Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Twelve Steps: Admitting Powerlessness (Step 1)
compulsive, obsessive sex disorders, overeating, broken relationships, essentially the human condition. And how might the series over the course of this next year benefit you? Well, first, one thing I'm not intending to do is I'm not intending this as a replacement. If you are a recovering alcoholic or involved in another of the 12-step groups, this is not designed as a replacement for your participation in that group. You can't replicate the power of a support group in a sermon series. But I think there's maybe four or five groups of people who might benefit to the course of this year through the series. One is if you are struggling or maybe flirting with an addiction and you don't know what the 12 steps are all about, you've heard about them, but you're reluctant to go take that next step of getting some help through a 12-step recovery group. I think the series will at least provide you with a reasonable introduction to some of the core concepts of the 12 steps. Second group of people is if you are working a 12-step program currently or a recovering alcoholic or dealing with some other addiction through a 12-step recovery process, I'm hopeful that the series will help you to integrate your recovery with transformation in Christ, especially if you have come to an understanding of God or been introduced to a personal connection with God through the 12 steps. Sometimes often people are struggling with some of the more spiritual dimensions of the 12 steps and I'm hopeful that this series will be a real benefit to you in dealing with issues like surrender to a higher power or any of the more spiritual implications of the 12 steps. Third group of people is if you are the child or the spouse or the important loved one of an alcoholic or someone else in the grip of an addiction, I'm hopeful that the series will help you to understand what it actually takes for a person to face up to that and to deal with that kind of issue in their lives. And with that understanding, I think you'll be empowered to support your loved one in recovery rather than simply supporting them in their addiction. Those are two very different things. In fact, that was my interest in the 12 steps in the first place. I grew up in a family that was very much affected by abuse of alcohol. My father abused alcohol for a long time, especially in my growing up years. His father was just a raging alcoholic and so alcoholism is definitely something part of my family heritage as it were and so the 12 steps when I first came to see what they were, a real interest to me just to understand what it takes to get free from an addictive process like that and I found it very helpful to understand and do some reading in that area in my own lives. I'm hoping that this series will be helpful for people in that position. And then another group of people, if you are a sinner, which is a condition that still affects some of us in the modern world, the 12 steps are like an awesome spiritual discipline to undertake in dealing with just the brokenness of our human condition. Even if you've been a Christian, a follower of Jesus for years, engaging the 12 steps, not simply hearing but engaging the 12 steps, I think can really facilitate a spiritual awakening or a reawakening in your life. So if you feel like you're someone in need of a spiritual awakening of a revivification of your relationship with Christ, the 12 steps are actually designed to facilitate such a spiritual awakening. And then finally, if you are part of a small group, you know, one of the men's groups or women's group or another of the small groups in the church, I'm hopeful that the series can provide the small groups who want to participate in this way with like a framework for discussion of these issues in the group setting and maybe even facilitate some more personal sharing in that context. So that would be entirely up to the groups that you're part of, but you might want to, you know, once a month in your group, small group meetings kind of follow along and discuss the 12 steps. So we'll try to provide some tools for that, hopefully get the sermons online. And also, I'll try to get my notes online in that little section on the new web page where I tuck away things of interest to me and hopefully to some of you as well. Ken's Corner, it's called, it's not on the home page, it's on any of the inside pages though you can get to that. So let's just take a quick look at the 12 steps in total so we can understand the first in context. The first three of the 12 steps are really about surrender to God. They go like this. We step one, we admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives would become unmanageable. Step two goes like this, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Step three, we made a decision to turn our will, thank you Peter and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. And then step four through ten, so that's the lion's share of the 12 steps are really all about reconciliation, especially in our relationships with other people. Step four, we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We admitted to God to ourselves and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs. Six, we were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Seven, we humbly asked him to remove our shortcoming. Step eight, made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Step nine made direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so, when they injure them or others. And then step ten, we continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. And this is the time if you're sitting next to your spouse or a roommate or someone who needs it to give them the elbow. This is going to go really well with the marriage class, step ten I think. And then step eleven sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for the knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. And then step twelve is really the mission step. