No One Is Beyond Saving

Psalm 107:10-11
Those who sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, bound in affliction and irons because they rebelled against the words of God and despised the counsel of the Most High.

There are some people who will read the verse above and think to themselves, "So!"
But what I have found over the years, is that what is written in Psalm 107:10-11 is at the very core and center of addiction in a person's life.
A rejection of God to embrace their own wants and desires. 
Unfortunately, our wants and desires come from a dark nature that every person is born with. The apostle Paul refers to it as the "flesh" or "The old man". It is a nature to go against God and what He stands for.
It is a nature that whispers to us we are independent from God. We don't need no stinkin' God telling us what to do. This nature causes us to view God with a jaded understanding. This warped nature tell us, "God is out to get you!" We readily reject God and anything to do with Him..........church.....the Bible........other people who have a relationship with Jesus. We steer clear of that whole scene, all the while falling deeper and deeper into the darkness of addiction.

Being in control of our own lives (or at least we think we are), we turn to drugs and alcohol to eliminate pain or to create a new reality in our lives because the current one is to hard to deal with. We trade family and friends for a new community of people who, like us, are going down that same dark road to destruction. It truly takes a Power greater than ourselves to halt that downward slide. Jesus is that Power. The turn around we need in our life is not beyond the reach or ability of this Jesus I claim to know and live for. How do I know this? Well, I know what He has done for me in my own life, and over these past 15 years, I have watched Him take others out of that darkness.

A week doesn't go by that I don't get a phone call or run into someone who has made that turn around to a new way of living. The one thing that is common to them is a profound sense of gratitude. Gratitude to Christ for what He has done in their life. These meetings to me are "payday". To have seen someone at their worst and now see them at their best.....it doesn't get any better. 

Someone asked me,"Don't you ever get discouraged with all the one who don't make it. Who go back out and keep using?" I'd be lest than honest if I said that it didn't bother me, or I didn't get discouraged. I do. But usually when I find myself drifting to that place of discouragement, that is when God sends someone who has regained their life, to just remind me that He is still in the business of saving and making whole those lives who were thrown onto the garbage heap of the world. Cast aside because they were "to bad" or "to far gone" or had burned every bridge with family and friends, these are the ones that God will rescue.

That is why God created Vineyard Recovery Church. So that they can plug into another group who are just crazy enough to believe this God thing actually works.

God on you.....
mb