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Facing Struggles to Gain Recovery Strength

 

Often times in our recovery process we go through what seems to be insurmountable struggles as we are learning to live life in our recovery. These struggles can appear in almost every area of our lives: physically, emotionally, relationally, vocationally, financially and spiritually. In the midst of all our struggles in recovery, it is very easy for us to feel like we are the only ones experiencing such trials and tribulations.

Why Do You Allow My Struggles?

It’s not long before we find ourselves turning our voices to God asking, “God, if you are so good, why are you letting me struggle so hard?!” Struggles aren’t fun to go through and often times they can make us feel like we are failing or doing something wrong in our efforts to stay in our recovery. Our struggles in our recovery can also make us wonder, “What’s the point of all of this? Is this what the rest of my life is going to be like?” If we aren’t careful, the voices that we hear coming out of our struggles can put us in a place of hopelessness and a relapse won’t be far behind.

Unfortunately, life is full of struggles and there’s no way to live life without them. While some struggles in our lives do come as a result of choices that we make, not all struggles necessarily mean that we are failing or doing anything inherently wrong. It could actually be God’s way to strengthen us for the next level of healing and growth for our lives…and in that struggle, transforming us into a stronger and more beautiful person.

A Butterly Portrays the Victory in Struggle

To help illustrate the God’s divine purpose of our struggles in recovery, let’s take a look the struggle of the butterfly.

One day a man found a butterfly cocoon in his garden. He watched it for several days anticipating the emergence of a beautiful butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole.

Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could, and could go no further. So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.

The man continued to watch the butterfly expecting that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support its swollen body, which he thought would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to become what it was intended to be.

What the man, in his kindness and haste, did not understand was that the restriction of the cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Sometimes our struggles in recovery are exactly what we need in our lives. If God allowed us to go through our lives without any obstacles, it would cripple us and keep us from enjoying deeper healing, transformation and experiencing the fullness of the life that God intends for us.

Asking For Strength

When we resist or try to run away from our struggles, we need to realize that we may actually be resisting the very miracle that God is waiting to give us. It’s the endurance of our struggles that make us strong and gives us the strength to walk joyfully and freely in our recovery!

I asked for Strength…and God gave me Difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for Wisdom…and God gave me Problems to solve.
I asked for Prosperity…and God gave me Brain and Brawn to work.
I asked for Courage…and God gave me Danger to overcome.
I asked for Love…and God gave me Troubled people to help.
I asked for Favors…and God gave me Opportunities.
I received nothing I wanted…and everything I needed!

If you, or someone you know, is struggling with addiction or in the midst of a relapse, we at New Life Spirit Recovery are here for you to help you overcome your struggle. Don’t wait any longer and contact us today at 866-543-3361 and let us help you be an overcomer!

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Ten Lies that Sabotage Our Recovery – Part 1

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You can go through the best rehab program in the world and still relapse. There are no guarantees that you won’t. Why? Because the “X” factor in your recovery, in part, is what you choose to believe. In the end, what you choose to believe will either enable you to keep walking in your freedom from addiction, or it will sabotage your recovery. In this two-part post we will be looking at the 10 lies that that most commonly sabotage our recovery and rob us of our newfound freedom from the demon of addiction.

Lie #1: “I Will Be Able To Drink/Use Again Someday”

Our best chance for recovery lies in total abstinence from all mind-altering substances.The reason we buy into this lie is because we want to be like everyone else…”normal”. So we convince ourselves that we will get to the place where we can control our addictive behaviors. We desperately want to believe that we can still drink or smoke a joint with our friends and be able to handle it like they can. Nothing will sabotage our recovery any faster than this lie of denial. The truth is that we are powerless over mind-altering substances. Alcoholics may fool themselves into thinking that they can no longer drink whiskey but can have a beer every now and again. This is a growing problem in AA as members will say that they are “sober” while still occasionally smoking marijuana.What we are doing in our self-deception is compartmentalizing our alcohol or drug abuse so that we can keep an “ace up our sleeve” in case the going gets tough. Drinking or using remains an option for us. When we keep this kind of secret, we are sabotaging our recovery. What we need to do is share this secret – tell the truth.