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. So step one, in that context we admitted that we were powerless, this case over alcohol, you might insert there anything else that would be that kind of a roadblock in your life. And that our lives had become unmanageable, just open with the prayer. God the Holy Spirit, we invoke your presence here, we want you to be present, we want to be present to you during this time. And we pray for the gift of divine revelation that we would be granted through your mercy to see things that we couldn't see with our own capacities and faculties. We pray for the miracle of insight in our hearts, for each one of us as we need it, that makes a real difference in our lives. So give us that moment today I pray. Pray for your empowering presence as I speak and for those who listen that they be especially given discernment to separate the weed from the chaff of the things that I offer and ask that in Jesus name. Now step one, no one likes to admit defeat, especially in our culture which is all about success, which is all about defeating others, but paradoxically it's the starting point of all real recovery, admitting complete defeat, unconditional surrender. This is from a little book, it's called The 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, a little commentary on the 12 Steps, about step one. The principle that we shall find no enduring strength until we first admit complete defeat is the main taproot from which our whole society is sprung and flowered. So if you have any respect for what has happened in the whole phenomenon of 12 steps in terms of allowing alcoholics and others dealing with addictive processes to recover, you know, they started in the late 1930s, really took off like in the 1950s. And before there were 12 step recovery programs, the possibility of recovering from alcoholism was extremely remote. And since the introduction and the extension of 12 step recovery programs, the possibility if you're an alcoholic of actually getting real recovery is so much better now than it was before, it's a real gift. It's a real phenomenon that's been going on in our country and around the world. And if you have any respect at all for that phenomenon, we'll really want to take seriously this commentary that says step number one is the main taproot from which all this good fruit has sprung. This is not just the first step in recovery from alcoholism, but it's the first step for any real spiritual awakening. Before we can surrender to God, we must first give up on ourselves, must first give up on ourselves in order to surrender to God. We have to give up on the idea that we have what it takes to manage our own lives in a core sense, not that we can't get up in the morning and go to work or pick out what to wear or any of the other things that are within our purview as human beings, but that at a core level, we don't have what it takes to manage our lives. Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, used this phrase to describe what it is. He's called it ego deflation at depth. I love that. Ego deflation at depth. This is something that's really counter intuitive, isn't it? Early in the ministry of Jesus, when he gathered his disciples and then the increasingly large crowds of curious onlookers to essentially present his program, which is he was offering the kingdom of God to any takers. He gathered people and he gave what's now called the Sermon on the Mount. He didn't begin with 12 steps, but he began really with something very similar, the eight blessings or the eight beatitudes. They might be familiar with that term. Basically, who it is that's blessed as he freely gives the kingdom to all takers. There's a real parallel between the beatitudes and the 12 steps, but the first of the beatitudes, just like step number one, is this. Blessed, happy are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. There are two words in Greek, which is the original language of the New Testament that are translated poor. The first is pennece. It's not the word that's used here, poor in spirit. It just means simple poverty. The other word, petokos, is the word that's used here. That has a much richer meaning. First of all, it means abject poverty. The poorest of the poor, if you were petokos, you were on the brink of starvation, of extinction because of your poverty. Then in Jewish culture, petokos came to represent a whole class of people who were the most powerless people in the whole culture. The abject poor, who really had no hope of getting justice in that culture, people for whom their really only hope in life in this world was in God. Jesus had a particular heart and concern for these spiritually poor. There would be another way of saying it would be religious