Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Twelve Steps: Turning it Over (Step 3)
to Jesus' brand spirituality. It's, first of all, activist. Jesus was out and about, healing free from the powers of darkness. So it's activist. It's contemplative. Jesus was a man and silence and had a rich inner life, which he wants to pass on to us. But thirdly, it's come into contact with God through Jesus is meant to really change your life and to make in your real life for the better. What you can be with him is what you can't be by merely human effort. And so the twelve steps we're looking at this year, first full weekend of each month, we're picking one of the steps. Because the twelve steps is probably the best summary of the transformative power of Christ that's available. When you actually walk in the twelve steps, the result is normally life changing. It's life enhancing. It makes a real difference in your life. It's transformative. The first two steps of the twelve steps are like the cleansing breath. The first one is the breathing out. You're admitting your powerlessness. It's ego deflation at depth. As Bill W says, the founder of twelve steps, breathing in. The second step is like coming to believe that God can restore you to sanity. And then step three is really the nub of the whole thing. It's the first active step. And step three really is what separates authentic Christianity from just playing around with Christianity. It's what separates real recovery where your life changes for the better and just spinning your wheels in one other diet program, like any diet program or whatever else you might spin your wheels under. Step three goes like this. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. Made a decision. It's talking over here about the capacity that sets us apart as human beings. It expresses our identity with God himself who is a decision maker. We have this awesome capacity, this frightful capacity to make decisions. It's the most sacred, the most terrifying thing about what it means to be human. We make choices. I set before you this day. This is God's words in Deuteronomy. Life and death now choose life. Big things are at stake in our decisions. The prophet had a sense of this when he said multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision. Back in the time of Moses in the book of Exodus when they were getting the tabernacle together, there were instructions to the high priest Aaron. He was to enter the holy place bearing the names of the sons of Israel on the breast piece of decision. The holy of holies was the most sacred, the most terrifying place on the planet. The high priest went into the holy place once a year on behalf of the people. That was the meaning of the names on the breast plate and it was called the breast plate of decision because it's our capacity to decide that makes us truly human in the image in the likeness of God. Follow me Jesus said to one and it says he left his nets and followed him. Follow me Jesus said to another and that man decided not to. His face fell and he went away sad. It says big things are at stake in our decisions. The scariest thing about growing up is learning to make decisions, having to make decisions. My daughter, our youngest Grace is in the fifth grade so she's getting set for middle school. She'll be going to foresight next year and you know when you're young in elementary school you got the world is your oyster. All your options remain open to you and then in middle school you have to start making the choices. She had to decide between orchestra, band and choir or some kind of like a language sampling class and I'm like I don't want my little girl to have to decide. I want her to have the opportunity for both every decision narrows your options. That's the problem of growing up. You have to decide what you want to be and you can't be everything and when you start making the choices you start limiting your options. When it comes to the ultimate decisions, which really are questions of God, of life and death and eternity, the conventional wisdom is that your safest bet is not to decide. You know on the question of God we live in an age of procrastination. I wait till I have better information. I don't like having to make a decision about God when I'm like seeing through a glass darkly. I want to wait till it's crystal clear. But that just doesn't understand our situation. Our situation is we're like a starving man driving through a fog in his car to his next meal. And so we can't just park and wait for the fog to the lift because the fog is sucked in and time is not on our side because we're hungry. We have to proceed. We have to steer. We have to navigate. We have to decide according to the best light that we're given. So to live is to decide agnosticism, which seems so safe. I don't know. I won't decide. It's really not so safe after all. Life of Pi, my daughter put me onto this book, kind of a popular fiction thing around these days. Kind of interesting book. One of the characters in the life of Pi says to choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. There's something to that. Life compels decision. I had a job in high school. I grew up in Detroit city of and I had this job. Some friend of mine, his father was like a contractor or something and he had a demolition job. One of the big old buildings downtown Detroit and so I was helping to demolish the building. What great thing for an adolescent male. I was using this, what do you call it, service elevator, cargo elevator that doesn't have the doors. It just goes up and down in the walls right there, bare walls and not knowing what the heck I was doing. Someone flipped the switch and my foot got caught between the door or the non-door and the wall. Things were happening fast that had consequences. This is all happening in a split second. What do I do? Which way do I flip that switch? You think it'd be simple. You want to stop the thing. When you're in the situation, at first, you think the wall is actually moving. The building is falling down and the elevator is holding still like when you're in a parked car and the car next to you moves. You think, whoa, your car is moving but it's not. On that basis, you'd make one decision but fortunately it made the right decision. But life compels decision. To live is to decide. Actions have consequences but so do inactions have consequences. Ultimately, only you can decide. Only you can decide for you. Only I can decide for me. The one thing God won't do for us is he won't exert our will for us. Even if it could gain some short-term benefit for us to exert our will for us would destroy the us involved. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. Why would it be necessary? I mean, that's he's asking for a lot. I'm thinking the 12 steps got a lot of nerve to put the hardest step so early on. Come on, we need a little marketing help here. You should kind of get us going, get some momentum happening, get us, you know, committed to the group and all that. And then at the end, like step 11, say no, just give your whole life over to God. It's a pretty radical thing but the 12 steps knows that until you take this step, you don't get anywhere. This is the big kohona, step three. And you might as well figure out if you're going to do step three or not because if you don't do step three, step four, five, six, seven, and the rest of it, it's just going through the motions. There will be no transformation. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over. Why would this be necessary? Well, it's just kind of the mathematics of addiction. The cost of addiction, or you might say the cost of sin or separation from God, is you get your way but you lose your life. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, Jesus said, but loses soul? It's the cost of addiction. The cost of recovery, or we might say theologically the cost of salvation, is you relinquish your way but you gain your life. Whoever would save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for me and the gospel will save it. Now, you know, the human heart, our hearts are motivated in a primal sense by one of two things, the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure. And I think it's probably theologically, it's probably theoretically possible, that you could be motivated to take step three simply by the pursuit of pleasure. If you could see that to unite your will to God's will and surrender your will to him is ultimately the path to the maximum pleasure in life, which it is. But we're not usually that far-sighted and we're not usually that clear thinking. You could take step three just in the pursuit of pleasure but most of us don't take step three except for the avoidance of pain, which means the pain of your addiction or the pain of your separation from God, the pain of your life without God has to exceed the anticipated pain of turning your will over to the care of God as you understand him. AA, they talk about, you got to be sick and tired of being sick and tired. It's not enough to be sick and tired. Most of the world, most of the time, is sick and tired. So what? You've got to be sick and tired of being sick and tired. The pain of the addiction, the pain of your separation from God has to be experienced by you as greater than the pain of turning over your will to God. Now the pain of turning your will over to God should be obvious because my will is what I want. My will is the ring of power in the Lord of the Rings. It's my precious, you know. I want my will. Those four words, is that four, one, two, three, four, each one of them. I mean, I want my will. I want my will. I want my will. It's self-will-run riot. That's the definition and AA of alcoholism. It's a great definition for separation from God or sin. It's self-will-run riot. Jesus in the Garden maybe gives us the best model of the necessity for a human being to turn his or her will over to God. Because Jesus didn't have a diseased will like we do. His will was pure. He willed the good all the time. And yet in the Garden you saw the movie, maybe you read the book, it's just before he's arrested and then crucified. He's having like an existential moment, you know, with God in the Garden, the wrestling match between the Father and the Son. For the first time he's at this place in his life where his will, what he wants is different than what the Father wants. And the dispute has to be resolved and the Son submits, he yields with the words, "Not my will, but yours be done." He's paving the path. If he had to do it, we need to do it to move forward. And it was wrenching for Jesus. It was painful for Jesus to turn over his will. And so this is sweating blood kind of territory. This is not something that if you feel resistance to it, you're on the mark. You're talking about your will now. But the deal is before you can turn over your alcohol, or whatever your problem is, the expression of your separation from God, you have to first turn over your will. You'd like to just turn over the alcohol, but you actually have to go deeper. You have to go to your will because it's your will, which has got a death grip on the alcohol, or your sin, or whatever it is, your expression of separation from God. And the alcohol or the sin, while you're holding on to it with your will, is working. It's doing stuff. It's pickling your will, actually. It's weakening your will. Your will, because of that grip, is becoming diseased. Your will is becoming increasingly weak. It's becoming defective. And so it's at the point where you can't just, even though you want to, let go of the alcohol or the sin, you can't because your will has been immobilized. So you've got to take it back a step to the will and turn your will over. And then you're empowered to turn the alcohol over, or the sin, or whatever it is, made a decision to turn our will and our lives. Well, our will, kind of, it's like the keys to our lives. Over to the care of God as we understood Him. Now, there are some Christians who bristle at this language as we understood Him. Some Christians would say, "Well, that's the cop out in the 12 steps. That's where the 12 steps deleted my Lord." That's taking in God we trust, out of the pledge, or is that on the money? I'm not sure where that. I'm all mixed up on my controversies. There's so many. But a little known fact about the 12 steps is that the 12 steps originated with a Bible believing evangelical group called the Oxford group. And then the 12 steps came out of that. All the principles of the 12 steps were there in the Oxford group. And this language was not language that was imposed by alcoholics anonymous as they were differentiating from the Oxford group. This is the Bible believing language of that group, God, as