Step Seven

Step Seven: "We humbly asked God to remove all our shortcomings".

"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).

I can't think of too much harder than becoming willing to give up the very things that I have used my entire life to cope with life's difficulties.  "God, would you take away my comfort.  Please remove my support and my coping mechanisms.  Exercise out of me the very things that I substitute for you."  Step Seven is a prayer for change.  It is to beg God to do whatever is necessary in order to transform me through and through.  Step Seven requires great courage and a willingness to embrace great pain.

"Step Seven goes beyond confession and asks God to change us....When we repent, we turn from our sins.  At the same time, we turn to God.  We turn from self-will to his will" (Don Williams, Jesus and Addiction).

This kind of prayer requires courage and but it also takes a great deal of trust in God.  He does not strip us naked of our unhealthy shortcomings just to leave us barren and alone in some far off desert.  He takes away the garbage that we have put our trust in for perhaps our entire lives so that he can replace it with something better--Himself!

"God loves us.  God accepts us.  We are his.  We are no longer worthless and alone, bouncing around in a meaningless universe" (Don Williams, Jesus and Addiction).

Step Six

Step Six:  "We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character".

"Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up" (James 4:10).

In my view, Step Six, may in fact be the hardest step to realize when one is honestly working through the steps to realize authentic and transformational life change.  Jesus asked the lame man by the Bethesday Pool, "Do you really want to be healed?"  In the same way, step six causes us to internalize the question, "Do I really want to get better?"  Do I really want to be done with all of the maladaptive coping mechanisms (those things that I do to keep from dealing with life)? 

Step Five

Step Five:  "We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs".

"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed" (James 5:16).

Step Five is maybe the scariest of all of the steps.  The thought of confessing sins can intimidate just about anyone.  I've been in the middle of several confessions-gone-wrong and I so I completely understand why the thought of confessing sins would be frightening.  People don't always keep confidence.  People don't always extend Christ's grace and forgiveness.  People don't always represent the gospel very well.  Though scary, confession remains essential and a fundamental biblical principle.  James 5:16 concludes, "Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.  The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much".

Don Williams in his book, Jesus and Addiction, writes, "Confession is the only way we can be free from captivity.  Through confession, we're not only admitting our sins, but also giving ourselves to God to be brought into a right relationship with him through the death of his Son".  It's the sharing of our stuff with Jesus and with His human representatives that allows the murky shadows to become brilliantly cleansed.  It's not an option--it's essential in our spiritual development.  We must confess our sins to each other.  Williams continues, "If we don't seek others out in confession, we will miss an important spiritual, relational, and biblical truth--God ministers to us through others.  They are often the means through which Jesus makes his intercession and mercy effective.  As we confess, our hypocrisy will blessedly melt.  We will no longer be religious but real.  After people see our brokenness and tears they will extend their love and mercy in Jesus' name."

"To be freed from fear is to be free to face our sins and acknowledge our pain before God and each other"  --Don Williams, Jesus and Addiction.

Step Four

Step Four:  "We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves".

"Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord" (Lamentations 3:40).

Step Four is perhaps the hardest of the steps to accomplish.  It involves taking an honest and sober look at everyone and everything that has happened in one's life--the good and the bad.  For me, it is a detailed record of my sins, my relationships, my failures, and my successes.  It is to answer the question, "Who am I?"  What have I done?  What has been done to me?  Don Williams writes, "Jesus comes to free us from the past.  This includes our bondage to Satan, this fallen world system, sin, the law, and the flesh.  As we make our 'searching and fearless moral inventory,' much of this will be specifically exposed.  It will include the hurts that we've inflicted on others as well as the hurts that have been inflicted upon us".  The fourth step takes time, it takes courage, it takes honesty, and it takes the searchlight of the Holy Spirit shining into the dark places of our heart that we would rather avoid.  It's also a step not to take alone.  It's advisable to have a counselor, mentor, or accountability partner that you can share your stuff with.  A moral inventory can be extremely painful at times.

To find a Celebrate Recovery group in your area click here.

Step Three

Step Three:  "We made a decision to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of God".

"Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship" (Romans 12:1).

Turning our lives and wills over to the care of God means meeting God on his terms--not ours.  "Jesus doesn't beat us until we give up.  On the contrary, he took the punishment that we deserve.  Out of his undying love, he woos us to himself.  As Jesus humbles himself before us and washes our feet, he breaks our pride.  Through his acts of mcercy, he crushes our hard hearts and fills them with his love and compassion.  Once this happens, at the very core of our being, our abandoned shame base starts to heal." (Don Williams, Jesus and Addiction).  Jesus doesn't beat us into submission--he loves us into submission!  The Gospel IS NOT the frightening news that God is angry and that he is going to hurt us if we don't straighten up.  The Gospel IS the very good news that God loves us and that He has already made a way for us to be reconciled with Himself through the sacrifical death and victorious resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Step Three involves a conscious and heart-felt decision to trust God.

Don Williams writes, "I must confess that as a Church addict, becoming detached requires a lot of grace.  At times God has had to separate me physically from the Church--once when I resigned and once when I was fired.  At other times, he has worked on me through the Spirit by wedding my heart to himself in new ways, freeing me to love him once again.  Whatever the means, we must be separated from our addictive attachment to the Church so we can really love and care for the Christian community in freedom rather than with compulsion. . . . As the attachment to our addictions is broken, we will be free to deal healthily with the things that have bound us, including the Church."