Lie #2: “Now That I Am Clean and Sober, I’m Good To Go!”

Another lie that sabotages our recovery is believing the lie that “Now that I haven’t had a drink or used in the past 30 days, I’ve got this think licked!” Breaking the bonds of your addiction is just the first step of your recovery process. Recovery is ultimately about recovering our spiritual self and identity. While overcoming the physical bond of our addiction is a great first step, we can’t be deceived in believing the lie that it’s no longer a problem. Much more than just putting the cork in the bottle needs to be done to ensure full recovery. We need to understand and admit that our addiction began as a solution to some deep-rooted emotional problem or issue in our lives.  Then one day we find that our addiction has become as much or more of a problem than our original problem. To experience a full and complete recovery, we must face both the physical addiction and our underlying deep-rooted issues. This lie will sabotage our recovery very quickly if we fail to address the other side of our addiction issue…our emotional hurts and pains.

Lie #3: “Now I Can Help My Friends Overcome Their Addiction”

We have to pursue our recovery with the same enthusiasm and energy that we had when we were drinking or using drugs! Sometimes in our sobriety, we convince ourselves that “I am strong enough to go to my old addict friends and help them overcome their addiction.” This is a dangerous lie that sabotages our recovery. Proverbs 6:27 warns, “Can a man carry fire next to his chest and his clothes not be burned?” In other words, by going back to the very addictive environment and friends from which you came, chances are real good that you will get burned. We need to understand that addiction overrides our best thinking and even our basic instinct for self-preservation. We have to get into the habit of asking ourselves, “What’s best for my recovery” and then acting upon the answer to that question. More than likely, what’s best for your recovery is to avoid those people and places of your addictive past. We must be willing to do things 180 degrees different from what we have been doing. We need to have nothing short of total commitment to recovery. If we are not 110 percent committed to our recovery, our efforts will most likely sabotage our recovery.

Lie #4: “I Don’t Have To Share All My Secrets”

There’s an old saying in recovery, “We’re only as sick as our secrets.” Secrets live in darkness and in the shadows. As they live in these shadows, they spit out lies of shame and guilt in our minds…and they are very loud voices. Honesty exposes these lies, along with its shame and guilt, to the light and power of TRUTH. This is when shame and guilt begin to loose its power and influence over us.Honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness are essential for recovery. Addictions feed on deceit, distrust, and dishonesty. We are driven to go to any lengths to drink or get high. As a result, we often violate our own personal values – no matter how strong or good they are – but not without consequences. To guard against this lie from sabotaging our recovery, we need to be able to discuss all the things that we don’t want to talk about, especially our secrets…the things that we believe we would never share with anyone. At the heart of recovery lies the notion that we must challenge our old ideas, which are rooted in a faulty pride system. Neutralizing the power of false pride and loosening its control over our life is critical. The more open we are, the more we are able to communicate. The more we share what we are ashamed of, the less power and control our false pride has in our life and the more serenity we experience.

Lie #5: “But I’m The Exception”

 Humility is the spiritual foundation of recovery. People who do best in recovery are those who surrender and follow suggestion. One of the most common lies that sabotage our recovery is to negotiate…to pick and choose what we think what will be helpful. One person might say, “I don’t need to go to a meeting every day for the first 90 days of recovery. Two meetings a week are plenty enough for me.” Or, “I don’t need a sponsor. I can do this by myself.” Or, “I don’t have to work all the Steps. One and Twelve are enough for me.”This kind of thinking is based on the mistaken belief that we are special and unique and that we don’t have to do what everyone else has done to develop a solid, robust recovery. This dangerous attitude has led many new-comers, and even some old-timers, back into the depths of despair and relapse. We are special and unique, but not in the sense of our addiction.

