My Sister and I Rebelled Against AA

My sister and I knew that there were big problems with AA.

My mother would tout that all we need was the Bible and The Big Book.

It is Christ and Him Crucified that we need, for He is our Life (Colossians 3: 4)

My mother, like many Christians, believed that belief in Christ Jesus was not pratical, but rather that the Bible needed a supplement.

Yet the grace of God in our lives is about as practical as it can get:

"But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." (1 Corinthians 15: 10)

Any effort on our part, in which we try to take charge or take credit in order to effect what we want or need, such flesh-effort will merely frustrate the grace of God in our lives (Galatians 5: 4)

What a sad irony, that so many believers think that they have to do something more in order to get God to move in their lives, when He is already moving and at work in us (Philippians 2: 13).

As young believers, not worried about the past or the future, not trying to make sense of the hardships that this life can through at us, we knew and believed that the idea of "choosing" your own conception of God simply did not measure up with the Bible, who presents to us a God who is beyond our understanding, one who loves us more than we can begin to reckon, who gives us beyond what we can ask or think (Ephesians 3: 20)!

We did not have a perfect understanding of the Bible, and nearly every day we were force-fed something from the Big Book.
My mother even insisted on calling my Father an alcoholic, which he is not. This myopia about Alcoholics Anonymous creates another perversion -- one of looking at the world from a world-view based on false premises. My mother was convinced that everyone is either an alcoholic, or in denial. The real dichotomy, however, is Jew, Gentile, or Body of Christ. I am now in the Body of Christ, where there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free (Galatians 3: 28).

The whole world is not at all divided into two camps -- drunk or sober. There is a lot more to life than not drinking, and most members of AA are still looking for this Life.

We are not classed according to whether we drink or not, since drunkenness and other perversions are merely manifest of the flesh, the same flesh which Paul calls for us to disdain:

"Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 6: 11)

We are a New Creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5: 17), so why do we spend any more time dealing with thoughts and feelings which we no longer identify with?