Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Twelve Steps: Faith in a Higher Power (Step 2)
It'd be great to get it done today, so immediately after the service, thanks to Dave Jansen who did PowerPoint for us today, and some good news. We had Grace Paljar from Shrinagar, Kashmir, share about, we have a relationship with a church in Kashmir, and she's started a Christian school that's doing going great guns, and we had a special offering, and we were able to send her back with between $8,000 and $9,000, so that was just awesome, it was really, really proud of you guys for the generosity, the grace, and that money goes a long way, a family could probably live on $200 a month in Kashmir, so that gives you an idea of what that $8,000, $9,000 is going to be able to do. Just a quick question too, I was thinking this, you know, this Mel Gibson movie's coming up, and I'm wondering if it would be useful or not, I don't know if this interests me or if it would interest a number of you to do something before the opening of the movie or, you know, in the middle of February there, I guess that's now, but not today, because I'm not ready for it, on the whole issue of anti-Semitism in the gospels and that kind of thing, is that, would that be useful, or raise your hand if you think that would be interesting, or helpful, or, okay, well I won't tell you, or a number of you, but not everyone, so I won't tell you what weekend it is, and then those of you who aren't interested will come anyway, so anyway, okay, but it looked like a number of you were interested, so I think I might try to work that out, we've got three priorities for 2004 as we get about the business of being the Ann Arbor vineyard, first of all we're really looking to press out a Jesus brand spirituality, a Jesus brand God connection that will have the effective fostering bonds of real, real community through the church, and also release more and more works of compassion, those three things, those three priorities have really been on my heart of late for this year, and so as part of getting after a real authentic God connection and authentic spirituality, we're looking for something that affects real transformation, that's how you measure spirituality, does it change your life significantly for the better, and toward that end this year in 2004, the first weekend of every month, we're taking one of the 12 steps and focusing on it from a biblical perspective, the first three of the 12 steps are up on the screen just to familiarize you with them, they're made famous of course by Alcoholics Anonymous, which is probably the most successful program for bringing about personal transformation that's certainly been known in the modern era, today we're going to be looking at step two, we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, now just as a side note, I'm not someone who's generally oriented around numerical goals, it's not like a, it's not a fire in my fireplace, but as before the service this morning I just felt like God said he was going to give beginning recovery to 50 Alcoholics this year, so I'm praying for that, there will be 50 people who are in the grip of alcohol who will begin the road to recovery and freedom this year through this series and I think that's just the tip of the iceberg of the transformation that can get launched among us if we take heed to what God has to say to us through these 12 steps, a little bit of background to step two, Bill W, Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous was toward the end of his life writing some letters, contacting some people who had been key players in the formation of the 12 steps through either their wisdom or some historical circumstance and he wrote a letter to Carl Jung who was at the time the preeminent psychiatrist, Carl Jung was a disciple of Sigmund Freud himself and Carl Jung had treated an alcoholic named Roland H who helped another alcoholic find sobriety and that person helped Bill Wilson come to sobriety and so there was a chain of causation there that Bill W wanted to recognize and in particular the advice that Carl Jung a psychiatrist gave to one of his patients who was struggling with Alcoholism that turned out to be really critical for the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous so he's writing to Carl Jung about this former patient of his Roland H. First of all you frankly told him of his hopelessness so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned. This candid and humble statement of yours was beyond doubt the first foundation stone upon which our society has been built meaning Alcoholics Anonymous. Coming from you when he trusted and admired the impact on him was immense. When he then asked you if there was any other hope you told them that there might be provided he could become the subject of a spiritual or religious experience in short a genuine conversion. You pointed out how such an experience that brought about might remotivate him when nothing else could but you did caution though that while such experiences had sometimes brought recovery to Alcoholics they were nevertheless comparatively rare this is back in 1931. You recommended that he place himself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best. In other words it wasn't the first Alcoholic who took the first step of humility it was the physician of the Alcoholic who took the step of humility and admitted his powerlessness as a physician over the stranglehold of alcohol in one of his patients life and he points to something here which is the great power but also the great stumbling block both of the 12 steps as a program but also of the gospel which gave birth to the wisdom of the 12 step and it's this it all hinges on a faith surrender to God everything hinges the whole power of the thing is centered on a faith surrender to God now before we just skip over this I want us to feel the dilemma of this if you are an Alcoholic who's not yet in recovery or if you're a sinner who's not yet in recovery from your sin sickness and here we are scrambling to manage our lives and the compelling problems of our lives for the Alcoholic might mean binging and getting sober