If you, or someone you know, is struggling with addiction or in the midst of a relapse, we at New Life Spirit Recovery are here for you to help you overcome your struggle. Shame, guilt and feelings of failure can often times be a factor as to why we don’t seek out help with our addiction or relapse, especially if we have already been through other rehab programs before. We understand the powerful control that these feelings have, but we also know how that love and grace has the power to swallow up your shame and guilt and put in its place hope and life. Don’t wait any longer and contact us today at 866-543-3361 and let us help you be an overcomer!

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Overcoming Anger

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Recovery isn’t a substance abuse problem alone; it is a heart problem that brings alongside it many other behaviors and emotions. Among other emotional problems, people struggling with addiction carry a lot of anger. Anger, much like substance abuse, numbs the heart from having feel. But for whatever short-term benefits it provides, it will lead a person into full-blown bondage.

What is Anger?

Anger is a defensive emotion that arises when we feel we have been violated. Anger is an attempt to maintain what we have; to validate how we feel or to protect what we feel entitled to possess. We can also experience anger when our own sense of worth is threatened, our basic needs are not properly met or when we feel our beliefs are under attack. Anger is a secondary emotion—it is driven by a deeper emotion that masks the initial emotion. (Adapted from The Christian Codependence Workbook by Stephanie Tucker).

Anger manifests in a variety of ways:
• Through defensiveness, blaming and denying
• Through criticizing, fault-finding and shaming
• Through resentment and bitterness
• Through fighting, yelling and verbal attacks
• Through physical violence and abuse
• Through frustration and outbursts
• Through hate and malicious intents to destroy others
• Through inward repression and outward “good doing”

When we use anger, we are manifesting our own sense of power and control to overcome a problem. The Bible tells us that not all anger is sin (Eph 4:26). Initially, anger can be used to take a stand or come against something that we have a right to protect, including our own life and safety. This is justifiable anger, like the anger Jesus had towards Pharisees that were abusing God’s temple.

But anger that is allowed to control us and to grow in our hearts without a redemptive protocol eventually becomes dominant. It in essence swallows up all other emotions. Anger can bring us into dark and terrifying places. It can imprint an angry identity over our lives where we become back-biting, critical, hateful, ornery, hardened and potentially violent people.

While anger looks and feels stand-alone, it is not. It is driven by an initial emotion that oftentimes is hidden and buried deep behind the anger. Those raw emotions are what we try to avoid, but they are what need to be exposed.

Some of these raw emotions include:

• Fear
• Depression
• Sadness
• Betrayal
• Guilt
• Shame
• Loneliness
• Abandonment
• Rejection
• Unworthiness

These raw emotions aren’t wrong or sinful. They have a reason and God cares very much about what is happening in our internal world. Jesus can meet us in our pain – but when we are angry – we become unreachable. Left without solution, these emotions, alongside anger, will destroy us from the inside. Simply put, anger needs to be understood and managed or it can ruin our lives.

Anger triggers

Anger is triggered whenever a current situation leaves us feeling threatened. That’s why it is a guardian emotion. It may stick its fists up in the air (sometime literally) and push a perceived “intruder” away. There are many ways anger will manifest in the moment of a trigger – including verbal and even physical abuse. But sometimes anger is passive aggressive. It seems outwardly friendly, but inwardly it is plotting revenge.

Bridget’s anger results in foul-language and accusations. When triggered, she feels an explosion of every built up issue she ever had with her husband. She uses anger to attack him with her tongue. Her anger is a weapon – but in truth, it is an expression of pain. Bridget isn’t really that mean and vicious woman that she projects; she is a scared little girl that has been offended by an insensitive comment that mimicked her abusive father. But her anger can be costly. One wrong move, and anger can erupt in violence and even worse. When angers isn’t managed, it can destroy our lives. It starts as innocent pain, but becomes a sinful stronghold.

Ted hides his anger and continues to comply in relationships where he feels offense. When he feels used or violated, he keeps track of every detail of that situation and inwardly condemns the responsible party. Outwardly, no one would know he’s angry; perhaps he’d never admit to anger either. But then his relationships are infected by resentment, and when he can, he develops a method to hurt or “pay back” the offender. It doesn’t matter if our anger seemingly doesn’t hurt others, it will hurt our own hearts and will ultimately cause disconnection in our relationships.