nobodies. Dallas Willard, professor of philosophy at, unfortunately, at the University of Southern California. Translates the first beatitude in this way. He said, "Blessed are the spiritual zeroes, the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars. Those without a wisp of religion when the kingdom of heavens comes upon them." There were many of the spiritual zeroes in the crowd that Jesus was speaking to and he was saying, "Blessed are you guys." These were the people most drawn to the ministry of Jesus. They were not just the poor in financial terms, the pennece, they were the petokos. They were poor in spirit, whether they were down and outers or whether they were up and outers. The opposite of poor in spirit, in New Testament thought, is not rich in spirit, it's the spiritually proud. The spiritually proud are contrasted with the poor in spirit in a parable that Jesus told the story that sheds light on the kingdom. In Luke chapter 18 and the parable is introduced with this commentary in verse 9, "To some who are confident of their own righteousness and look down on everybody else," Jesus told this parable. These were people who had that toxic combination of confident in their own righteousness and looking down on everyone else, people who gather in right-thinking ghettos, whether it's the liberal ghetto or the conservative one, whether it's the Christian ghetto or the Muslim ghetto or the New Age one or the secular ghetto or the agnostic ghetto. That doesn't matter. Any self-congratulatory click specializing in contempt for everybody else, mmm, ring any bells, it's easy to slip into that, isn't it? This is who Jesus is directing this story to and the story goes like this. Two men went up to the temple to pray one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. To get the import of this we have to do some cultural translation because when we hear a Pharisee, we've been conditioned in modern religious framework to think of the Pharisees as they're the bad guys. They're the religious elite that represents everything that's wrong with religion. Not really. At the time the Pharisees were the populist party among the religious leaders in Israel. The Pharisees were the fun guys. They were the ones who believed in the resurrection and they believed in angels and all the good stuff about religion. They were the ones who wanted it to be fun. They were the populist. They were like Democrats in a union hall. I mean the Pharisees were the popular party among the religious leaders and the tax collectors were just the lowest of the low. No one was for the tax collectors. The tax collectors had made the mistake of being wealthy. Levi the disciple called by Jesus through a big party for all his friends after Jesus called him. He was a man of substance and means. He was an up and outer. This is about not just poverty financially. It's about poverty in the broader sense. The main figure is a Pharisee and an up and outer. Then we read in Luke 18 verse 11 through 4. The Pharisees stood up and prayed about himself. God I thank you that I am not like other men, robbers, evildoers, adulters or even like this tax collector over here. I fast twice a week and I give a tenth of all that I get but the tax collector stood at a distance. He wouldn't even look up to heaven but he beat his breast and said God have mercy on me at center. Jesus commented I tell you that this man rather than the other went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted. So spiritual poverty ain't pretty. You don't feel good when you're in that condition. It's not someone putting on a pious humility act. It's someone who has bought his last self-help book because the self doing the helping is no help at all. I mean that's the problem. You go through the self-help section and there are all these books. I go through them and I think oh man I could and then yeah but the self that needs help and the one I got is no help at all. And that's the reality that is being dealt with in step one. We admitted we were powerless that our lives have become unmanageable. Now it is the first step for a really important reason. It takes a lot of insight to get this. It's why you guys pay me the big bucks to do this. It's the first step because it comes first. That's why it's the first step. Yeah I know it's an awesome gift I have. Sometimes I just get these things you know and I can't take any credit. It's just God. It's like we just go over this. It's like a groundhog day in our car. Nancy and I driving sometimes. Same thing he's happening over and over going somewhere and we get map quests. I've had bad luck with map quests. There's always a street name something else and it is on map quest and I'm off and I'm and I can't find the place. And then I am on the Myers Briggs I'm on the end which means intuitive which means I just have a sense that if I when I'm driving and I want to go somewhere I just have a feel like I can feel my, I can almost close my eyes and do it you know. And I'll recognize some landmark or it'll soon become clear just around the corner. I'll recognize and I'll find my way there and so many times I've got lost, lost or lost this under that kind of scenario and all the while Nancy who is a NASA sensing not an intuitive will say hey why don't we stop by. There's a gas station we can stop and ask there. There's a you know why don't we that guy and I'm like no I just around the