Read an Excerpt
Getting Right with God, Yourself, and Others
By John Baker
Zondervan
Copyright © 2012 John Baker
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-68963-8
Chapter One
The Road to Recovery
Eight Principles Based on the Beatitudes
By Pastor Rick Warren
1. Realize I'm not God. I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and that my life is unmanageable.
"Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor." (Matthew 5:3)
2. Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to Him, and that He has the power to help me recover.
"Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." (Matthew 5:4)
3. BLDBLDonsciously choose to commit all my life and will to Christ's care and control.
"Happy are the meek." (Matthew 5:5)
4. Openly examine and confess my faults to myself, to God, and to someone I trust.
"Happy are the pure in heart." (Matthew 5:8)
5. Voluntarily submit to every change God wants to make in my life and humbly ask Him to remove my character defects.
"Happy are those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires." (Matthew 5:6)
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.
"Happy are the merciful." (Matthew 5:7) "Happy are the peacemakers." (Matthew 5:9)
7. Reserve a daily time with God for self-examination, Bible reading, and prayer in order to know God and His will for my life and to gain the power to follow His will.
8. Yield myself to God to be used to bring this Good News to others, both by my example and by my words.
"Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires." (Matthew 5:10)
Twelve Steps and Their Biblical Comparisons
1. We admitted we were powerless over our addictions and compulsive behaviors, that our lives had become unmanageable.
"For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out." (Romans 7:18)
2. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
"For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." (Philippians 2:13)
3. We made a decision to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of God.
"Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God -this is your true and proper worship." (Romans 12:1)
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
"Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord." (Lamentations 3:40)
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed." (James 5:16)
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
"Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up." (James 4:10)
7. We humbly asked Him to remove all our shortcomings.
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9)
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)
9. We made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
"Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift." (Matthew 5:23 – 24)
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
"So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall!" (1 Corinthians 10:12)
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and power to carry that out.
"Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly." (Colossians 3:16)
12. Having had a spiritual experience as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
"Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted." (Galatians 6:1)
Serenity Prayer
If you have attended secular recovery programs, you have seen the first four lines of the "Prayer for Serenity." The following is the complete prayer. I encourage you to pray it daily as you work through the principles!
Prayer for Serenity
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time ;
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace ;
taking, as Jesus did,
this sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it ;
trusting that You will make all things right
if I surrender to Your will ;
so that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Celebrate Recovery's Small Group Guidelines
The following five guidelines will ensure that your small group is a safe place. They need to be read at the beginning of every meeting.
1. Keep your sharing focused on your own thoughts and feelings. Limit your sharing to three to five minutes.
2. There is NO cross talk. Cross talk is when two individuals engage in conversation excluding all others. Each person is free to express his or her feelings without interruptions.
3. We are here to support one another, not "fix" another.
4. Anonymity and confidentiality are basic requirements. What is shared in the group stays in the group. The only exception is when someone threatens to injure themselves or others.
5. Offensive language has no place in a Christ-centered recovery group.
Lesson 12
Confess
Principle 4: Openly examine and confess my faults to myself, to God, and to someone I trust.
"Happy are the pure in heart." (Matthew 5:8)
Step 5: We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed." (James 5:16)
Think About It
After writing an inventory, we must deal with what we have written. The first way we do that is to confess our sins to God. Let's review the acrostic for CONFESS.
BLDBLDonfess your shortcomings, resentments, and sins
God wants us to come clean. We need to admit that "what is wrong is wrong. We're guilty as charged." We need to own up to the sins we discovered in our inventory.
"Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy." (Proverbs 28:13)
Obey God's directions
Principle 4 sums up God's directions for confessing our sins.
1. We confess our sins to God.
"'As surely as I am the living God, says the Lord, everyone will kneel before me, and everyone will confess that I am God.' Every one of us, then, will have to give an account to God." (Romans 14:11 – 12, GNT)
2. We share them with another person whom we trust:
"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed." (James 5:16)
No more guilt
This step begins to restore our confidence and our relationships and allows us to move on from our "rearview mirror" living. In Romans 8:1 we are assured that "there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."
"All of have sinned; ... yet now God declares us 'not guilty' ... if we trust in Jesus Christ, who ... freely takes away our sins." (Romans 3:23 – 24, TLB)
The "CON" is over! We have followed God's directions on how to confess our wrongs. Four very positive things start to happen after we "FESS" up.
Face the truth
Recovery requires honesty! After we complete this principle we can allow the light of God's truth to heal our hurts, hang-ups, and habits. We stop denying our true feelings.
"Jesus ... said, 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.'" (John 8:12)
"Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:32)
Ease the pain
"We are only as sick as our secrets!" When we share our deepest secrets we divide the pain and the shame. We begin to see a healthy self-worth develop, one that is no longer based on the world's standards, but on those of Jesus Christ.
"There was a time when I wouldn't admit what a sinner I was. But my dishonesty made me miserable and filled my days with frustration. ... My strength evaporated like water on a sunny day until I finally admitted all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide them. I said to myself, 'I will confess them to the Lord.' And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone." (Psalm 32:3 – 5, TLB)
Stop the blame
We cannot find peace and serenity if we continue to blame ourselves or others. Our secrets have isolated us from each other. They have prevented intimacy in all our relationships.
"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and fail to notice the plank in your own? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me get the speck out of your eye,' when there is a plank in your own? ... Take the plank out of your own eye first, and then you can see clearly enough to remove your brother's speck of dust." (Matthew 7:3, PH)
Start accepting God's forgiveness
Once we accept God's forgiveness we can look others in the eye. We understand ourselves and our past actions in a "new light." We are ready to find the humility to exchange our shortcomings in Principle 5.
"For God was in Christ, restoring the world to himself, no longer counting men's sins against them but blotting them out." (2 Corinthians 5:19, TLB)
"But if we confess our sins, he will forgive our sins, because we can trust God to do what is right. He will cleanse us from all the wrongs we have done." (1 John 1:9, NCV)
Write About It
1. What wrongs, resentments, or secret sins are keeping you awake at night? Wouldn't you like to get rid of them?
2. What value do you see in confessing, in coming clean of the wreckage of your past?
3. As you obey God's directions for confession, what results do you expect God to produce in your life?
4. What freedom do you feel because of the words of Romans 8:1 and Romans 3:23 – 24? What specifically do the phrases "no condemnation" and "not guilty" mean to you?
5. After you complete Principle 4, you will find four areas of your life begin to improve. You will be able to face the truth, ease the pain, stop the blame, and start accepting God's forgiveness. In what areas of your life will each of these four positive changes help your recovery?
I can be more honest with ...
I can ease my pain by ...
I can stop blaming ...
I can accept God's forgiveness because of ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Getting Right with God, Yourself, and Others by John Baker Copyright © 2012 by John Baker. Excerpted by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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