What to Do with Anger:

Anger doesn’t mean a person is terribly evil. While the behaviors can be extremely damaging, anger is an expression of needs and of pain. Thus, where anger exists, it means we need to process situations and events, and also work through relationship struggles. This is good news. This makes anger more like a smoke detector than simply a defective human being. Anger alerts us that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with. Usually there are resentments and offenses that took root and created an entire system of anger. God’s goal is to teach us to find the pain first, and deal with it in its raw form. This requires the ability to be vulnerable and to feel the pain, rather than immediately switch to anger.

The first step in aiding our lives from anger’s destructive influence is to recognize the reason it exists. If you identify with an anger problem, you really are identifying a pain problem. Instead of running from anger, feeling shame from it or pretending it isn’t there, listen to your anger. Write down, if at all possible, what goes through your head when you are angry. It may be hard to do in the moment, but you’ll be surprised by what you discover. Our anger will be directed towards another person initially, but if we listen closely, we’ll find that it is actually our own woundedness that is speaking.

If anger feels unmanageable, develop an anger management plan. This can be a safe place you go in your anger. You won’t want to in the moment – so planning ahead can help. You may want to have prepared reading, workshop music or bible scriptures that will aid you in identifying the triggering of anger. It is amazing how anger can break into the pain with God’s help. If you embrace the what you are feeling and ask God to help you in it, you’ll discover that He can address the pain.

When you are ready to face pain through God’s healing – He can bring transformation. But this requires we stop medicating our pain – both through anger and through any other drug or behavior that causes other emotions to shut down.

Releasing our anger isn’t about being weak or not being able to set boundaries. Just because you release anger, doesn’t mean you have to be defenseless. We use anger to empower ourselves wrongfully. As we allow God to administer healing, He also seeks to equip us with healthy weapons of defense. These are His ways of overcoming the pain and the problems we have people and with ourselves. God always has a better alternative and His ways will lead us into peace and joy!

New Life Spirit Recovery is a Christian drug and alcohol rehabilitation center that believes that God is Healer and has a redemptive plan in our lives. You can’t even be too far from His grasp. Call today to learn how to overcome your anger issues. 866.543.3361.

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Why Look Back?

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People will oftentimes question the purpose of looking back into the past since it can’t be changed. Looking at the past isn’t about living in the past; it’s about finding the seeds that were sewn that continue to affect us today. It provides access to understand why we do what we do, and how and where our learned styles of coping were formed. Some “seeded examples:”

  • We fear abandonment in the here and now because we were abandoned by a parent
  • We repeat the same behaviors of our parents, even though we vowed we wouldn’t
  • We believe we are unlovable because we weren’t cared for when we were young
  • We don’t know how to be intimate in relationships because intimacy wasn’t modeled to us effectively
  • We abuse substance to escape from trauma and not wanting to feel

Most of the journey of uprooting is finding exactly how and where those roots were formed. Once we recognize them, we have the opportunity to do something with them. When people avoid the presence of rooted issues,  they try to stifle or avoid the “fruit” in the here and now.  Fruit is produced after the seed rooted and the structure itself grew. Fear, shame, guilt and ultimately drug and alcohol abuse are fruit – they aren’t the root. 

Facing our history is extremely painful for some. It can be deeply difficult to recognize the very things that we prayed would be removed still affect us. We can feel that we are somehow a failure as a Christian because we can’t walk into the promises of God. However, God marvels and delights when we are willing to let Him dig deeply. He knows what’s there. Like a true Gardener, He comes ready to aid us and to bring redemptive tools to weed out the harmful things that are blocking us from the abundance He has stored up for our future. God wants to uproot the things choking us, and prepare us to walk redeemed. Once He is allowed, then the seeds He plants can at last prosper. We will have the room in our heart to grow up in our God-created design.

