Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Twelve Steps: Admit it! (Step 5)
This is the first weekend of the month, and during the calendar year 2004, we're dedicating the first weekend to looking at one of the 12 steps that were made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous. The 12 steps you may know is probably the most successful program for personal transformation ever known to man. And it has its roots very much in biblical thought, has its roots very much in the gospel of Jesus, though it is not explicit on that point, so that as many people as possible can benefit from the program when it comes to sobriety, but there are many spinoff programs of the 12 steps, adult children of Alcoholics, Narcotics Anonymous, and all sorts of things. It's a very powerful tool for helping people grapple with real difficult issues in their lives. And one of the marks of Jesus' brand spirituality that we're seeking to press out in the church here is to really come to grips with the reality of transformation and to tap into Christianity's power to make a measurable discernible difference for the better in our lives, the kind of difference that other people notice and the kind of difference that affects our families and affects our capacity to love other people and to be the light of Christ in our workplaces and in our neighborhoods and to keep us alive as well. So we're in the fifth on this 12 part series and the fifth step I'll read to you. It's admitted to God. We admitted to God to ourselves and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs. Now the fifth step is not one of the most of the thought of doing that. It's not something that, I don't know, that just immediately fills your heart with joyful anticipation. When do I get to do that? It's not like we're gathered around the water cooler and talking to our co-workers. When you believe what they did to Jennifer Hudson and then you say, "Have you done a fifth step?" I mean, wow, I did one and it was just awesome. You really ought to try it. It's not the material for that kind of conversation. But so I'd like you for a moment to take this out of the personal threat zone and don't think for a moment about yourself doing a fifth step. But I want you to think about someone that you really care about. Maybe that person is in your family. Maybe that person is a parent of yours, a spouse, a child, a brother, a sister. Maybe that person is a dear friend. But as much as that person has many good qualities, there's something about him or her that is just sabotaging her life. In English class, we call it the fatal flaw or the Achilles heel. Just something that seems to make everything not work. It might be an addiction this person is suffering from, it might be a character weakness. Might be a tendency like worry and anxiety to just rob this person of their energy. It might be a kind of aversion to conflict that keeps them from going deeper into committed relationships. The person might be self-absorbed or might have a dishonest streak. They might be the kind of person who for whatever reason is struggling to receive love or to express affection. Maybe it's the kind of person who's just really hard on herself and then subsequently hard on other people close to her. Just hold that person in your mind and in your heart and you know we all have those people in our lives if we could only see if that person could only see what it is that we see. But no, it's a real blind spot. It's the conversation you can't have with him or her. And so the effect of all this of course is there's a kind of a glass wall between you and your loved one. There's a remoteness that is part of the relationship that you wish is somehow that could be shattered and broken through. Now if you will imagine that something really different, something wonderful begins to happen to your loved one. There is an unexpected softening of their heart, ego deflation at death. The wind is out of their sails and a new humility comes into their heart. There's a ray of hope this person experiences. Maybe God could help me and the person even goes so far as to make a sincere surrender of their life and their heart to God. And then something that sounds almost too good to be true, you hear that the person is taking a long hard look at themselves. They're taking stock of their strengths and they're taking stock of their weaknesses. Maybe a month later you learn that your loved one has come clean with God, with himself, with another human being, just pouring out the things that are on their chest. Now your response to this, if this really happened to someone you really know, would be hope, it would be excitement, it would be the beginning of joy. Maybe you would just let yourself feel that joy, wouldn't it? It would be unadulterated joy. I mean there are those of us in this room who would literally give anything to see that process begin to unfold with a person in our mind or in our heart. Now you know how God feels when we take these steps in the twelve steps. I tell you that in the same way Jesus said there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 so-called righteous ones who think they don't need to. We admitted to God to ourselves and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs. They said earlier that the twelve steps were rooted in biblical thought and there's clearly a text that is in mind for this step 5, it's from the letter of John, the beloved disciple. His first letter, the first chapter, is riddled with a thought behind step 5. I'll begin with verse 8 and 9, which hits the target right in the center. John writes, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." Now John is talking here about maybe one of the most frightening realities of the human heart, one of the most frightening capacities we have about the way we're wired, about the way we work, and it is our capacity to deceive ourselves. Unless you realize that you have the capacity to deceive yourself, you're not really being honest about the human material, the human stuff of what you're made. Let's say you get your hand caught in the cookie jar, metaphorically speaking, and the person who catches you, you're busted, and you respond, "Well, my hand was not in fact in the cookie jar. My hand in fact was near the cookie jar. It was passing over the cookie jar. There was a little fruit fly inside the cookie jar. I was trying to get the