AA is most successful at recruiting and retaining males of low IQ and educational attainment who have dependent personality types--i.e. they like being told what to do.
How can anyone expect to live a life of any joy and purpose if they have to be told what to do all the time?
I have lived this life. This program indeed created within me a program of action in which every time I felt bad, sad, glad, or anything else, I had to run and tell someone else about it in order to break free of the pain and hurt.
I look back on this and other regressive, even destructive habits.
Wow -- this AA program really sucks!
It is cruel how people get sucked into this terrible program, then they rhapsodically praise it for helping them to get sober.
After years of taking my inventory, sharing my feelings, telling people what I was going through, complaining about life, running from conflict, running from my feelings, never quite understanding why my life was not quite working, compared to everyone else, now all the pieces fit together.
This program had taught me, among many others, that we could never trust our own thinking, that any of our judgments or reasoning or understanding of issues would be forever marred as wrong.
I lived a greater part of my life waiting for someone else to tell me what to do. I lived a greater part of life convinced that I had no idea what I was doing, what I had, or who I was.
All of that changed when I read about the New Covenant., prophesied in the Old Testament, and fulfilled in the New Testament:
"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.
First of all, the LORD pledges to be a god to me, not just for a nation, not just "there", but "there for me", and for all who are established in His righteousness (Isaiah 54: 14; Matthew 6: 33; 1 Corinthians 1: 30)
He offers to lead us from within through the Holy Spirit, who places on us His laws both in our hearts and our minds. Because He is my God, I no longer need wonder if I will be OK or not, because He is my Shepherd, and thus I lack nothing. (Psalm 23: 1)
Because He leads from within through peace (Colossians 3: 15), I need not question and wonder all the time if I am doing the right thing or the wrong thing. I need never worry about God being upset or frustrated with me, or even His threatening to leave me because He will be "merciful" or "pay for" my unrighteousness, and never again remember my sins or iniquities, which speak of heredity sin through Adam, and the sins which I have committed.
Knowing God does not even require steps or provisional actions in addition to believing that He died for my sins. "The Twelve Steps" are included in that heartless mix of religious traditions which actually separate us from God and His grace because they coerce into doing things to get righteousness, instead of laboring to enter the rest of righteousness paid for and provided to us as a never-ending gift (Romans 5: 17)
We can rest in His Spirit, and depend on the Truth which He reveals to us (1 John 2: 20, 27), all of which is signaled to us in righteousness, peace, and the resulting joy of the Holy Spirit, i .e The Kingdom of Heaven (Romans 14: 17)
AA is for dependent people, because it makes them dependent on people:
"Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.
"6For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited." (Jeremiah 17: 5-6)
No wonder so many people suffer in AA meetings. They are taught to trust in the "wisdom" of old-timers.
There is a better Way:
"7Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is.
"8For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit." (Jeremiah 17: 7-8)
Now, the heart of man is wicked, cannot be trusted, as indicated in the next verse (Jeremiah 17: 9)
Through Christ, we receive a new heart:
"And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh:" (Ezekiel 11: 18)
This new heart is filled with the peace of Christ, which rules "good or bad" in our hearts (Colossians 3: 15)
No comments:
Post a Comment