In recovery, we’ll always need to deal with the things we can change and those we can’t change.  We have no power to change what people have done or the choices we ourselves made in the past. But we change our mindsets. We can allow God to redeem the very places where faulty messages, beliefs and shame have sabotaged us. We can allow God to re-message our lives with the firm foundation of His truth and the power of grace so He can touch and heal what was broken in the past. We can trust that God can overcome. We can choose to believe that whatever happened in the past, God will somehow use it to better our future and fulfill His purpose in our lives (Romans 8:38-39).

New Life Spirit Recovery is a drug and alcohol treatment committed to seeing men and women walk into freedom, hope and new beginnings. www.newlifespiritrecovery.com or 866.543.3361.

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Addiction is a Stronghold; but What Does That Mean?

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What is a stronghold? Does it have a valid context in the bible and can that be applied to addictions, problems and conflicts?

In biblical times, strongholds were fortresses of protection used to hide from the enemy on the battlefield. A stronghold, therefore, represented a place of security from the oppressive elements of battle. In the spiritual battle of our lives a stronghold acts this same way – but depending on where that stronghold has been built, it can have dramatically different results. For example, Psalm 94:22 says “But the LORD has become my stronghold, and my God the rock of my refuge.” This is a picture of God acting as a safe haven and point of security. This is a stronghold that buffers us from the enemy.

However, the Bible also reveals that strongholds can be fiercely oppositional to our well being. They can be the very places where the enemy traps us into systems of thinking, feeling and behaving that single-handedly destroy our lives. 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 says:

We are humans, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God.

In this context, strongholds are something to be rid of; something that obstruct our ability to know God. To know God is to have faith to believe He is real even though He can’t be seen, and then to pursue Him intimately in relationship. Through that relationship, we are fed and nourished by His truths and His purposes for our lives. To be kept from the knowledge of God, therefore is a state of being blinded and bound – as if we were taken away from life-giving resources. Imagine a fortress in your heart that is designed to keep  you away from God by overtaking your mind and heart with wrongful ideas, mindsets and attitudes. This is a stronghold.

Strongholds are not reserved for people filled with total and complete darkness and evil. That’s why Christians are so easily deceived. Very simply, strongholds are lies that become our truths. Strongholds eventually can erupt into addiction, codependence or numerous other ailments. But those are the effects, not the cause of a stronghold.  In 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 notice that the reference to a stronghold is “human reasoning and false arguments”. This is referring to the chatter we house internally in our everyday situations. We analyze, think, build conclusions, develop reasonable truths that become so much a part of who we are. Overtime, we can adapt thousands of false beliefs that are our inward truth. We typically normalize these lies (strongholds) and reject the remedy of truth.

Identifying a Stronghold:

Strongholds are spiritual, but show up in our soul. Our soul is composed of our mind (thinking), emotions (feeling) and will (choosing). Just because a person is Biblically literate doesn’t exclude the potential for strongholds. Strongholds (lies) are much deeper than surface level,and often times we don’t even know what we’ve agreed with as truth in our heart. Once we come in agreement with a lie, our perception of ourselves, God and others gets tainted. Depending on the information we are digesting, this can be extremely toxic.

Examples include:

A man uses heroine as a way of managing his fears. He feels powerful and insists his life is manageable. He rejects any help and places his addiction above everything and everyone. His stronghold isn’t just the drug, but hundred of messages he believed that brought him to the point of wanting to leave reality through a substance.

A teenager believes she’s “fat” even though her thin figure weights in at only 65 pounds. She continues to starve herself to death and will not adhere to the insistence of those who say she needs help. Her stronghold isn’t just an eating disorder, but rather it’s her low self image and the obsessive way she’s tried to control how she is viewed.

A woman is abused by her boyfriend but faithfully remains in the relationship and is unwilling to leave in the name of “love.” She protects him and rejects people who want to help. Her stronghold isn’t just the boyfriend, but the lack of value and preciousness she has assigned to her life. She believed the message at some point that she didn’t deserve to be treated with love and dignity.

A child is ignored and neglected early in life, feeling invisible and unwanted. He brings that sense of rejection into all future relationships, recycling its message over and over again. His relationships suffer, but the lies he believed at a young age are the real problem.