corner we just come and you know I've I'm embarrassed to say how many times I've gone for so long before actually stopping it's the power of step one. You have to admit that you're powerless and that your life has become unmanageable. As long as you think you can manage it yourself you'll try. And as long as you think you can manage it yourself you will try and God under that arrangement will be relegated to observer status in your life. You know God feels very distant to us under this arrangement. We can be pious under this framework. Lord I love you I want to be like you blah blah blah we can even be committed under this framework. We can give awesome things we can make ourselves available to God in extraordinary ways but we can't be close under this arrangement because we're keeping him whether we know it or not at arm's length by saying I can manage this myself. See the deal is if unless we are willing to let God into our messes we're not willing to let God into our lives because the stuff that's right at the center of us is broken. And so it's not showing any respect at all to God to close the door to him on our messes. We let him into our messes that he gets to be God for us. And God respects human freedom. God is free and he gave to us the gift of freedom and he won't violate that gift so he will leave us to manage our lives by ourselves if that's the way we want it. And if you think well that doesn't sound so bad consider what C.S. Lewis said the internal dynamic of hell is wanting to live your life your own way. And it shuts the door to God. So that's just to give us a sense of whether this is important. There's a lot at stake in step one spiritually in other words. Now how do we come to this self understanding that we admit it? That's all it is. We just admit it. It should be easy. But it's not. We admit it. We were powerless over whatever that our lives had become unmanageable. Two things. Mostly we come to this understanding through some experience of profound and personal failure. It's the way we come to this insight. We don't come cheaply to this insight. We usually come to it through some experience of profound and personal failure. Profound. I mean brick wall failure. Not try try again and you'll succeed kind of failure. But brick wall can't get it done. Failure. And it's got to be usually personal. A failure that touches the core of who we are as human beings. Not just what we do. I like to disc golf and if I go out and have a bad disc golf day or if I have a bad disc golf year that doesn't lead me to this insight in step one. It's failure that is personal, that's profound, that threatens what we hold most dear in our lives. So for the alcoholic it would be alcoholism. And recovering alcoholics will even sometimes speak of the gift of alcoholism because it made the soul plain to them that they were powerless and that their lives were unmanageable without God. So an alcoholic who's in recovery will even at times come to see his alcoholism as a gift. But for those of us who aren't alcoholics it might come in another way. It might come through a marriage failure. Not being able to love that other person that we thought we could love so easily. It might be a failure as parents, unable to care for, to have the wisdom for, to have enough love for this child of ours that we just don't understand. It could be any of a number of things. It could be just a failure to find meaning and purpose in our lives. So we have all these gifts and we have all this to offer but we're just frittering it away because it's not channeled into any overarching meaning or purpose in our lives. Mostly we come to this understanding through some experience of profound and personal failure. We also come to this self-understanding by divine revelation. That's good news. Divine revelation, that means like heaven opens up to us and we see something that we couldn't see before without God disclosing it to us. It's not divine revelation unless you couldn't see it without God revealing it to you and the source of the divine revelation that's needed to take step one is the most powerful image in all of human history which is the Son of God Christ Himself crucified on the cross. I think there have been studies, the three most well-known icons or logos in the modern world, the shell gas station thing, the Nike swoosh and Christ crucified. So He's definitely in the top three and has been for a long time. This is an image that's been out there that's available to the human race. It's a powerful, powerful revelation. Here's what the deal is. Jesus understood Himself, His mission part of it was to personify Israel. And Israel's mission in the bigger picture in the world in a sense was to reveal to all of humanity all the potential and all the failings of the human condition. So in Israel we see the good, the bad and the ugly like times ten. And so Israel stands as a sign to all nations of what it means to be human in relationship to God. All the victories and all the defeats that we as human beings go in that core relationship which makes us essentially human. Jesus understood Himself in other words as the representative human. He was the Son of man in that sense. He was becoming, He was taking on, He was bearing, He was revealing our humanity to see what we've become apart from God. That's what Jesus crucified reveals to human beings. So Jesus doesn't just reveal God to