resolving to do better and being temporarily lifted up by a burst of shame for a time but falling again in the same cycle recurring for the non-alcoholic sinner the grape juice sinner is among us the might be a struggle with pornography it might be defecting your character that is really doing great damage to your marriage it might be a gambling addiction that you're under the grip of and and you fret about it you do your best to avoid the circumstances that bring it on you kick yourself you try harder Dallas Willard the professor of religion of philosophy at USC called this whole approach of sin management he called it it's like the plate spinning act that the magician or the you know and old Ed Sullivan guy would do you get the polls and you start the plate spinning and of course they you know it's just a it's impossible to keep up with it you're just trying to manage the problem to control it to work around it to limit it to manipulate situations to you know tweak it to clean up after this destructive tendency that we all have now when you are struggling to manage a problem like that it can be extremely frustrating to hear that the way forward hinges on a faith surrender to God something we seem to have no control over you know you'd like I'm too busy bailing water out of my sinking boat to bother with something like that I mean I don't have the luxury of a spiritual experience in the middle of this chaos that I'm living in but here is the rub Jesus himself said whoever would save his life must lose it other words must surrender your life but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it the the underlying principle here that is just right right through the whole biblical wisdom and is the underpinnings of the twelve step is this until we give up we can't give in until we give in we can't get in and until we get in we can't get well just the way it is step number one we admitted that we were powerless that our lives have become unmanageable step two we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity it's a natural progression step one has to be before step two it releases the possibility of step two why is that well it's the way reality works it's the way reality is structured an encounter with the real God the living God saving God begins when we come to grips with reality because that's the realm in which he operates insanity is the inability to deal with reality so reality always comes first and the reality that comes first is the reality that's closest at hand which is ourselves when you admit your powerlessness over something your inadequacy to beat something it's like the first fresh breath of reality that you're taking you're now in the realm where the real God really operates there's no facing the reality of God until we face the reality of ourselves but once we take that first step that what Bill W called ego deflation at death popping the balloon of your pride you admit your powerlessness over something the step second step then mysteriously wonderfully becomes possible becomes likely even we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity I love it about the twelve steps it's so reality based it's so experimentally demonstrated that belief in God is not some you know primarily some abstract or academic or philosophical process that we go through it's it's really a pragmatic and very personal process that we go through it's us in the boat of our lives bailing because we've sprung the mother of all leaks and and we realize over a period of time that our bailing is not keeping up with the leaking and almost out of desperation we finally give up we admit our powerlessness and we stop for a moment from our frenetic bailing long enough to see Jesus walking on the water toward our boat it's like the deal is this you just you just don't you're not able to see Jesus sometimes until you stop bailing is how it works so believe in God is not some abstract at the academic philosophical process what does this mean practically if we're fighting a losing battle with either alcohol or drugs or gambling or a character defect that is ruining our life or our marriage or a relationship that's important to us that some other manifestation of our sin sickness has just got the strangle what does this mean practically for us well first of all it means try another approach your current approach is not getting you where you need to go try another approach I'm a terrible golfer don't golf very often but so I don't have any golf stories I don't have any great golf stories and mainly but I do have some some loser stories and one of my loser stories is I was playing a Leslie golf course some years back and it was a twilight golf where you know pay five bucks and play until the sun goes down or the moon comes up or whatever and it was out on the hilly side the hilly side of the course and the sun was going down and I was in one of those bad positions where your position below where your ball is and that's not that's awkward and so the sun's going down I've got this bad lie I guess you call it or something and I take a swing at the ball and I you know miss it completely and I look around to see if my any of my partners are around and they're not so I decided that was a practice swing and because I wasn't really I wasn't honestly sure in my mind what I actually intended you know so there was some doubt I gave myself the benefit of that doubt it took another swing missed that looked around and this time I just said well I'm that's a mullet kind of mulligan situation you know took another swing not you understand I'm fairly I hand coordinated it's not like I'm I don't want you to get the wrong idea this was like this was outside the bell curve of my normal you know data spread you know and but I missed the I must have missed the ball 14 times and I would say that after about the fifth miss a kind of a like a you know how sometimes you just go into a warp it was like an obsessive thing happened and I just was swinging over and over and over again insanity is trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different result and so what the 12 steps is saying what the gospel is saying is try a