Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity?
Selfishness - self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.
So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us! God makes that possible. And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self without His aid. Many of us had moral and philosophical convictions galore, but we could not live up to them even though we would have liked to. Neither could we reduce our self-centeredness much by wishing or trying on our own power. We had to have God's help.
The problem with AA, and with every other religious system or cult, is that is still too much in the way. Man is still expected to do something, have something, make some move to do more so that "self" does not takeover. Unfortunately, this just creates a meaningless contradiction. How can I be delivered from this body of death without someone else supplying everything?
Jesus does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, with is everything.
We are dead in our trespasses, and the more that we try to be good, it is still "we" who are trying.
Fear, resentment, preoccupations of any kind, all of this manifests the unrest of a fallen man who keeps on trying to pick Himself up.
The biggest source of self-occupation -- condemnation. We see our sin, ourselves unable to break away from this sin. We need more than good thoughts, we need more than proper feeling. We need a new life, we need the Power that holds the Universe together, the same One who sits at the right hand of the Father to justify us in all that we do.
Jesus Christ is our life (Colossians 3: 4), He is everything that we need. Any system or train of thought which makes Him less and makes us more is made up of folly and doomed to fail. We bring nothing but death within us, as we are all born into this world in the likeness of fallen Adam.
Yet for so many of us, we find ourselves loving ourselves, convinced by pride and fear and tradition that "God helps those who help themselves" or that we cannot trust anyone, that we must keep stable on the inside in order to keep our lives stable, we find nothing but frustration and instability in our lives.
God is love (1 John 4: 8) and this love is a lavish, never-ending forgiveness for all our sins (1 John 4: 10). His love is not based on feeling, not based on circumstance, but on the Cross, where all of our sins were purged, and where we receive the gift of righteousness and abundance of grace, both of which have nothing to do with us, everything that He has done for us.
So, God loves us perfectly, and this perfect love makes us like Jesus, brings us into Him, and thus "As He is, so are we in this world." (1 John 4:17). This perfect love, one which takes away all our sins and takes us from dead in our trespasses to alive in Christ, forever adopted into God's Holy Family.
The problem for most believers, for me, is that we pay too much attention to our feelings. We want to feel a certain way, we want our thoughts and feelings to cooperate and do what we want. Paul went through that dizzying drama-trauma in Romans 7, where the words "I, I, I" never stop.
People drink, smoke, abuse people, places, and things because they love themselves, they love themselves too much, convinced that they are the center of the universe, that when they think and feel right, then everything else will all work out right.
None of this wrangling is necessary. We are called to rest from our dead works, to let His working within us (Colossians 1: 29) lead us through His peace.
Thank you again, Bob George, for this revelation. Pastor Joseph Prince makes righteousness the key element along with grace, but your explanation on this issue has made all the difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment