Resentment, Fear, and all the Rest: Flesh!

AA distorts a man's proper identity.

He is not his feelings or his thoughts. I was surprised to be sharing this truth with a member who had been working the program for over thirty years. She never connected the truth of who we are, which has nothing to do with who we are.

All throughout the AA literature, the AA cult tells people to look at their feelings, look at their past, look at themselves.

All of this preoccupation with self is precisely the reason why people drink, binge, waste their lives on addictive substances. This love of self, this attempt to fix ourselves through our own means causes more of the problems.

Men and women were never meant to be the center of the universe, or the final focus of their lives.

The truth sets a man free, and the truth is that everything is not up to us, or all about us in the first place.

Man is a spirit, he possesses a soul, and he lives in a body. Man is not defined by what he feels or what he thinks.

Man is a spirit:

"And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." (Genesis 2:7)

He possess a soul:

"In your patience possess ye your souls." (Luke 21:19)

He lives in a body:

"What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?" (1 Corinthians 6: 19)

We do not identify with our bodies, but with the Spirit of God in us:

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

Paul then writes:

"16This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. 17For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. 18But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." (Galatians 5: 16-18)

Then Paul outlines what are the "works of the flesh"":

"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, 20Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, 21Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." (Galatians 5: 19-21)

Man is spirit, not flesh (the realm of self and self-effort), but to the extent that man in his own effort tried to do anything, to that extent will the flesh manifest in his life.

Her is the good news for every believe in the Body of Christ, and for anyone who is struggling to work the Twelve Steps and go nowhere: as a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), you do not identify with the resentments, fears, envies, or any other negatives within you. In fact, you can simply dust them away as ashes, since you now identity with God's Spirit within you.

Resentment, fears, and all the rest are hold-over from the Old Adam flesh which every man and woman is saddled with in this life. Look at Christ, identity with Him, for:

"As He is, so are we in this world." (1 John 4:17)