different approach erratically counterintuitive different approach instead of fighting the problem begin by admitting that it's got you that a fighting the problem begin by admitting that you're inadequate to address it that it's got you it's got you look then and this is all just in that letter from Bill W to Carl Young saw started in 1931 Carl Jung speaking to that alcoholic that he couldn't help then put yourself in a position to have a faith encounter with God or in those inspiring words of Carl Jung place yourself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best now the book of Romans is the book in the New Testament that has the most to say about the the role of belief the power of faith Romans is all about a new way of connecting to God through Jesus that is faith driven not works or effort or law driven faith is the doorway in the book of Romans to salvation to eternal life to the kingdom of God or in the language of the 12 step it's the doorway into sanity and Romans chapter 10 is all about how faith works how it happens and some of the if you will some of the mechanisms of believing so it's very helpful for us at this juncture I'm reading from Romans 10 verse picking up the in the middle of the discussion at verse 8 but what does it say the word is near you it is in your mouth and in your heart that is the word of faith we are proclaiming that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved for it is with your heart that you believe and are justified it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved as the scripture says anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame for there is no difference between Jew and Gentile the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved this is a kind of practical what Paul is commending to us is belief in Jesus but not just belief in Jesus but belief in Jesus as Lord there's a claim there that Jesus is if you will chief among the higher powers the biblical world there was this understanding of there were higher powers that were part of the universe and that had influence on human affairs and human history and Jesus is presented in the Bible as the chief the highest of the higher powers that's what it means for him to be called Lord now in alcoholics anonymous you can get started on the road to recovery by kind of picking anything as your higher power the power of the group itself might be your higher power you know it's kind of up to you to decide I would just like to make as a Christian I'd like to make the case for Christ the compelling case for Christ as the best higher power the most effectual the most powerful of the higher powers number one Jesus admittedly by the co-founders of AA is the source of the wisdom of AA so the fire and the fireplace the the ground zero for this incredible wisdom that's led to all this recovery is the gospel is the new testament that's there's no doubt about that according to the testimony of Bill W himself and and Bill W was not a confessing Christian so far as I can tell so that testimony is even more is even more compelling I think secondly second case for Christ as your higher power of choice is that Jesus is the only higher power who died for us while we were still helpless I think that just commit that commends him amazingly that Jesus is the only of the higher powers who died for us when we were still helpless and then third that great philosopher of the modern age Bono wrote this he said the most powerful idea that's entered the world in the last few thousand years the idea of grace is the reason I want to be a Christian if it's good enough for Bono maybe I don't know I say the best for last in the compelling case don't you think so when you look at Romans chapter chapter ten the kind of faith that Paul is talking about is brand name faith it's faith in Jesus as Lord but it's also step two faith it's faith that a power greater than ourselves could really restore us to sanity in other words it's all about our actual lies when the Bible uses language like save you it means save you from your distress it's not just salvation in some kind of a generic abstract theological sense it were saved from our sins were saved in the particular ways that we need saving and it's different for different ones of us and it's expression so whether it's from beginning the insanity of alcoholism you need to be saved or from your inability to love another person the way you need to or from the stranglehold that anger has on your life or gambling or any of another number of other addictions that's the kind of faith that saves us it's rooted in our actual struggles and this faith comes to us by hearing Paul says it comes through what we hear this is a mechanism he's talking about and hearing in particular good news and hearing this good news in a particular way you can hear good you can come across the information of the gospel in many different ways you can find it on the internet you can read it in a book but the way it's really designed to come to us is from a news bearer we see the word preach or preacher in the text and we immediately assume a lecture from a podium in a church but that is only one form of preaching the Greek word chorizo that is translated preach here means herald means announcer a news teller telling what's happened in context someone who has experienced the saving power of God in their lives and is passing that good news onto you so for the alcoholic the bearer of good news regarding the possibility of sobriety might come from another recovering alcoholic for those suffering from some other form of sin sickness it would be coming from a recovering center most likely that's where such a message would be most compelling would be most likely to be her so putting yourself in a position to believe using Carl Jung's advice from 1931 means being near the people who have been set free who have good news to tell you near enough to hear really hear the message that God is bringing through them and believe it you know if it's an alcoholic it's not just knowing about alcoholics anonymous it's not just coming to the first weekend of the month through 2004 that's just a sampling it's going