humans. He also reveals humanity to humans and He does that par excellence on the cross when He's crucified. The truest picture of sin, of our broken condition isn't whatever guilt you feel on any given day or whatever guilt you don't feel. The truest picture is Christ crucified hanging on that cross because it's a picture of powerlessness. It's the picture of what we are in our God's separation. It's a picture of complete defeat. It's a picture of ego deflation at depth, powerlessness. When you're crucified, you are not managing so well. If you were to stumble across someone who was being crucified and you had the temerity to ask them how they're doing, they wouldn't respond, "Oh, managing thanks." When you're being crucified, you are not managing at all. You are being managed. You can't manage to move. You can hardly manage to breathe. You can't manage to live. This is the revelation from heaven for us if we're open to it of our powerlessness apart from God. It's often at the intersection of those two means of revelation, our experience of profound and personal failure and the image of Christ crucified on the cross where we really get the deepest revelation that allows us to take the first step. How do we actually go about admitting powerlessness so that it's meaningful? If you're going to break through that wall of human pride to take this step, you want to take it so it really counts, so it's meaningful. Three things I'd suggest, first of all, say it out loud to yourself and to God. Say it out loud. There's so much that goes through our minds in terms of thoughts and thankfully we ignore most of it. I'll tell you what's going on through my mind. You definitely want me ignoring a lot of it. We have to distinguish between just thoughts that are rolling through our minds and stuff that we really put our heart, our intention behind, and we do that by saying it out loud to ourselves and also to God. The second suggestion is that you write it down. You go through the discipline of writing it down on a piece of paper and that you keep what you've written somewhere that's meaningful and important to you. And then third, how do we admit our powerlessness so it's meaningful? Tell someone else who is likely to be supportive to you in facing this reality in your life. Tell someone else. The first word of the first step is the pesky pronoun we. We admitted to ourselves. It's not an interesting, it's so very personal, but it's not private. In order for us to be powerful in our responses, they need to be personal, but not necessarily private. We, Bill W, the founder of AA, there were like two miracles that were at the birth of AA. The first miracles, he was in a hospital bed at the far end of his alcoholism and he had a vision from God. He describes it as being struck sober. I think he saw himself up on a mountain top. Heavenly breezes just blew through him and he says it blew the desire for alcohol right out of his system. He describes it, I was struck sober by God. Most alcoholics don't have that. Most of us don't get it in an experience like that, but Bill W had an experience like that. And so for a number of months, he kind of did this journey by himself. And even his wife, Lois, who had known him so well when she saw him after that experience, knew in her heart that he would never drink again. That's how powerful an experience it was. But some months after that miracle experience that he had, he was in Akron, Ohio and he was in the lobby of a hotel. And there were a group of people in the bar off the lobby and he felt for the first time since he was struck sober, the craving for alcohol. And instinctively, he knew he had to find himself another alcoholic who was seeking recovery. And unless he did that, he would be back in that bar and be on that same road to death. And so he found Dr. Bob in Akron, Ohio and that's how alcoholics anonymous came to be. We tell someone else who is likely to support you in facing what it is that you're facing. You know, we're talking here about bondage, which is a form of like spiritual imprisonment. Jesus came to set the captives free. And when we're in prison, that experience is empowered by solitary confinement. And so part of setting the captives free is ending our solitary confinement. We, so find someone who will support you in your, facing that issue and tell them about it. Don't treat it as something you can handle on your own. Okay, done with step one, step two comes next month, give you a chance to kind of process this kind of intense. You're not going to want this 12 weeks in a row. You'll be gagging on truth and challenge in your life. But I think in a year, we can take these bite-sized things and maybe even do something with them. Why don't we stand up and invite the band back to help us to, to worship together. And for, for time of ministry, we like to do at the end of that, toward the end of the service is just have some time where individuals who want to respond in a more personal way to something God's doing at, you know, here, right now in this moment to come forward and receive prayer from anyone on the ministry team. So that's what this time is all about. It's just a time for people to be real with God and to receive prayer from others. So, you know, we're not focusing on, you know, we're here, we're shipping together. And then as people come up and want to respond, they're free to do that. And today, I felt.