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?
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