going to a going to a meeting I'm not an alcoholic so I can't tell that story in a way that you can hear and believe if you are a non-alcoholic center alpha course that we present here two or three times a year is a setting it's a it's a place you can go that smaller smaller scale than church it's a conversational scale not a public speaking kind of scale so you can really get near enough to the gospel to hear it and for most of us that means we need to question it a little bit we need to poke it and prod it we need to maybe try it on for size examine it consider it and then if you as you have that experience of hearing faith happens you come to believe and the power begins to be released or small groups that's what that's the dynamism of of a small group it's where we can come near enough to hear the stories of others their interaction with the gospel the way it's changed their lives the best hearing happens in conversational space it happens when we come near and the faith that Paul is referencing in Romans 10 is just very personal very much like step 2 came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity us not just them me and could restore me in particular could save me could restore me to sanity if you believe Paul writes you will be safe anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame for there's no difference between Jew and Gentile there's no indifference difference between the Jew who is the insider in his context already inside experiencing the promises experiencing the power of life with God or the Gentile the outsider so it's not just for the insider the person already on the road to recovery the person who's always already had the miracle of a spiritual awakening is put but it's also for the outsider for the one who is on the outside looking in who is just alone with the gorilla in the living room wondering what to do with the gorilla and spending all your time cleaning up its messes the same lord is lord of all and richly blesses I love that richly blesses just extravagantly blesses all who call on him for everyone who calls on the name of the lord will be safe so it's personal it's it's it's we we we we imagine this god who is willing to restore us to sanity and we understand that faith in him has to be rooted not only in him but it has to be hooked into whatever our mess is that's the tether that brings the power so it's not us trying to you know put ourselves in some kind of fake condition where we don't need to be saved so he can save us it's coming to grips with the gorilla in our living room facing up to that gorilla facing up to our problem entering into the realm of reality where the real god operates admitting that it's got us licked and from that posture daring to believe that god could save us that he could save me and that he could save me in particular with this mess that's in my life this dirty little secret that's in my closet that's when transformation the transformation of the gospel begins to happen in our lives and it's easier to believe it could happen to you when you know someone that it's actually happened to and so I'd like to ask Debbie if she'd be willing to come up and and share a bit of her story Debbie S why don't you give Debbie a warm welcome let's we got we got time to close with some worship and I want to just offer some time for ministry while we while we have some closing worship the band could get back up here to lead us and that'd be great I think the Lord today really is here for untouchables he's here you know Jesus had a ministry to the untouchables of his society and that was a sign that not just that he has a ministry to some special class of untouchables in our society but that he is a God who comes to us in the places in our hearts that are according to us untouchable so I think Jesus is after it this morning I think he's after some stuff and wants to demonstrate that he is Lord of our entire lives including those areas that we might think are untouchable how would you know might be an untouchable area for you well it you don't want to talk about it maybe you've never even shared it with another human being that would be a sign your spouse would probably know if you're married if it's untouchable because if the topic comes up it's just you can't have a good conversation about it that's fraught with anger and defensiveness and all that and it doesn't have to be a big issue it might be something that if you actually mentioned it to your best friend it would be like oh okay well yeah we all have struggled but to you it's it's got a grit and Jesus wants to demonstrate to us today that he is a savior who loves us through and through not just the good but also the bad and the ugly and the sign of that is Jesus hanging on the cross that on the cross Jesus demonstrated his embrace of us in all that's ugly about humanity and our death in our sin in our rejection of all that's good all the pain and the suffering of the world was poured into Christ at the cross including the pain of our of our secrets and so as a first step if you would like to just come to Jesus with whatever that is this morning and just present it to him I would invite you to do that that doesn't mean you need to disclose it to someone if you decide to come up here and ask for prayer you don't that's that's it's a disclosure to him first of all and if you wish you could of course could disclose it to someone praying for you but it that's not by any means necessary but I think there is there's something that happens there is a spiritual release there is an exchange when we come before God just admitting our powerlessness or our helplessness or our inadequacy over something in our lives and when we do that somehow something lifts off us and faith becomes possible in a way that it wasn't possible before it just happened so why don't we stand and if there's any other issue in your life that you need prayer for if you need healing of any sicknesses or physical ailments or if you're facing something in your life this coming week or in the future that has you intimidated and you need the power of God to just see you through that I want to invite you to come up for prayer also