AA Makes You Look At Yourself -- Look at Jesus Instead!

This thought brings us to Step Ten, which suggests we continue to take personal inventory and continue to set right any new mistakes as we go along. We vigorously commenced this way of living as we cleaned up the past. We have entered the world of the Spirit. Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness. This is not an overnight matter. It should continue for our lifetime. Continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear. When these crop up, we ask God at once to remove them. We discuss them with someone immediately and make amends quickly if we have harmed anyone. Then we resolutely turn our thoughts to someone we can help. Love and tolerance of others is our code. (AA, pg 84)

This program is so evil.

Making people look at themselves to maintain their program -- there is nothing but despair and frustration for a person who wakes up every day, convinced that they must look out for this disease of alcoholism from rising up to curse and condemn us.

Frankly, despite all of the Bible reading and writing which I had engaged in my life, I spent much of my time looking at my thoughts, my feelings, my fears.

God was a distant consideration much of the time.

No one had ever taught me that God is taking care of everything in my life. No one had ever taught me that all I have to do I believe on Him.

My knowledge, my understanding of God, and how good He is, was so flawed, so marred, so limited.

Why? Because my conception of God was based predominantly on the Twelve Steps, Alcoholics Anonymous.

I did not see how good God is.

We cannot understand Him as long as we do not believe that we are righteous.

This righteousness is an ultimate gift:

"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)

We are made the - THE - righteousness of God in Christ. When we believe on Jesus Christ (John 6: 29), we are taken from dead in our trespasses to alive and seated in heavenly places in Him (Ephesians 2: 4-6)

We should not be looking  at ourselves, to begin with, because we are not in ourselves, but in Christ.

Paul tells us to look above, to God the Father and the Son seated at His right hand (Colossians 3:1-4)

For the past few weeks, I have begun to notice how much time I spent looking at myself, looking at my resources, convinced that whatever I needed depended entirely on me.

I have been reading my Bible for a long time. I have been learning  more and more about the grace of God in Christ, and that I have been freed from the law, and that God is a god to me not because of my obedience, but because of Christ's obedience on our behalf, since He is my High Priest forever (Hebrews 7: 16)

All of this thinking, righteous believing, is quite new for me, but I am glad for this new journey, one which is upending all the lies and distortions which I was forced to learn and accept because of the crappy, evil AA cult.

For a long time, I would not come to God and ask for help, because whenever I struggled with negative thinking, I would spend so much time trying to feel better, or to change what I was thinking. If a sense of shame sprung up in my mind because I was not focusing on Jesus, then I would get fearful and worried and look at myself and try to fix my thinking, my feeling, my words, my everything else.

There is no peace in looking at ourselves. There is nothing but peace as we look more and more at the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9: 6)

Look to Christ, not yourself, and be transformed from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18)