Hey Partners and Friends,
Now we are at a place in our sharing snippets of the CR principles where we come to mountain moving time. The infamous Principle 4, Step 4.
Principle 4: Openly examine and confess my faults to myself, to God, and to someone I trust.
It takes guts to do this, courage. God tells us repeatedly in scripture to be strong and courageous. I believe engaging in this principle takes faith, the kind of faith that moves mountains. The result or goal we are looking for is the promise or truth Jesus talked about in MT 5:8 GNT “Happy are the pure in heart; they will see God.” That sounds pretty good, huh? When our hearts are pure on the inside we are blessed with the ability to see God on the outside. The Message bible puts it this way; “You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.”
So how do we go about doing this at Celebrate Recovery? That brings us to Step 4 of the 12 steps: “We made a searching and fearless moral (honest) inventory of ourselves.” We intentionally look at ourselves and our own lives. Typically we (you and me) have the tendency to do just the opposite; we tend to get all bent out of shape and upset over government, politics, corporations, greed, corruption, crime, traffic, immigration, courts, justice, prices etc, etc. Our attention gets consumed by the problems and issues of the boss, the neighbors, the world and everyone in it. Truth is we can’t do a whole lot about any of those things. The very best thing we can do is to find recovery for ourselves, allow Jesus to change us. Then we can be a positive influence on everything and everybody in our lives. We can actually help encourage others by being a strength not a weight or burden. We can be part of the solution not the problem. Here’s the point, at Celebrate Recovery we learn how to look at ourselves and our own issues not everybody else’s. Sometimes I think we watch the news so we can see the garbage in other people’s lives which allows us to feel better about ourselves and basically ignore our own issues.
Jesus talked pretty directly about this idea when He said, “And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying, ‘Friend, let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.’
The scripture we use in CR is Lam 3:40 “Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.” This implies if we examine, really look at, our own ways and test them we will find areas or attitudes or behaviors that are at least counter productive or even destructive to our selves or others. Places where we don’t line up with God’s will for our lives. Then we can intentionally and specifically give those areas over to the Lord to help us, and ask Him to change us or do for us what we have not been able to do for ourselves. David, the man after God’s heart prayed it this way; “God, examine me and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any bad thing in me. Lead me on the road to everlasting life.”
God answered that prayer in David’s life, He has answered it in mine and I am seeing Him answer it in countless others. Psm 139:23-23 NCV
Thank you for partnering with us in this mountain moving ministry.
Jim & Pam