Smoking freedom in 20 days: Day 8
To learn how to quit smoking you need to develop positive addictions. This is why I recommend the Purpose Driven Live every day. You need to search and pray about finding your purpose. One of my positive addictions is helping other people who have addictions. I need a lot more positive addictions if I am going to stay clean from all negative addictions for good. Do you need more? Today write down a list of things you can do or accomplish that would be healthy positive addictions.
We need to develop many new positive behaviors. What one new activity will you start to work on today.
God has unfailing love for us. Every day I will add another verse that talks about His unfailing love. Psalm 32:10
Many are the woes of the wicked, but the LORD’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.
Pray morning noon and night: Father take away my anger. If other emotions are a problem for you pray about them as well.
Let’s continue to watch people who quit to see how they did it. Ty quit by making it a habit to turn aggressively from thinking about smoking.
Sue prayed “Father, help me to care only about quitting my smoking 3 times each day.”
Tom said 3 times every day “This temptation will go away if I don’t act on it. If I give in it will return and it may be even stronger next time. If I don’t give in it will go away and someday it will go away for good. I have the self-control to change”.
TJ learned to think about other things by reading “The Purpose Driven Life” every day.
Key Point #1 Learn new activities and learn how to worship God all the time and you will be done with your addiction.
We worship God by telling Him that we love Him. We need to thank God for his unconditional love for us, then we should meditate on how we can learn to love him more. The Bible says that He who loves me keeps my commandments.
Next tell God that you worship only Him. Not money, not the smoking rush, not lust, not anything else.
Next tell God that you praise Him because He is a mighty God, an awesome God, and one that is greatly to be praised. We love to praise football stars, rock stars, movie stars. Just stop it. They will only bring you tiny bits of joy. Praise God instead who can bring you fullness of joy.
Key Point #2 The Bible says in everything give thanks. This means that we are to thank God for everything good or bad.
When you learn to find joy though Jesus Christ you will find that you have 10 times as much power over your addiction.
Read Matthew 5 and First Corintians 5 from the Bible.
Continue to read “The Purpose Driven Life”.
Matthew 5 is about how we can change so that we will be blessed by God. The beatitudes should guide us, point us in the right direction, teach us, and show us the values that Jesus cares about. As we read them we should be looking at whether or not we are trying to follow them.
www.relijournal.com noted the following
“The First Beatitude verse 3
God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for Him,
for the kingdom of heaven is given to them.
The word poor here means those who are poor IN SPIRIT. Jesus wasn’t talking about people being financially poor. To be poor in spirit means to recognize that we fall short of what God wants us to be. It means that we know we are unworthy to receive God’s grace. The poor in spirit see that without God we cannot be forgiven and made new.
We see an example of being poor in spirit in Luke 18:9-14. It is the story of a Pharisee who believed he was completely righteous and looked down on everybody else. The Pharisee stood up in the temple and thanked God that he was not a thief, a liar or a cheat like the tax collector who was also at the temple. He boasted to God that he fasts twice a week and always gives a tenth of his earnings to God. The tax collector stood at a distance, feeling unworthy to look up to heaven. The tax collector said, “God, please have mercy on me, for I am nothing but a sinner.” The Pharisee did not recognize his faults but the tax collector recognized his need for God and for forgiveness, and that is being poor in spirit.
Jesus says that only the poor in spirit will enter into the kingdom of God because they confess and turn to Jesus.
It is easy to agree that we need to walk in repentance but it can be hard to do. Pride can get in the way of us realising our need for God. James 4:7-10 tells us exactly how to develop the right attitude so that we can live by this first characteristic Jesus mentions. It tells us that we must humble ourselves to be able to recognize our need for God.”
10 For we are God’s[a] masterpiece,[b] created in the Messiah[c] Jesus to perform good actions that God prepared long ago to be our way of life. Ephesians 2:10Living Bible (TLB)
To quit smoking we must learn to resolve conflict. What conflict causes you to go back to your addiction? What can you change about that? Today write down what changes need to be made.
It is a huge challenge to find activities that will help you live your life better. If you want to find joy find a new hobby like helping out at the food bank where you will spend time investing your life helping other people. Then you will have less time to be tempted and you will be accomplishing something great with your life.
Read Proverbs Matthew 6 and First Corinthians 6 from the Bible.
God has made us what we are. In Christ Jesus, God made us new people so that we would do good works. God had planned in advance those good works for us. He had planned for us to live our lives doing them.
Ephesians 2:10 International Standard Version (ISV)
Psalm 33:5
The LORD loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love.
The Freedom Prayer
By Tim Hofflander
Father, give me wisdom to develop techniques to quit my addition
Help me to fulfil my God given purpose in full, or to aggressively train to achieve it
I plan to obey you today and I ask that you would see my sincerity and help me to not only quit smoking but to also quit other addictions/sins that keep my blessing far away
I will do my part in helping others and I humbly ask that you would start to bless my health and to give me a chance to help others long term
Matthew 5 is about how we can change so that we will start to be blessed by God. www.relijournal.com noted the following:
The Second Beatitude v4
God blesses those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Now the person that mourns is the person who becomes poor in spirit and repents. It isn’t necessarily talking about mourning over the death of somebody. It is talking about recognizing that we are sinners and understanding how much those sins hurt God and others.
None of us can mourn like this unless we have the Holy Spirit within us because it is the Holy Spirit who convicts us of our sin. When we sin we bring dishonor to God’s name. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to do wrong and just take forgiveness for granted.
When we want happiness at any cost the lines between right and wrong can become blurred and we stop seeing how far from Jesus we have come. That is when we stop mourning over our sin. But when we do mourn God will comfort us. One of the great examples showing this is the story of the prodigal son.
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Thank you for reading day 8: The quit smoking hack.
Index
Day 1 Overcoming cravings
Day 2 Why can’t you quit
Day 3 Start a Journal
Day 4 Overcoming negative emotions
Day 5 You can’t increase your pleasure for the month by smoking
Day 6 Control your emotions and plan your day
Day 7 Learning how to worship God is a key to overcoming addiction