We Need a New Self: Himself

AA is wrong on too much, because there is a little bit in AA which registers some truth.

We need to be reborn, but this rebirth presupposes the truth that we have received a new life, and that we have become a new creation.

The Bible offers us Sonship through the Spirit of God.

AA condemns us to sin and shame, a status of "alcoholic" which a member can never relinquish or flee.

In effect, man is no better in an AA meeting, since the sin in our flesh remains the primary identity of the member.

Then it gets worse. As members who are defined by the very perversion from which they wish to break free, is it any wonder that so few people actually get sober in an AA meeting?

Even those members who do get sober have very little to show for the empty life which they are called to. What value is there in an a life in which you have to take your inventory every day, where you find that those "defects of character" never go away?

They can never go away, for we are beyond help in and of ourselves.

We need a new self:

"That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses." (Matthew 8: 17)

Infirmities speak of our sinful flesh not just our sins, but the very sin nature of dead Adam which we have all received because of the first man and his sin against God.

Yet God's love is greater than man's sin, and through this Love, we receive life and that more abundantly!

We cannot fix ourselves, and we cannot maintain any semblance of life and hope through our efforts, as good as we try to make them. Righteousness is not something that we earn, but something that we receive and keep receiving through Christ Jesus (Romans 5: 17)

For years, I never understood what it meant to let go and let God, because the very cult which presume to teach us to let go never reconciles the fact that the whole Twelve Step program is something that we do.

If we are turning our will and life over to a power greater than ourselves, then should not this power be able to live in and through us, too?

Exactly:

"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2: 20)

This Jesus cannot be conceived, He is so good. We either believe the truth of the Gospel, or we don't.

The Biblical record is the  place for us to see Him who has been from the beginning. Either you believe Him and receive more of Him, or you fall back into your own efforts, the way of Cain, and gain nothing but bitterness and upset.

We need a new self, not a new way to fix our old self. Receive Himself, and reign in life!