we understood Him. And it's easy to skim over this, understand and think that means, "Well, God, as we like to think of Him, or the God of our preference, the God of our best dreams, but no understanding is a little different than that." Nancy and I are taking this marriage course that we're giving at the church here, eight weeks, and I think it was then there's homework that you get in the marriage course, little exercises. And we had this exercise to do called active listening. Active listening sounds easy, hardest thing in the world. And then they dumb it down for you. The exercise is you get like a handkerchief. This is like kindergarten, the talking baton or whatever. And if you're holding the handkerchief, then you get to express what it is that's bothering you or some maybe issue of tension in the relationship where you want to express your point of view. And you only get to do that if you got the handker in your hand, which means if you don't have the handker in your hand, you can't put in your two cents and correct your partner's perspective. With your perspective, you just have to like listen and you have to actively listen and reflect back what your partner says. I heard you saying that you think, "No, you just have to make sure that your partner understands that you're really getting it." And then you, after you reflect back what you've heard, you ask the question of all that, what is the most important thing that you said that you really want me to grab hold of and your partner will kindly, lovingly express that. And you will receive it and reflect it. I heard you saying this and it's only through this ordeal of active listening that you get to come to the point where you actually understand your partner. And then you get the handkerchief. Come to the handkerchief. It's my turn. I want to be understood. Oh, people are saying, "Oh, pray for Nancy." And he's got some issues he's saying. What I'm saying is understanding is a wonderful gift to give someone. And it's not something that's just an easy gift to give. To understand is to stand under, not to stand over. It's not overstanding, it's understanding. See, there is no turning our will and our lives over to the care of God unless we understand that God cares. That he knows us better than we know ourselves. That he loves us better than we love ourselves. That we are a factor in God's life. To say that God cares is to say that you are a factor in God's life. That who you are and what you do and what's happening with you, all of that affects God. There's a hint of this in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. It says, "Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God and filled with violence." Between 1979 and 1991 and the United States, 50,000 children were killed by gun violence. 54,000 were killed in the Vietnam War, so it was an equivalent loss of life. Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God and was filled with violence. When the Lord saw the wickedness of man and his heart was filled with pain, we are a factor in God's life. There is no pain like parent pain. You're also a nerd. I'm looking for some parents to just say, "I'm with you, Ken. Thank you." I know some of your stories and I know I'm talking to you right now. There is no pain like parent pain. I have known precious little parent pain, but the little I've known convinces me, there is no pain, hello like parent pain. Because your children are a factor in your life and who they are and what they do affects you as a parent. I have four daughters and so I'm hiding this daughter in the sea of that anonymity. I had a daughter, I have a daughter, but I had her as a high school daughter when she was in high school. And I guess that makes it down to three. We're down to three, okay. In high school, I came to discover that she had been sneaking out for three years after she went to bed. And we went to bed, she figured out how to sneak out and just sneak out. And a neighbor put us onto this. And so like at first I was denial, no way. She was no way. I'm too good a parent for that to be happening. And so I remember that James Bond movie, where it was an old one, it was O'Connory, Sean Connery. And he had this technique for figuring out whether someone had been into his hotel room while it had been locked and he was away. And I'm not going to tell you because I think that's right, some of the high school students are here. This is proprietary information for parents only. So if there are any parents who need to know the James Bond technique for knowing whether your kid has gone out while you've been gone and come back in and you didn't know it, there's a very simple method. It's awesome. It works. But if I tell your kids they are going to be able to mess with the positive sign and make it a negative sign and it won't work. So just contact me if you need the information proprietary, right? Parents, soon your network here. Anyway, I did the James Bond sign and it was positive. When I woke up in the morning, which meant I knew she'd been out, and so I said, "Okay, God, just help me catch her." And so, you know, I got up at like one o'clock, one morning to check, and she was gone after coming home and being fast asleep, she's gone. So I waited for 1.30, 2.30, weeknight we're talking, 3.34, even though I'm a professional, unpaid to be good. I lost my serenity between 1.30, somewhere between 1.30 and 4. I think I lost it at 1.32, actually. And every emotion that is known to humankind is not pleasant. I experienced fear, anger, anger at myself. How could you? You sapped? You know, how could she? It was just all brewing. She came in. I was there to greet her. We had an exchange. She denied that this was a one-time thing. I had the goods on her. I knew it wasn't so. I was so angry. I was just nothing that you would ever even think about reporting to protective services. I was just like visibly shaking. I felt like my whole body was shaking with anger. And I think that was maybe the clue that she had to fess up and say, "Yeah, it's been happening." And so we went upstairs and we had a chat, you know, "What does this mean and what's going on?" And in the middle of that, I just started crying. It wasn't my plan. All the feeling, all of them. It just came out. But I saw a look in her eye, which was like, "Oh, I think I'm a factor in his life. I think who I am and what I do