This Week In Recovery Lesson
Brainwashed from the Inside Out
Step Three says, “Made a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understood (came to believe in…) Him.”
This decision is predicated on the belief in a power greater than ourselves who can restore us to sanity. As we come to understand who we are in relation to who God is, the decision is remarkably sensible to turn our unmanageable lives—our mess—over to the ONLY ONE with the authority to renew and restore through His plan of surrendered recovery. It is so common sense that to decide anything else only adds to the insanity with our addiction to selfish obsessions.
When we come to understand how our brains work—selfish to the core—with automatic thoughts based on chemical reactions in the brain and central nervous system, fueling beliefs so irrational that they generate feelings that drive the kind of behavior willing to risk so much for instant gratification (reward), we do so most often at great cost. The result is loss: lost peace, lost hope, lost trust, lost love… lost life. I am often asked, “Why do I settle for that?” It is our nature. When we seek to know ourselves through an honest inventory of ourselves, hoping to identify the exact nature of what is wrong with us, the more our self examination breaks down to our deeply rooted selfishness. We can try this and try that to fix ourselves, but it’s like pulling weeds that break off but the roots are too deep and they always grow back, bigger and badder than ever.
We have taken the brain that God created in us to be good, and allowed evil to come in and spread like a cancer until we are rotten to the core in our selfish thoughts, beliefs, and behavior. How does that change. It changes when we come to believe that we are powerless to our selfish motivations and intentions, come to believe in what can and will do to wash our brains, transforming them into something new, and the commit daily to letting Him brainwash us since He has afforded us the opportunity to enter into relationship with Him as an act of our will.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:1-2 (NIV)
While God’s love for us is unconditional, the quality of relationship we have with God is conditional. This is evident throughout Scripture. Relationships always have a when-then quality to them. When one thing happens in relationship, then another thing happens in response. To experience the life of transformative recovery empowered in relationship with God, we need to be about the when in the relationship. God will then change us into something new.
There is what we do in this transformative relationship, and there is what God does. What we do is offer our bodies to God sacrificially with our actions–our behavior. It is what we do with our eyes and our ears. It is what we do with what goes in and what comes out of our mouths. It is what we reach for with our arms and hold on to with our hands. It is where we go with our legs and where we stay with our feet (Romans 12:1). It is with our bodies that we give in to selfish urges and fall into addictive patterns, and it is with our bodies that we quit giving in to them.
There is what we do from the outside in when we offer ourselves sacrificially to God by the way we behave with our bodies. Then there is what God does in us from the inside out to completely transform us by the full renewing of our minds—literally rearranging our brain chemistry so as to empower us to live better and to think and feel healthier. God exchanges our desires and intentions with His desires and intentions. We then can resist self-centered addictive urges through the power of prayer and actually live in freedom, proving that God’s plan for us is perfect and beautiful. (Romans 12:1-2)
“That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or, they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines in it.” —C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
- What would you say it means in Romans 12:2 to be transformed by the renewing of your mind?
- What is your reaction to a relationship with God being conditional?
- How might the notion of relationship with God being conditional conflict with the truth of Romans 8:38-39, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord”?
- What might you say about mothers and fathers who love their children unconditionally even though their sons and daughters have rejected engaging in relationship with them?
- How would you say that receiving the best of what God wants and has for us is similar to parents wanting to bless their children with the best of what they have and can do for them?
- How is the promise of blessing that parents have for their children conditional on the quality of relationships they have with them?
- How might the promise of blessing we can receive from God be conditional on how we choose to live our lives, whether have desire or have apathy to engage in quality relationship with Jesus Christ?
- What would you say it means in Romans 12:1 to offer your living body sacrificially to God as a condition to being restored into something new?
- What does it mean to not give in to the patterns of the world?
- What would you say if it is true that the quality of the blessing you experience in your life is conditional on investing into a quality relationship with Jesus?
- How might the wonderful C.S. Lewis quote above have meaning for you?
Please refer now to TWRAC 038 for This Week’s Recovery Application Challenge.
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