He Prospers My Soul (I Don't Have to Work a Program)

Faith and works are completely antithetical.

Grace is a gift which we receive by faith, and God wants us to keep receiving the gift of righteousness and abundance of grace with it (Romans 5: 17)

The biggest sham/shame/fraud of Alcoholics Anonymous rests on the empty notion that we have to fix our feelings and prevent ourselves from emotional upsets.

I kid you not. The whole program rests on maintaining emotional balance, when the steps, the pages, the meetings, and all the other nonsense end up creating people caught up constantly in their feelings, in their heads, in their minds, unable to meet with the troubles and strifes of the world.

Add to the hardships of this life the challenges of keeping yourself in emotional balance throughout the day, or worse, add to all of that the idea that you have to guess what God wants you to be doing, as if He is not working in you and through you to desire exactly what you want to do.

There is no life in Twelve Steps, as there is no life in the Ten Commandments. A list of "do nots" and "must do's or else" is not life.

Yet the biggest pain, the greatest hardship of Twelve Steps, is that every time we get upset, fearful, angry, etc., we have to do something about it.

We have to make sure that we do not get angry, hurt, bitter, etc. as if everything in our lives hinges on how we feel.

There is mention of God's everlasting, unconditional love in our lives. No mention of His love, which transforms us from dead in our trespasses to alive and seated in  heavenly places, that God the Father looks at every believer and sees us as His Own Son!

Not only that, but God is actively prospering us, inside and outside by His Holy Spirit:

"Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." (3 John 2)

A full rendering of this powerful verse would look like this:

"Beloved, I want you in all things that you be prospered and have health even as your soul is prospered."

We do not prosper ourselves. We have nothing in and of ourselves, so what can we bring to our impoverished, powerless state?

Yet we are more than powerless in and of ourselves. We are dead, but through Christ we receive His Holy Spirit and His life in us, that we may live through Him (1 John 4: 9), and thus He prospers us spirit, soul, and body (1 Thessalonians 5: 23)

He is prospering our soul, Beloved! He is taking care of us. He is granting us His grace and truth throughout our walk in this world. We do not live in our own strength, and never once should we feel that we face this life on our own. Never.

He prospers our soul as we walk in the truth (3 John 3-4), and this truth is the Gospel, which is grace for all things, in all occasions. We are who we are because of His grace (1 Corinthians 15: 10). Instead of focusing on ourselves, let us see what grace He has, and keeping receiving from Him.