.” (1 Cor. 6:12)
Anything
that limits my freedom of choice— that binds itself
upon me —has taken from me some portion of the one thing I
have to give to Christ. Read the following with this in mind.
Dr.
M.A.H. Russell, in the British Medical Journal, May 8, 1971,
(Cigarette Dependence: 1- Nature and Classification) wrote: “A
teenager need smoke only twice to have a 70% chance of smoking
for the next 40 years if he lives so long.
This
follows from the facts that only
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15% of adolescents who smoke more than one
cigarette avoid becoming regular smokers, and that only about
15% of smokers stop permanently before the age of 60.
However,
it is apparent that the onset of smoking during adolescence is
determined by an interaction of social and psychological
factors, while the maintenance is due largely to dependence on
the pharmacological effects of nicotine.... Three out of four
current smokers either wish to or have tried to stop smoking,
yet only about one in four succeeds in becoming a permanent
ex-smoker. Thus most smokers smoke not because they wish to but
because they cannot easily stop. This is a feature of dependence
disorder.
Smoking
is certainly associated with other dependence disorders; 92% of
alcoholics and 99% of heroin addicts are smokers compared with
58% of the general population. Intermittent or occasional
cigarette smoking occurs only in about 2% of smokers. People who
smoke at all sooner or later become regular, dependent smokers.”
In
a second article (Cigarette Dependence: 2- Doctor’s Role in
Management; British Medical Journal of May 15, 1971) Dr. Russell
wrote: “About half of all smokers remain complacent and
profess to be happy about their smoking. This they achieve by
using face-saving psychological defenses such as rationalization
and denial.”
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