Saturday, March 11, 2017

Two Stepping On A Saturday Morning



Step # 2
We came to believe that God, through Jesus Christ, can restore us to sanity.

Romans 12:2
......but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
There are two things that become apparent as we move deeper into our recovery.
The first involves God and our perception of Him.
Our experiences both before we became addicted and since we have been using have separated us from God. Because of this, when we began our recovery program we felt nothing but anger, abandonment and criticism from the god in our heads. The God we thought we knew about was, in reality, a mixture of information and opinions we had collected from others and formed ourselves.
Because we had a this twisted image/opinion of who God is, and how he interacts with humanity, we chose to follow our own instincts and decisions when it came to life. Trouble is, the voice in our head was influenced heavily by our own flesh(sin-nature) and the infusion of drugs and/or alcohol. Not exactly the healthy combo that makes for good decision making. 

The second obstacle to Step # 2 is the matter of sanity. Nobody wants to be considered insane.
It is true that extended use of drugs and/or alcohol can lead to personality changes and mental illness, sanity referred to in Step # 2 comes from Webster's New World Dictionary: "Soundness of judgment."
Using our drug of choice, in spite of the damage it is doing in our lives, is not using sound judgment. The insanity of addiction is that we continue to use in spite of the consequences of our action.

In John 17:3 we read: And this is eternal life--to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth. Here is the focal point of the restoration from insanity. It is moving into a relationship with your Higher Power (Jesus Christ). From this place of relationship, you begin anew to learn how to live and have proper healthy relationships with other. 

God created us with and awareness of Him and with an inborn desire to have loving relationships.  Somewhere along the way, we allowed these inborn desires to become tainted and instead of growing in them, we supplanted them with our own fleshly desires. Hence our addiction and subsequent destruction that came into our lives.

Key Thought for today: Addictive logic is insane thinking.
Verse for today: Proverbs 14:1 -  The wise woman builds her house, but the foolish tears it down with her own hands.

Today's blog was inspired by teachings from the workbook Conquering Chemical Dependency.

God be with you....
mb

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