affects him." And in a sense, that was the beginning of growing up for this particular child, becoming a woman. Which brings us to Jesus. God, I don't know about you, but God is not understandable to me in his infinite Godness. Like when I try to think about God is an infinite being. He's always been and he always will be. Before there was anything, there was God. He's got me. I'm stumped right there, right at the starting line. I cannot understand. I can say those words. I cannot wrap my finite brain around that. I cannot understand God in that way. If I'm going to understand anything of God, God has to come down to me and make himself understandable to me. God has to become graspable if I'm to grasp him. That's who Jesus is. God come down in flesh so we can grab hold of him. Jesus is the message that God cares. That you are a factor in God's life. That who you are and what you do in your joys and your sorrows and your struggles affect God. That's the whole point of Jesus' pain by the way. When Lazarus died and it says Jesus wept. That was the point when Jesus suffered and when he was in pain through the crucifixion. That was the point he was carrying the sins of the world. He was also carrying the pain of God. His suffering is the sign. It's the message that we are a factor in God's life. That we affect God. But it takes a decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of God. It's not enough to just know that he cares in order for the transaction to take place. You have to turn your will over. You have to entrust yourself to that care. Abraham Heschel, a Jewish philosopher, wrote, "Engagement to God comes about in acts of the soul." Not in thoughts, not in feelings, but in acts of the soul. We can do things in our soul which are actions. And a decision is one of those acts of the soul. I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. As I understand him, I want to invite you in God's name to make a decision, an act of your will, to turn over the keys of your life to the care of God as you understand him. I'm not talking about turning your will over to the care of some group, or God may use the care of some group. I'm not talking about turning your life over to the care of an ideology. I'm talking about turning your will over to the care of God, for heaven's sake. It's not like turning as parents, I guess, around the parent thing. I don't have any keys. Oh, yeah, my keys. You turn over the most frightening thing you do as a parent. They're 16. They've gone through the driver's head. You've been driving with them, and it's time. You turn over the keys to your 16-year-old. It's painful to turn over your keys to your 16-year-old. But you do it, or you're 17-year-old. I hope the law changes as you're 25-year-old, but you turn over your keys. Let's just be odd for God to be watching us struggle. We do turn over. Most of us end up turning our keys over to our 16-year-olds. But we struggle to turn over the keys of our lives to God, a NASCAR driver, when he's proven himself. I mean, God is confidence, experienced. We're all dependent on God anyway. That's the irony of it. It's like, wow, we're turning our will over to the care of God. Good for us to turn our will and our lives over to God is simply to end the hypocrisy. The hypocrisy that we have what it takes to just rule our own lives as if we're the author of our own lives. It's just to end the illusion. It's to end the insanity of our self-will, run, ride. It's to return to the heart's true home. It's all it is. The invitation is for now. It's for today. Why today? Because it's possible now, today. Because tomorrow is a day that just never comes. I've got a list of things that I'd like to do around the house that are on my tomorrow list. And I never, ever do them if they stay on my tomorrow list. I always have to transfer them from my tomorrow list to my today list. And then they have half a shot at getting done. Nancy has no particular confidence in my tomorrow list because tomorrow never comes. Today is the only day we have. And so what I want to do is just I'm going to read a prayer that could be for you a step three. And I'll read it in advance. I prepared it. I thought it out so that you can consider it and decide whether you want to pray this prayer, right, where you are. And here it is. It goes like this, Lord Jesus, I turn over my will and my life to your care. I hand over the keys to my life and I ask you to become the driving influence. I renounce the insanity of my self-will, run, ride. And I embrace the peace and the goodness and the power and the pain of your will. Amen. And that's step three. Now you might want to take step three because you've never taken step three before in your life. You've tried to practice a Christianity that didn't entail turning your will over to God. And that does not work. Or maybe you're in the grip of an addiction. And your will is diseased and you can't turn over the addictive thing. And so you have to go back to the core to your will. Or maybe you've done this in your life, but you're in one of those places where you've grown attached again to your will in some area of your life. And maybe it's being frustrated. And that frustration, it's not happening like you planned it, is leaking out and anger towards God. Often that's a sign that it's time to surrender once again. For whatever reason you may need to surrender, you may need to take a step three. And so because it is an act of the will, I'd like to do it this way to underline that. In a moment I ask you to close your eyes. And I'd like to ask you to raise your hand if you want to take this step. It's an act of the will. And so why don't we do that? Close your eyes and then whoever wants to take this step, just raise your hand up so I can see it. And keep them up there for a moment. Okay, so there's real business happening here today. I'm just going to pray this and you can make it your own and your heart there. Lord Jesus, I turn over my will and my life to your care. I hand over the keys to my life and I ask you to become the driving influence. I renounce the insanity of myself will run riot. And I embrace the peace and the goodness and the power and the pain of your will. Amen. Amen. Okay. It's baptism time. Don, you want to come up and lead the baptism? This is the fun part. We had like four people get baptized. Yeah, let them know about that. [BLANK_AUDIO]