There are thousands, perhaps millions of ways we can believe a lie as truth. But how can we actually find those lies?  We don’t learn by studying the lies, but by understanding God’s perspective in all situations.  Pursuing truth is the greatest feat in the Christian journey, especially in a culture that contradicts it at all levels. Many times Christians mistake knowing and memorizing God’s Word as the complete source of truth, believing that intellectualism can solve their inward crisis. Learning God’s Word is vital – but it’s not enough. Just as a fancy piece of gym equipment has no effect unless its used and applied, so God’s Word has to be “worked out” into us for it be effective. We desperately need for God to take that Word and place it into our heart like a flashlight. When we see our shortcomings, the lies we believe and the spiritual needs we house, we become positioned to let God change us. His greatest act of love is helping us find the mentalities, behaviors and choices that are creating barriers to us “knowing Him.” This can feel uncomfortable, but it is, in reality, the way He delivers from perilous battle conditions. We are then transferred into the safety of His love and protection. His goal is to become our stronghold.

Overcoming Strongholds

What about you? What lies have you believed? If you don’t know where to start, pray for Holy Spirit to reveal it and ask God to send truth into your heart. In program, our main focus is to help people identify where those strongholds have been built and to transfer unhealthy strongholds into God’s hands.  This happens by doing a fearless inventory, and being willing to submit to God’s truth. Oftentimes, we don’t know that a lie exists because they can rise up quietly within, creating obstructive messages without us even knowing they exist. Issues from childhood, abuse, negative relationship and the culture at large are typically the culprit.

Here are some ways you can try to capture and demolish strongholds in your own life.

Pray to the Father to help you see and comprehend the strongholds and beliefs you might house. Be open to their existence, and ask to visualize them like a fortress that the enemy has resurrected in your soul. Allow righteous anger at the enemy to give you the courage to pursue what lies within. Refuse to let fear prohibit you from seeking truth’s remedy.

Inventory yours thoughts and continue to assault them as they try to get placement. Trace your emotions and behaviors back to potential lies that you are believing.If you know of an area of weakness (addiction, relationship struggles, low self esteem) find resources specific to that area so you can better identify this. This might be a 12-step meeting, a workshop, counseling, treatment or a friend you know has similar issues.

Stay in God’s Word, even if only in small increments. God’s Word is the power you have to speak over lies. God’s Word is literally like an arsenal. It can detonate strongholds, just so long as we believe in the words and through faith activate them.

Ask for help. Seek prayer, support from others and maintain a connective community as a lifestyle where you can hear from others in a similar battle as your own. Isolation is where all strongholds are formed.

A Prayer to Overcome Strongholds

Father God,

Help me to overcome the power of the lies I harbored, protected and listened to as my truth. Show me where lies have taken ownership of my heart. I submit myself to you so you can shine light into the darkness, and you can expel the tactics of the evil one. I choose to take hold of the weapon of truth. Make me hungry and thirsty for your Word – and help me to not only read your Word, but let it become my nature – who I am. Claim my heart to be a safe haven to your Truth, and protect that Truth at all costs. I cast out the lie that ____________________ and I replace it with the truth that ___________________.

In Jesus name – Amen

 

Read more about God and Addiction

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Surrender

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A true brokenness is a divine appointment only God can orchestrate. Through various situations, God is pleading with us to realize our helplessness and thus realize our need for Him. When this occurs, it gives us the ability to transfer control. When and if we are ready to surrender, we must take two basic transactions:

-Die to self. What does that mean? We choose to cease control. We choose to strip off our own defense mechanisms and strategies of battle, recognizing that we are losing the war. THe death of self is not the death of our God given destiny, identity, personality and giftedness. It’s the death of our self-will (flesh) that is programmed to meet needs independent of God.

-Ask God to take control of our life. That means we no longer call the shots based on our own needs, perceptions, survival strategies, and so forth. Instead, we let God call the shots for us. We allow Him to lead and guide us into His ultimate plan and purpose for our life.

While this sounds simple enough, it can be a fierce internal struggle. By nature, we are prone to be in a mode of self-survival and self-defense. Being asked to abandon those strategies, admit defeat and truly surrender can leave us with a complete sense of vulnerability. So what would motivate us to do such a thing?