fruit fly out of the cookie jar." Now at first, as you're telling this tale, it's plain to you and probably to the person who caught you that you're really just trying to deceive them and you may or may not succeed. In a sense, the truth is still in you at that point, isn't it, even though you're not telling it, but then something very dangerous begins to happen in your heart. You begin to believe your own story. You're actually in the process of entering that state called self-deception. You are deceiving, you are actually blinding yourself to the truth that you know. Does anyone ever experience that reality? Do you know anyone in your life who has come to that point where they've started off knowing the truth and then they tell the untruth until they begin to believe it themselves and you don't really know, do they know they're even deceiving themselves? It's a frightening, frightening state to be in. The frightening thing about it is it's very much like insanity because our only link to reality is the truth. So when we deceive ourselves, the truth is not in us, we've separated ourselves from what is real, because God is the real God. When we lose our link to reality, we've lost our link to Him. We're no longer in the light where life is, we're in the darkness where life isn't. That's what's at stake in this process. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. What's the way out of this condition? If we confess our sins. Now in that phrase, we confess our sin sounds to us at first like painful humiliation. We picture what are the homicide or NYPD, blue and Andy's, sworthy, sweaty, melodorous, simple, what's in your face intimidating you until finally you break and you confess that you're guilty. It's just a God-awful scene in our minds. But that's not what the word confess means at all. That's not the feeling, the sense around the word. The word in the Greek confess is homo-logale. And it literally means homo means the same and lego means to say homo-logale to say the same thing as. Say the same thing as. So if I were to homo-logale this bottle, I would say this is a Poland spring bottle of water. It would be the easiest thing in the word, world to confess, to say the same thing as what this is. Now here is where the language of the fifth step I think provides a helpful clarification, what it means to confess, to admit the fifth step says the exact nature of our wrongs. I could say for example that this, if you ask me what is this, I could say it's something and that would be true. But I would not be disclosing would I, the exact nature of what this is. If you press me further, I could say it is a cylindrical object and that would be truer. But it wouldn't be the exact nature of what the thing is. For me to confess what this is is to tell you everything I know about it. It's a bottle of Poland spring water, 1.9 ounces. It's clear, water, it's got a cap, confess, to say the same thing as simplest thing in the world. It's a beautiful thing when we confess, when we say the same thing as our sins. We have some friends there, I consider Doug and Gretchen the co-chair of the Ann Arbor Vineyard Alumni Association because they were part of the church here and then they moved out to D.C. but they've kept in touch with us and in D.C. they started having kids and they're first born now Sam is three years old. Now Sam is a little bit advanced verbally I should say, he's probably a real outlier on the chart there on verbal stuff but Gretchen, who is a teacher, has been working with Sam and showing them like they've been working through the story of Jonah and one of these Bible tapes on Jonah so Sam's been getting into Jonah and Jonah is a prophet called by God to go to Nineveh and Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh so he ran away from God and he got on a ship and God caught up with him there on the ship and the belly of the whale and all sort of the whole Jonah story. So one morning Sam says to Gretchen about mid-morning, "Mom go wash." The background to that is that Gretchen once the second born would take a nap would usually go up and take a shower and so Sam was saying, "Mom go wash go wash" and Gretchen kind of knew that there was something up here so she said to Sam, "Sam do you want me to go take a shower because you want to sneak in a cookie jar and get one of those cookies even though you're not supposed to have a cookie until lunchtime?" He looked down and he said, "Well you're just going to have to wait until lunchtime." No, and she put the cookie jar up high where he couldn't get it and then Sam was just standing by himself kind of off to the side and she overheard him say to himself, "Like Jonah running away from God." She said, "Do you feel like Jonah running away from God?" He said, "Yep, Sam is that a good feeling or it's a sad feeling?" Yeah, mama feels like that too and she's running away from God. A beautiful thing is saying the same thing as, and of course what was going on with little Sam is just what goes on with all of us. Small issues, great issues, just coming to grips with the reality, admitting to himself, saying the same thing as what was happening to him, admitted to God to ourselves and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs. Now this also clarifies, step five does kind of a commentary on 1 John chapter one, it clarifies who we do our confessing to. This is a big question, isn't it? Who do you do your confessing to? And what the fifth step says is you do it to God, to yourself and to another human being, and this is the real genius of the fifth step because this is like the big trifecta of admitting you're wrong. When you do it to God, to yourself and to another human being, there's just something gets released, power happens, the lights go on, it's a big deal. Go back to your friend that you've been thinking about, what would give you the most hope? What would give you the most hope that your friend was really on the road to dealing with this thing that had a choke hold on him? It's like think of it like a multiple choice question, A, he admits it to God, B, he admits it to himself, C, he admits it to another human being, or D, all of the above. And as a friend, you would feel most confident, wouldn't you, if you knew that your loved one had selected D, all of the above. Now why are all three necessary for the real impact of confession to take hold? Well, because all three are with