Step 10 - Crossroads

Principle 7: Reserve a daily time with God for self-examination, Bible reading, and prayer in order to know  and follow God and His will for my life.

Step 10: We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

If you’ve been following the steps to this point, you’ve gotten off to a great start.  Here’s what you’ve done so far, you have: faced your denial and admitted that you cannot fight this spiritual battle alone, submitted to God by surrendering your life and will to Jesus Christ, sought the Holy Spirit in taking an honest look at your life by listing, confessing, and admitting all your wrongdoings, offered your forgiveness to those that have hurt you, and made amends for all the harm that you have caused to others.  Overall: you’ve submitted to all the changes God wanted to make in you so far.  WOW! That’s quite a journey!  At the start, most of us would have said that it was an impossible journey.  You could never have done the work that the first 9 steps ask of you, and you would be right.  YOU can’t, but God can.

Yet perhaps some of you have not made that entire journey…  Maybe it loomed so large at the start, you never really started.  Maybe you did start, but you really only wanted something fixed.  Maybe you started but then relapsed…and felt as defeated as ever.

If you didn’t really follow the steps, didn’t turn ALL your life and will over to Christ, didn’t do or finish the spiritual inventory, didn’t admit your wrongs to God, yourself, someone you trust, didn’t forgive or make amends to those you need to, didn’t submit to the changes God wants to make in you…    then you are still in the cycle.  I often do the laundry; I kinda enjoy it.  I reuse the rinse water for the next load of wash.  It seems that once per wash day the dryer stops and I find the washer full of water and dirty clothes.  Why: because it is stuck in the cycle…after sucking the old rinse water back in, I neglected to advance the dial to the wash setting, so my dirty laundry just sits there, wet, dirty, stuck in the cycle.  If you’re still stuck in the cycle, it’s not because the Steps don’t work.  I’m gonna guess that the breakdown was a failure to trust and obey God as He tried to lead you through the Steps and a failure to praise God.

The Crossroad

Step 10 is not a place to stop great progress and rest on recent victories.  “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor 10:12).  Relapse is looming as soon as you start to you’re your guard…as soon as you decide to “take a rest for a while.”  Step 10 is not a place you expect to start anew if you’ve skipped Steps 1-9!  You cannot skip Steps.  Trying to do so means you think you’re above it, or that you know better than God…that’s called idolatry – making a god of your design.

Most recovery material refers to Steps 10 through 12 as the “maintenance steps.”  That doesn’t mean auto-pilot!  God is just beginning to make the necessary changes…it’s a life-long process.  Remember Principle 3?  It says, “We made a decision to turn our life and will over to Christ.”  Now starts the rest of your life…making choices over what god you will worship:           gods of your father and mother, gods of your past, gods of our culture, OR the One True God.  We’ll talk more about these “other gods” in the weeks ahead.  The fact is, you will trust, you will praise some god.  Which one will it be?  A god you choose or the God who chose you?  READ Isaiah 44:6-17.   What will you do?

Forgiveness part 2 (our forgiveness of others)

Principle 6: Evaluate all my relationships. Offer forgiveness to those who have hurt me and make amends for harm I’ve done to others, except when to do so would harm them or others.  “Blessed are the merciful…Blessed are the peacemakers.” (Mt 5:7, 9)

Step 8: We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.  “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31)

Last week we talked about God’s forgiveness of us; that it is only possible becuase Jesus Christ died to pay for our sin.  We talked about the woman caught in adultery in John 8; she was caught in the act, dragged through the streets, the penalty death.  Yet Jesus did not condemn her.  Instead He told her to “go and sin no more.”  Jesus told her only way she could go and sin no more was to “follow Me.”  Forgiveness and “going and sinning no more” go together…all connected by “following Jesus.”  If you want to have victory, and stop the resentments and addictions, then follow Jesus.  When you believe and confess Jesus is God the Son, the Christ, and you repent of your sin, He forgives you.  And that is the 1^st reason you should forgive others!

Tonight we’re talking about our forgiveness of others.  So here is the second reason to forgive: not doing so hurts you.  “Forgiveness doesn’t excuse their actions, it keeps their actions from destroying your heart” - unknown source.  We tend to just think about what our forgiveness means to someone else who is truly seeking it, and it does mean much to them if they are sincere in asking, and us in giving.  But we tend to think little about what our forgiveness of others means to us; it means a release of the hurt, frustration, resentment, and the burden of stored-up anger which the enemy will use against us.  For you: forgiving others removes an emotional, physical, and psychological tool of the devil.  Thus, forgiveness doesn’t excuse their actions, it keeps the devil from using their actions to destroy your heart.” 

There are also deep spiritual implications of your forgiveness of others which brings us to the Third reason to forgive: God tells you to.     “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15).  How can you accept God’s forgiveness of the sin debt you cannot pay and then refuse to forgive someone else’s sin against you?  How often do you need God to forgive you?  Once, or every time?  How often does He expect you to forgive those who sin against you?  Once, or every time?

Forgive every time.