John 12:24-26 provides a summary of the purpose and goal of true surrender. (Bracket’s enclose author’s words for emphasis).

“I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies (our self-will), it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels – a plentiful harvest of new lives (a life surrendered). Those who love their life in this world will lose it (those who choose to live independently of God). Those who care nothing for their life in this world will keep it for eternity (those who give God control). Anyone who wants to be my disciple must follow me, because my servants must be where I am. And the Father will honor anyone who serves me.”

Through this scripture, we learn that ultimately the entire destination of our lives rests upon our willingness to die to self so Christ can live through us. Living for God brings amazing blessings – the access to all God’s resources and an endless supply of His love, mercy, grace and power.

 

-Christian Codependence Workbook, ©New Life Spirit Recovery

 

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Honor and Recovery

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God’s love honors us. To honor is to assign value and preciousness as prescribed by the Beholder. Honor isn’t based on what we do or even the contents we carry internally. Honor is imputed to us by the God that both created us and redeemed us. God’s honor means the price and value of our life is high. For God to honor us is the highest position we will ever carry in this world. Kings and queens; presidents and diplomats are honored by the standards of this world; we are honored by the King of Kings and Lord and Lords. There simply is no greater privilege.

When we enter into healing, we can easily misinterpret God’s intents if we don’t understand honor drives the essence of everything He does. Through honor, God meets us where we are at and loves us without conditions. Before commanding we change or barging into our world to tell us what’s wrong; He tenderly injects Himself in our pain and perspective. It’s vital we know that God does this first, lest we can mistake His actions as a rejection of who we are at the moment.

God doesn’t speak down to us as though we are wretched, or dirty or defective. He loves us in the broken places and sees our value far surpassing the adjustment that needs to be made. Through honor, God allows us to feel, to hurt, to have needs, and to be where we are. In essence, He doesn’t ask us to come up to His level. He drops down and sits in the pits of our life situations with us.

Most of us will enter seasons in our life when we don’t want someone to fix us; we want someone to hear our heart. This is very much a human need, and God knows that need more than anyone. The challenge that arises is that in our pit we typically surround ourselves with faulty messaging and toxic mindsets that will destroy our inner world. The injuries we carry at a heart level can create filters that wrongly judge the situation and circumstances. We can have misplaced intimacy and misguided insights into relational principles. Thus, should God leave us where we are without offering us a redemptive tool, it wouldn’t be love at all. He will challenge us to make the choice to heal in the midst of our awareness of what’s wrong – but not because He won’t accept us and love us exactly how we are. But because He calls us to more. He calls us to freedom and wholeness in Him. He calls us into a relationship with people that allow us to give and receive love as He intended.

He loves us too much to enable us to stay in the pit and create that as our own “normal”. But the ability to leave the pit will always, always be activated through the choices we make. People will try to fix us in the pit; but only God owns the tools of redemption. And because God honors us; He lets us make a choice. We can stay in the pit if we choose.

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Uprooting old systems

Looking at rooted issues in life may seem backwards but the roots drive what is happening in the here and now.

“Most of us are unaware of how deep our methods of self-protection and survival run. We often developed unhealthy roots that have dug down and formed internal mindsets that dictated the way we see life, relationships, and our identity. As we grow, life experiences drive these roots deeper and produce wrongful fruits: fear, anger, discord, bitterness, drinking, drugs, codependency, love addiction, anxiety, inferiority, depression, people pleasing are merely fruits. As we are driven further away from our ordained purpose by harmful behaviors and emotions, we lose touch with the nature of God’s redemptive heart, and the perspective He houses toward us.

Many times, we want to change our “fruit” without the comprehension of how deep that fruit links with the rooted system. We, in essence, want to plant over areas in our lives with the “good stuff” we hope to attain, only to continually experience failure. Not understanding that we can’t plant something new where deeper rooted systems were already formed, we wrongly conclude that healthy growth is impossible or that we are stuck in our circumstances with no way out. Misunderstanding the nature of God’s love and the power He claims on our behalf, we do not walk with the authority to overcome; but we live as though we are spiritual paupers – having a Heavenly Father, but being unable to live under His promises.

