Anyone who is or has ever known an alcoholic is familiar with AA’s 12 steps to serenity. The first three of these very powerful steps are as follows:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Every new member to AA has to stand in front of their peers and admit they have a problem. This isn’t to make sure everyone present is an alcoholic and not a spy. It is to make sure that everyone knows that they are not the answer to their own problems. No, in AA it is understood that one cannot be the source of a problem and the solution at the same time.
Those of you not afflicted with this disease may be questioning the relevance of these things to you. You may not be afflicted with alcoholism, but you are afflicted with something just as destructive. Pride.
Alcoholism can restrict you from functioning as an adult. It can make you dependant. But pride can make you just as dependant. Not on a drug, but on yourself. This may not seem like such a bad thing to you. But if, like me, you have come to understand that any true growth cannot come from within, you realize this dependence to be even worse than any dependence on a chemical.
Now, I’m going to do something strange: I’m going to refrain from trying to convince you of the idea that you cannot achieve any real inner growth of your own power. This is because I know that if you haven’t learned this fact on your own before now, I won’t be able to do so with words. For some of us this lesson is harder to learn than others. This is because some of us are naturally smarter, stronger, and generally more able than others. It is these people who have a harder time understanding the need for a higher power to aid us in our attempts to understand things beyond our understanding…like anything having to do with God.
In a way, you have to hit rock bottom before you can understand this. You have to come to the realization on your own that while you may be smart, it isn’t enough.
For the rest of us, this is just a short reminder of the fact that if we seek to understand more of ourselves, we need to depend on God, not our own knowledge.
God Loves A Longshot
I don’t know if you know this, but God loves to send completely unqualified people to do His work. That way, everyone knows that it was God alone working. He loves it. He chose the weakest son of a sheepherder to rule a nation. He chose a murderer with a speaking problem to free His people from Egypt. And if you had any doubt as to this fact remaining, look at what the Bile says about God’s own Son. God could have given His Son an appearance that was attractive and drew people to Him. An appearance that immediately made people want to be around Him. But here is what the Bible says about the Christ:
He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.
-Isaiah 53:2-4 (NIV)
But here we are. Feebly trying to get our spiritual affairs in order on our own. When will we learn that the failure or success in our spiritual lives has nothing to do with us but with how much we let God take control? It is only God that can draw people to Himself.
So you go ahead and improve yourself. Make yourself clean before you let God use you. Personally, I’ll take a crazy man who won’t shut up about God over a diligent and determined disciple trying to make himself better any day of the week.