Step One

For some time now I have been slowly reading Don Williams' book, Jesus and Addiction.  I have reached the point in the book where Pastor Williams discusses the 12 Steps of recovery.  My personal exposure to the 12 Steps comes exclusively through Celebrate Recovery and so I am deeply interested in another perspective.  In Jesus and Addiction, Pastor Williams is making the case that the church is by and large an addiction machine and that changes will be necessary in order for a church to become a place where individuals find freedom from addiction.  For example, rather than teaching people to serve out of their wholeness, churches often encourage service in order to find some sense of personal fulfillment--I now know that such a motive is called codependency and is anything but healthy.

Step One:  We admitted we were powerless over our addictions and compulsive behaviors, that our lives had become unmanageable.

This first step, "painfully confesses that addictions, whether to substances, processes, or relationships, are no longer working and that we have to release them.  We have been pretending that we are in control, but in actuality, we are out of control."

"Giving up the illusion of control means abandoning the last defenses of our independent egos.  It means that false selves are now exposed for what they are.  Since destruction precedes reconstruction, these false selves must die."

"This admission of impotence only comes through crisis.  The crises of admitting that we are powerless over our lives comes as we hit bottom--sometimes with a bounce, sometimes with a crash."

"God will break the hard hearts of the self-righteously religious who come to Step One.  He will strip 'elder brothers' of performances, righteous works, presumptions, judgments, and secret rage.  As those elder brothers, we will give up the law and the spiritual pride that goes with it.  Where will that leave us?  We will be on our faces, mumbling that we are powerless and that our lives, yes, even our religious lives, have become unmanageable.  We will be on our faces, admitting that our codependent service to the church, our workaholism, and our continual rescue of others, hide the emptiness inside.  We will be on our faces admitting that our attachments to money, food, sex, relationships, and our own self-images are idolatrous.  This is the first step on the path of healing, and we must take it with guts and grace."

"I have admitted my own powerlessness more than once.  My first crisis was during my conversion.  I realized how much Jesus loved me and how I shared responsibility for his death.  My heart was broken; I knew in that moment that I could no longer manage my own life.  Another crisis came when my wife Kathryn and I, in deep emotional pain, admitted that we were powerless over our relationship.  Years later, I was broken once again when I was fired as a pastor. I then knew that I was powerless over the church.  I became separated from my 'drug of choice' and all of my codependent relationships.  Numb, depressed, and empty, I retreated into myself.  All my plans, hopes, and dreams lay shattered at my feet.  This was God's severe mercy and my first step to healing.  All of us will go through this crisis more than once as God brings down our idols, setting us free to love him.  Acknowledging that we are out of control is the first step to becoming like the fearless Jesus."

--Don Williams, Jesus and Addiction.

SHAME

"Shame is a kind of soul murder. Once shame is internalized, it is characterized by a kind of psychic numbness which becomes the foundation for a kind of death in life. Forged in the matrix of our source (family) relationships, shame conditions every other relationship in our lives. Shame is total non-acceptance. Shame is a being wound--in other words, it has to do with who we are at the deepest level--and differs greatly from the feeling of guilt. Guilt says I've done something wrong; shame says there is something wrong with me. Guilt says I've made a mistake. Shame says I am a mistake. Guilt says what I did was not good; shame says I am not good" (Don Williams, page 35-36, Jesus and Addiction).


"Our response to shame is to try to cover up, for fear of exposure. We fear facing the results of abandonment: depression, aching loneliness, and the loss of our true self. In place of God's image in us, we create the false self, a Hollywood movie set behind which we hide. This screen is made from our own fears and fantasies. The scripts are written by other people. If we are honest, it often seems that we are acting in someone else's movie. We have become people pleasers, trapped by performing in order to gain acceptance" (Don Williams, p36, Jesus and Addiction).

Addicted to People?

I want to share some more today from "Jesus and Addiction". Don Williams is putting his finger on something that clearly needs attention in the church and yet I'm not so sure that the church is ready to hear it.

In defining addiction Williams writes, "Addictions begin because we want to experience pleasure and avoid pain. To do this, we attach ourselves to other people, behaviors, and things that make us feel good. Repetitive behavior reinforces such attachments." "We are set up to become addicted; we are creatures who naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain. We are inherently fearful, needing to have our moods altered and welcoming outside control". People will naturally take the path that appears to be least painful and most pleasurable. We will attempt to be at peace with everyone (pleasure) and to avoid conflict (pain) at all costs. This appears spiritual and even Christ-like on the surface until you realize that this mode of operation puts people in charge and reduces Jesus to secondary consideration. You can't obey Jesus if you are obeying people. You can't serve two masters.

Williams makes the application, "How then, does this concept of addiction apply to ministers? Their fear of failure and subsequent abandonment and job loss results in their need to 'people please.' To them their questions easily become, 'What does my church want? How can I make the congregation happy? How can I keep people coming?' The question should rather be, 'What does God say my church needs?' The shift may be subtle, but it's clear. Rather than being God focused, leadership easily becomes human focused and self focused". We stop doing what God wants in order to do what the people (or the board) wants. Pastors become employees of the church rather than servants of the Most High God.

He continues, "In many churches functional authority has passed from Jesus to the people. When pastors continually ask what the official board wants or what the people want, they admit that control from the outside rather than the Spirit's direction on the inside is the ideal state of affairs. Rather than acting, the codependent leaders spends his or her time reacting". Thus we have broken churches who do not and cannot experience the power of the Holy Spirit.