us in the light where God is. All three are with us in the light where God is. This is the whole background, in fact, of 1 John chapter 1. We're going to take the preceding verses to get the context of what he's talking about in this confession text. I'm reading 1 John 1 verse 5 now to 7. We were on verse 8 through 9, so we're stepping back a couple verses. This is the message we have heard from him and declared to you, "God is light in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet, walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us from all sins and it works in other words." So this is the verse. If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. In other words, the love of God, think of the love of God as a place that you go to. The love of God is a place that we're led into. It's like our shelter from the storm, the love of God. And who do we find there when we come into that shelter from the storm, which is the love of God we find ourselves there, we find God there and we find one another there. We're all there in the light. Now the tendency we have as moderns very much is to compartmentalize all this. That's what the modern world does. We take things that are whole and we divide them into their constituent parts and that helps us to understand them better, but sometimes it kills those things in the process. We compartmentalize our relationship with God. That's me and Jesus. And then our relationship with others. That's a separate compartment, that's you and me. But these neat compartments that we make only separate with God, in fact, is joined together. It's even rehearsed in the third verse, just another verse up in first job, where he writes, "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us." And our fellowship is with the Father, there's a twist there, isn't there? You would expect him to say, "We proclaim to you what we've seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with God." But he says, "So that you also may have fellowship with us." And our fellowship is with the Father and the Son. The Holy Trinity, God's love, is like the love zone. And he welcomes us in, he is there, we are there, and others are there with us. It's integral to the love of God, this picture, this reality. So I think there's actually little doubt that in context, if we confess our sins has this trifecta, this step five understanding in the background that we confess to God, to ourselves, and to another human being. That's very explicit in James chapter five. It's another healing context, how God works through the body of Christ to bring healing to us. If is any one of you in trouble, he should pray, is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well, the Lord will raise him up. If he is sinned, he'll be forgiven, therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. It's the same background picture, isn't it, of 1 John chapter one. Now let me make a word, a brief word to the compulsive among us. Brief word to the compulsive among us, this does not mean that you have to run off to the confessional and confess every sin to another human being in order for it to work. This is not what's understood here. The biblical culture was not like a shame-based culture like our western culture is. If you read the writings of the New Testament and the Hebrew scripture writers, these are not people who are plagued neurotically with guilt. These are people who well admit they do things wrong and then they move on and they're no worse for the way of very much like oriental people in the modern world. They're not plagued by guilt like we are. And so we're not to read the Bible through this kind of a guilt-ridden, shame-based lens that we have as modern western people. So this kind of nervous, neurotic, compulsive approach to sin gives religion a bad name. Yeah, I would have to say. And there are people who are in desperate need of confessing their sins who just won't go there because they think, "Oh no, I don't want to give in to that compulsive, neurotic thing inside of me that just is never satisfied." No, no, no, no. The context of step five is the twelve steps. It's the step after step four, which is sitting down in a period of reflection and making a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself instead of everyone else, which is our normal inventory taking. You've been pressed to this point. There's a monkey on your back and you're willing to do anything to get that monkey off your back. What do you do then with that inventory? That's the context here. You know, so if you've never done it before, you think about doing this. Maybe if you're new to Christianity and you think about doing this, maybe you're bothered by things that went down in your past, you think about doing this. You're coming to grips with some thing that's slippery and it's hard to get a hold of and you know that you're in a brush with denial over the thing and you need all the help you can get. We're only as sick as our secrets, they say in AA, don't they? They're only as sick as our secrets. So you choose another human being carefully. This is not entertainment. This is not like Jerry Springer. You choose this other human being carefully, someone who can handle it, a steady eddy, someone who can zip it, who can hear what you have to say and not have it affect your relationship with them and it's not going to be blabbing it to everyone around telling your story for you. Someone who can keep a confidence, if you're in a 12-step group, a sponsor, someone who's down the road of recovery, it might be a pastor or a small group leader, say if you're not part of a small group, I don't know how you even get to know people at this level to be able to do something like this with them. It's one of the great values of small groups is talking to one of the small group leaders in the church saying that she and another member of their group had actually gone through step four and step five together, and it was a beautiful, beautiful thing. Maybe you're part of a ministry called Pursuing Wholeness. We have Pursuing Wholeness facilitators, that'd be a great kind of person to do this work. Someone mature and well-grounded, but there's also a broader application here to this whole understanding which is being whole, thinking biblically, is being known. In our culture we think being smart, being powerful is how much we know, but in reality being whole as a