Jesus -- More Than a God of Our Understanding: Much More

A God of my understanding.

It sounds so good, so natural, does it not?

The concept would allow me to embrace a "Higher Power" to my liking, not like the hateful deities which motivated men of war in ages past.

So went the argument in Bill Wilson's mind:

Despite the living example of my friend there remained in me the vestiges of my old prejudice. The word God still aroused a certain antipathy. When the thought was expressed that there might be a God personal to me this feeling was intensified. I didn't like the idea. I could go for such conceptions as Creative Intelligence, Universal Mind or Spirit of Nature but I resisted the thought of a Czar of the Heavens, however loving His sway might be. I have since talked with scores of men who felt the same way.

 

My friend suggested what then seemed a novel idea. He said, "Why don't you choose your own conception of God?"

That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last. It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning. (AA, pg 12)

Then Bill Wilson shared:

There I humbly offered myself to God, as I then understood Him, to do with me as He would. I placed myself unreservedly under His care and direction. I admitted for the first time that of myself I was nothing; that without Him I was lost. I ruthlessly faced my sins and became willing to have my new-found Friend take them away, root and branch. I have not had a drink since.

 

How can he talk about "sins" if this God he is bringing himself to is "as he understood Him."

 

What sins did Bill have to confess to, anyway?  This God, this new found "Friend" would later become "Father" then "Principal" in other parts of this book.

 

My schoolmate visited me, and I fully acquainted him with my problems and deficiencies. We made a list of people I had hurt or toward whom I felt resentment. I expressed my entire willingness to approach these individuals, admitting my wrong. Never was I to be critical of them. I was to right all such matters to the utmost of my ability.

 

"my problems and deficiencies" --I thought that He had sins which needed to be confessed.

 

I was to test my thinking by the new God-consciousness within. Common sense would thus become uncommon sense. I was to sit quietly when in doubt, asking only for direction and strength to meet my problems as He would have me. Never was I to pray for myself, except as my requests bore on my usefulness to others. Then only might I expect to receive. But that would be in great measure.

 

All of this sanctimonious talk runs contrary to the real life of Bill W., a flagrant philanderer and thief, a man who was clamoring for alcohol at the end of his life, who smoked obsessively until he had to struggle with an oxygen tank, and even then he chose to smoke instead of breathe.