AA "Works" Only To Do Worse

First of all, I am not contradicting prior posts.

Alcoholics Anonymous does not work. The failure rate is staggering, disappointing, and disturbing. Teaching people to identify with their failings, then switching them to a program of religious fanaticism is not recovery. To walk around with shame and frustration about one's past, and a present fear of slipping back into bad habits and thinking, is not life and that more abundantly.


Yet there is that three-to-five percent group who do get sober in AA, in that they stop drinking. And there are those people who hang on for a year or two, only to get drunk again. And don't get me started on the many people who slip a drink or two, but continue to attend meetings and claim continuous sobriety notwithstanding.

So, what about those people who do get sober? Doesn't that prove that the program works?

Not really.

Man has a greater need than not behaving badly. He needs life, and that more abundantly (John 10: 10)

He certainly does need deliverance from self, or more specifically, his flesh:

"For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not." (Romans 7: 18)

And yet what does AA do? Teach people to identify with their flesh ("I am an alcoholic"), and then try to keep it in check. Never can work, or can work only if people switch to another addiction.

You see, Adam and Eve at from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good as well as evil. Alcoholism is a picture of the evil, but then people give up the overt perversions in their lives, only to start eating from the good, and still they are dead, still they fail, and still they produce sin and death in their lives.

So, even though we stop doing bad things, we are not free from the sin in our flesh by trying to do good. We need to receive His life and His grace in our lives. We need to be delivered from self, yes, but more importantly we need something, or rather, Someone better: Jesus!

Yes, AA does have a record that AA "works", in that a few people stop drinking. But even members who insist on sitting and wasting their time in the rewmz will admit that people have living problems, not just drinking problems. We have to go further. We need Life, and that Life is a Person: Jesus!

AA may help some peope to stop frinking, but the bitterness and emptiness in people's lives do not go away. Men and women still find that there is nothing to propel them through from day to day. In meetings, you will meet bitter people who are still angry about what their parents did to them, about the jobs they have to work. I remember one woman sharing that she would walk into a room full of glass, and break everything just to get over some rage in her life. This is not healthy, this is not good, this is not life, and that is not recovery in any way, shape, or form. "White knuckling" is all too prominent in AA meetings. How is this life? How is all this embittered self-centeredness of any value?

It's not enough to stop eating evil. We also need to get away from the good, that is the lie that there is any good in our efforts, in ourselves, in our flesh. Christ is all in all, and we are called to rest in Himself and His Goodness.

Any conception of God merely projects our weakness into Him.

 Let God through Christ take you (and al of us) up in His loving arms and live and bless us in all things.