person is all about being known. To be whole is to be someone who is known by God, who is known by another human being, someone who is known by yourself. That's true knowledge in a biblical sense. So I think this has an implication for the community of Jesus, for the culture of the church. The culture of the church that we want to promote, the Jesus influence in the church, would be expressed in the fact that this would be the kind of place where you could selectively disclose your stuff. I don't mean you just do it randomly in inappropriate times, but I mean this could be the kind of place where you could come into relationship with some other people. And as you gain confidence and as you gain trust, you could come to the point of disclosing who you are to that person, the good, the bad, and the ugly. What I'm saying to you is if you've never gotten to that point of relationship, it's waiting there for you. And there's healing as you move into that kind of relationship with other people. We confess our sins to one another and we are healed as we pray for one another. I know this is something as a pastor I've struggled with because I grew up in terms of my pastoral ministry in the setting that said pastors should hold themselves above the people in the congregation and should have it all together. The leaders are the ones who should have it all together compared to the other people. And so people will lose respect for you if you show too much of your weaknesses. In fact, someone advised me not to smile for my author photo in an early book that I wrote because it would show a little more sober kind of expert kind of look. So that's the most god-awful author photo and thankfully those books are out of print, but if you really want to, what's the word, blackmail me, you get hold of some of those photos, they're just, they're terrible, but where was I? And so I had to make like an actual intentional choice that if I wanted to be in the kind of church where that happened, I would have to like say something from time to time about things I was struggling with, you know, and I can remember and I'm glad I have because I remember many years ago my daughter, my oldest daughter had decided she didn't believe in marriage and decided to have a baby even though she didn't believe in marriage. And I was ticked about that, I mean I did not, I believe in marriage, you know. And when I, oh that was a painful, painful thing and you know what, I didn't think twice about hiding that from the church. I felt like, you know, I'm just a member here, I can, you know, when it's appropriate, I can let people know that, and that never came back to haunt me, I never picked up on scuttle butt like, oh did you hear that, you know, pastor's daughter, they're now conventionally married and a house and a van and two kids and the whole nine yards, every time I see my oldest daughter, I kid her about how conventional she is, it's, it's pretty funny. But anyway, it wasn't funny back then when all that was sorting and sifting of what marriage meant was going through. And you know, I remember when we used to years ago where I used to wear suits to church. And I thought when we moved down to Milan, I thought this, this is nuts because people in Milan are not coming to church in suits and there's a whole crowd in Milan who don't go to church because they don't have a suit to wear and they're not those kind of people who get dressed up on Sunday morning. So I started saying to the church, you know, we got to start lighting up here on the dress code and I encouraged and I encouraged, but I kept wearing a suit and then I realized, you know, this is not going to change until I put my blue jeans on and I put my blue jeans on and a t-shirt and I was like, you know, in about two or three weeks, the whole culture of the church had changed, you know. And so it's really, you know, I just can't imagine being part of a church where I had to hide everything. Don't get me wrong. There are certain things. I would just never say it to a large group of people. Come on. But there are other things that, you know, hey, you know, I mean, and it's easier for me, it's less psychic energy if you can know some of that stuff about me. It just makes it easier for me, it's for my own benefit. And so we want to have a church where that's possible, that we want to have small groups where that's possible. We want to have relationships with one another because, you know, it takes a lot of energy to be good. We can't afford any energy hiding our bad. If we put all our energy hiding our bad, we won't have enough to be good. And so let's use our energy wisely on this thing, and the fifth step is really about that. And so I highly recommend to you, if even if you're not part of a 12-step program, if you have never done a fourth step and a fifth step, first of all, find some setting where you can meet someone to do it with and then sit down, do a step four, and actually do a step five, it will, power will be released in your life. You'll feel a relief that you didn't even know was possible. Here's what happens when you do it. You sit down with your little list of things, and you're talking with this other person, and as you say the things, they have just a strange way of coming into a different proportion in your mind. So there may be things that you were just terribly ashamed and felt awful about, and then when you speak them out, they don't seem nearly like such big boogie men. And there might be other things that you just, "Oh, well, yeah, I have this tendency to rip on my wife or to be sarcastic," and then you say it out loud, and the proportion changes as it gets out. And there's this, if you're saying it to the right person, they're not like going, "Oh, I can't believe it. You, turkey, you..." No, they're listening, they're loving, they're accepting you in that, and as the time wears on, somehow it just sinks into you. Even though I have all this stuff rattling around in my closet, this person is accepting me and loving me, and you realize in that moment that God can handle your stuff. And the power of evil that has that stuff in a grip, it's just released from it. And you are free in a way that you don't know freedom until you've done that. So there is real, real freedom in this. So I highly commend it to you. Okay, I think I'm done saying what I need to do about step five. So let's share communion together tonight.