Haggai 1:5-6 (The Message Bible)
Take a good, hard look at your life. Think it over.
You have spent a lot of money, but you haven't much to show for it.
You keep filling your plates, but you never get filled up.
You keep drinking and drinking and drinking, but you're always thirsty.
Funny how we think addiction and drunkenness is a modern problem. Well, it isn't. The one thing I know is that it is more of a problem now than at any other time in our nation's history. Not to beat a dead horse, but when I was growing up, there weren't any treatment programs around here. Probably A.A., but nothing along the lines of what we have today.
I was handed a copy of a new book written by a man who has way more initials at the end of his name than I do mine. Pretty smart fellow I would say. Seems as though he has come up with a cure for alcoholism. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making fun of this fellow, or sport of what he wrote about. In his opinion, the cure is found in an "opioid" blocking medicine that takes away the craving to drink. Not going to argue with him. Like I said, he has way more many initials at the end of his name that I do.
But such thinking doesn't seem to address the real problem.
What is that problem?
Self! Me! The big "I".
I will continue to carry the message till I die that people don't have drug and alcohol problems......they have a living problem.
What is the heart of the Twelve Steps?
Me! I'm the problem. I have chosen and created a life outside the loving will of the one who created me....God.
I'm suffering from the Genesis 3:5 syndrome...
The serpent told the woman in the garden of Eden that God was holding out on them. He was keeping back some important information that would actually benefit her and her husband.
What information?
Well, here goes..
"God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
So what was the serpent inferring?
#1- The couple was blind. They were somehow not seeing the entire picture of life in this garden. They were not getting the entire picture of who this God is and what He expected of them. In other words, the serpent told the woman that God did not trust her or her husband with the COMPLETE truth.
#2 - If you eat this fruit (even though God told you not to)....you will be like God, knowing good from evil. Wowzer's..what a line of hooey! But to someone who swallowed the bait, the idea of "Being Like God" is pretty enticing. Because (here it comes) "If I'm Like God....I don't need God!"
There it is...the whole shebang! Self has taken over and rejected the rule, the love, the provision that only God can give us.
Ever since those two fruit-loving bozo's went crazy, mankind has been infected with this sin disease. So if my actions are dictated by "Self-run-riot" then I truly do need a power greater than me who could restore me to sanity (or the ability to make sound decisions). Enter Jesus as the ultimate HIGHER POWER
to restore and make new all the destruction of my past behavior. And one last thing.....I'm not going to sit here and insult you by saying that sobriety cannot come by other means and ways. It can. I know people who have gotten sober without Jesus. But they ain't living...truly living. They are just sober.
What I'm trying to say is that there is a way beyond just being sober that will take you into a new dimension of living. Like Jesus said in John 10:10..."I have come that they may have life...and that they may have it more abundantly."
Don't know about you, but I don't think that kind of thing come in a pill. Might be wrong, but don't think so.
Make it a good day!
God on you..
mbb
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