We were created to be addicted, and the presence of God is the most addictive substance on the planet. If we look at an addict, we see a crude, yet strong picture of worship. Take for example a person addicted to heroin: they will give their time, their money, their sleep, and even give up food so that they can spend every last penny on the next buzz. They will trade respect in society, their families, their job, and will even become homeless all for one more high. What sacrifice! What devotion! They worship the drug with their whole life. They put most christians to shame in their worship of a mere object.

Our lives should reflect the same and yet an even more abandoned form of worship to our King. We are to be living sacrifices, our bodies instruments of righteousness, our behavior as slaves to Christ. This kind of devotion comes through addiction. Just as the addict is compelled to give everything away in favor of this “higher pleasure,” in the same way when we become addicted to Jesus, we should be willing to give up anything and everything in our lives, not because we have to, but because we are lost in the bliss of His glory. We will trade any earthly pleasure for the infinite pleasure of knowing Him.

When God made Adam and Eve, he placed them in the garden of eden (hebrew-pleasure or delight). We were created for pleasure, for addiction, and for infatuation, but the devil diverted our cravings for God’s presence, and deceived us into embracing the counterfeit pleasures of this world. We have been trying to medicate our deep longing for God with the painkillers of sinful delights. But the black hole inside of us can only be filled with God Himself. We were created for Him, and when we are without Him in our lives, we feel what the fish feels out of the water, or the tree feels uprooted from the soil: the slow suffocation.