The Hold of AA -- Part II

When Pat took my sister and me away from our father for nine months, convinced that she was living in an abusive home in which she felt nothing but anger about her situation, her lot in life. I am convinced that she was frustrated with the circumstances in her life. She had quit the meetings, but she did not have something better to replace it. Just like everyone else in the earth, we need fellowship, acceptance, unconditional love, yet we cannot find these things in other people, in the world, or in anything that we say, think, or do. Only in Christ alone and Him Crucified do we find the life, the peace, and the joy of man's desiring.

The problem for many believers, for many people, including my mother and later myself, was that we were trying to live our lives under the Old Covenant, when life is in Christ, and He lives in us because of all that He has done. Our "job" is to believe on Him, and believing on Him is all about knowing Him and receiving more of His grace (2 Peter 3: 18)

But as long as we are operating under an Old Covenant, we will never have a sense of completion, a sense of wholeness, a sense of "rest" because under law, man is condemned, forever unable to meet God's demands.

Paul explained the proper role of the law:

"But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. 24Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. 25But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster." (Galatians 3: 23-25)

In the Book of Hebrews, the writer reminds the Hebrews, and every believer in the Body of Christ, of the New Covenant:

"For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people:

"And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.

"For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.

'In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away." (Hebrews 8: 10-13)

The New Covenant is based completely on all that He has done - our "job" is to believe that He has indeed been propitious (has provided a sacrificial substitute in His Son!) to our unrighteousness and remember our sins and iniquities no more. With this New Covenant established through the Blood of His Son (Luke 22: 20), the Old Covenant of the Law is done away, fulfilled forever (Matthew 7: 14) and put away in the Body of Jesus (Colossians 2: 13-15)

Yet for all of her upset with the Twelve Steps, the program indeed never left her, and instead of being rooted and grounded in the love of God, she ended up founded and floundering on the Twelve Steps for the rest of her life.