It’s not that God can’t emerge us into our design, but rather that we need to uproot sometimes before that positive growth can occur. Looking at the rooted issues in our life may seem backwards, but it drives what is happening in the here and now. You can chop the fruit off a tree, but until it’s roots are eliminated, it will continue to grow back. So it is with the “fruit” we eliminated in our own lives.

While looking at roots is imperative, it’s not enough. God calls us out of bondage by speaking vision, destiny, and purpose into our lives. He gives us a picture of our potential; much like viewing the eventual fruit meant to be harvested from a tiny seed. So just as God comes to uproot, He comes to plant you into your original design. God never paints a picture of our future with doom and gloom; He has a redemptive scope on our life. God may not immediately change or fix what’s wrong; but He places His grace on to our situation and somehow, someway, He can resurrect life and goodness in the very places of pain and destruction. “
Thrive, Spirit of Life Recovery

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Breakdown of the Natural and Spiritual life:

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When we seek spiritual solutions to life’s problems, we need to understand how to navigate between the earthly realities we face, and the heavenly perspective God offers. This is typically where things break down. We are in fact human beings, living in a human world and subjected to the cruel realities of life’s imperfections and pain. We can know what the Bible says, but feel unable to make that into a way of life. Thus, there is a dramatic separation between the natural circumstances of our lives, and the spiritual realities of the Word of God. When we are unable to tap into the spiritual resources of God’s power, the natural circumstances are dominant, and our natural coping mechanisms quickly follow suit. Not only that, we begin to seek the cultural ideas of a true solution, negating and invalidating the power God offers to us as His children. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to have a deeper understanding of our problems, and use resources that address our needs as human beings. We want to remain relevant and real. But at the end of the day, the natural, what we see with our eyes, was created from the spiritual, God’s Kingdom. Jesus is the Creator of all life, and because He possesses authorship, He is the ONLY one qualified to change us. We find this is in Colossians 1:15-17:

Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation, for through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see-such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him. He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together.

The essence of our being is spiritual because we were created by a spiritual God with a spiritual purpose. We are not trying to take our human experiences and add God to it. Quite the contrary, we need to unravel our human experience and give it spiritual dominion. From there we can begin to place remedies that are both practical and spiritual according to God’s designs.

In the natural realm, there is very little we can do to change our circumstances, much less our hearts. Despite our best efforts, we do not possess the rightful ingredients to take us into our God prescribed destiny. Not to mention that we are at war with our own flesh, the corrupt world system and a demonic agenda set to destroy God’s purposes. This is why natural weapons won’t work. Even education in and of itself won’t be enough. The outcome of our lives rests completely on the choices we make moment to moment to walk with God or rely on our own resources. Our actions will either be a reaction in our natural, or a response to the Spirit of God living inside us.

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Whoever shapes your choices determines your destiny

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“The essence of God’s love to us is expressed through free will. God gave us the incredible gift of choice that allows us to decide how to interact with Him and others. Had God not offered us this relational style, we’d be enslaved to Him by force. We’d be like pre programmed machines used to perform a function rather than engage intimately and through love. Therefore, while God desires that we give Him control, He makes it optional. He is a leader who respects His followers and doesn’t “cram” Himself down their throats.
When God isn’t in control, a human system takes His place of authority. In fact, when we aren’t allowing God to be in control, it often means we are in the operating seat. Or we may have allowed someone or something else to make decisions on our behalf. Human-controlled structures will always bring damage. That’s because human beings could never offer the resources God Almighty provides! Even the most well-intentioned human lacks the wisdom, pure love and power to act on our behalf. Imagine comparing the strength of a gnat with that of a lion.-there is no comparison! Comparing human strength with God’s power is insanely ridiculous. God is the Potter; we are the clay. The clay can’t independently grow in beauty and design unless it is allowed to be shaped by the Maker.”
-Christian Families in Recovery