Mention the word “addiction” and our minds immediately run to drug, alcohol, and sex addictions.  But another rarely recognized addiction exists in each of us-  

We all have  a stubborn commitment to our own felt well-being, living addicted to arranging for satisfaction of whatever longings we can neither deny nor smother.

We are relational beings, created in the image of the three-person relational God, and so we naturally look for satisfaction through relationships, but we stop looking to God for the satisfaction our relational souls crave. The result- Relational Sin, a failure to love others the way Jesus loved us.  The universal human addiction. It is a pandemic. 

We relate to:

• protect ourselves from hurt by others;
• procure from others what enhances our favored image of ourselves;
• preserve that image by letting others see only what maintains it.

Relational sin plants the seeds of the quarrels, fights, and jealousies that James warns us about.  Relational poverty then engulfs families, communities, churches, nations, and the world.

What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you?   You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it.

James 4: 1-2