A Ploy of the Enemy, Put Away Forever

Our sins have been put away, paid for, sent away forever.

I did not believe this.

Part of the evil of Alcoholics Anonymous is that men and women who sit in the meetings identify every day with their sins, their failings.

Imagine: every day acknowledging "I am an alcoholic."

That is not God's best, never was, and never will be.

The true revelation of Christ and Him Crucified demonstrates a powerful Creator and Redeemer who wants to take us out of our dead-in-trespasses state.

Granted, alcohol addiction/abuse one element of this sin, this shame, this terrible death that every person is born into, through no fault of their own, by the way.

When we receive a new life, Christ in us, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27)

Yet we still walk around in these bodies. We will still feel temptations in our flesh. Satan will seduce us out of our rest time and again.

While AA taught me to keep up with resentments, find ways to push past them, or get rid of them somehow, I often found that the victory I was looking for in the realm of my emotions never happened. People could make me made. I felt powerless over so much, and it only got worse. I never knew what to do about the people who upset me. Was it something that I had done, or that the other person was responsible for? I could never tell.

This confusion made it impossible to work with other people. There is no getting away from a very troubling trend in AA: this program makes it almost impossible for people to find and keep work.

But more on that later.

The ploy of the Enemy which I want to report on: a program which teaches you that every time you get angry, you have to do something about it. Every time you have a bad memory, or a bad thought, you have to get rid of it, either by sharing it with someone or doing something good for someone else. When I refer to this un-merry-go-round, I am talking about the Tenth Step, continuing to take one's inventory and correct every mistake, or else.

This habit has died very hard. I still wake up and struggle from time to time with bad thoughts, or bitter hurts. But wait, those hurts are not "I" or "you":

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

"For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." (Romans 8: 13)

and

"1If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. 2Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. 3For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. 4When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. 5Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:" (Colossians 3:1-5)

Whenever I would feel bad or angry, I would get fearful, wondering why God was not doing something about those hurts and unhappy feelings:

"3For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh." (Romans 8: 3)

So, even when we feel troubled or upset from within, let us remember that we are in a different fight, a labor to rest in His Finished Work:

"8For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day. 9There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. 10For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. 11Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief." (Hebrews 4: 8-11)

God has put away forever all my sins, and instead of thinking that the work is not done, I get to rest in Him and all that He has done!

Hallelujah! I love writing about all that Jesus has done (and down with AA!)