Friday, October 26, 2012 -- Life With God In Recovery -- Step Two -- Came To Believe

Step Two:  We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

As we turn in a new direction towards healing and life, we have to confront the power of self in our lives.  If we’re honest, we really struggle to completely lay down control as we’ve known it and surrender to a new higher power.  We just don’t believe God loves us more than we love ourselves.  We’ve decided what taking care of us looks like and as long as God is willing to do that for us, we’ll go along with His plan.  However, when God leads us by another way – and He surely will because He’s the only one who really knows love and life and freedom – then we refuse to go His way and take back control.  Why?  We don’t believe in a power and a love greater than our own. 

Underneath our words we tell ourselves that if God truly loved us He should have spared us from the troubles that overcame us and He didn’t.  How could He love us and let us experience that pain and injustice?  We asked for help in certain ways and God didn’t work in that way and so we felt let down and betrayed.  How can we trust Him?   We have to surrender to the fact that God’s ways are better and more loving than ours even though they are sometimes beyond our ability to understand.  The truth is that with full knowledge of everything that would go wrong in our lives, God prepared power and love and healing that is far beyond any evil action done to us.  His loving power is more than able to give us a life that is safe and wonderful.

For us to live free from our addiction, our first need is to bring all of our painful past to Jesus Christ who died on the cross, and ask for healing and forgiveness.  We often get stuck in that place where we need to surrender our hatreds and resentments against our victimizers to Jesus.  Jesus died on the cross as the victim of all sin and all wrong doing – both for what we have done and what has been done to us.  In the same way we want to be forgiven, through the cross, for the harm we have done to others, we need to agree to forgive those who have harmed us.

We love because He first loved us.  Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.  And He has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.  (1 John 4:19-21)

The choice to wholeheartedly believe and live in this powerful love, regardless of our feelings, restores us to sanity.  God’s power is greater than the evil of Satan and the arrogance of self.  Will we choose to believe that today and surrender our thinking and our feelings to the God who loves us unconditionally and whose love frees us from every other dark power?