Forget Painstaking: Jesus Took All the Pains

"If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it." (AA, pg 83)

Working for freedom is another Orwellian double-speak webbed throughout Alcoholics Anonymous.

The program claims that men and women who work the Twelve Steps, including the act of sharing their experience, strength, and hope with others, will find this new life.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Men and women in AA go to meetings day in, day out, week in, weakly out.

There is no end to an empty existence in which a member must share his faults, his defects of character, with another person, while forever looking over his shoulder worrying about taking the next drink.

How can anyone walk though life in connection with an identity of "alcoholic" and be proud of it?

Jesus Christ did not die on the Cross so that men and women would reduce themselves to identifying with a failing, one which supposedly corrodes their ability to think and feel, one which tells the person that they must forever measure up to a program which does not work, designed inevitably to keep a man in bondage.

Furthermore, the idea that we must work for this life is both demeaning and deceptive.

Jesus Christ came that we might have life, and that more abundantly (John 10: 10)

If we need life, then any notion of our working for it will fall apart.

Jesus did all the work on the Cross, and there is not one thing that we need to do, or that we can do, so that we can receive Himself into us:

"For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." (2 Corinthians 5: 21)

Jesus took all the pains for our sins, something that we could not do:

"For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:" (1 Peter 3: 18)

Let's take a closer look the sufferings which Jesus endured for us, and what they grant to us":

"He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

5But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed." (Isaiah 53: 3-5)

 

God could not abitrarily forgive sins, or He would contradict His nature as Light. Because God is Love (1 John 4: 10)

 

"And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission." (Hebrews 9: 22)

 

Jesus died for all the sins of the world once for all (1 John 2: 2). The notion that anyone of us can add to His full, final, and forever sacrifice for is not just wrong, but arrogantly so:

 

"14For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. . .
"18Now where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin." (Hebrews 10: 14, 18)

 

There is nothing left for us to do in order to be established in righteousness before God the Father.

 

Jesus took all the pains for our sin, that we may rest in His righteousness and receive His grace, because Christ now lives in us (Colossians