AA

The Serenity Prayer

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 2 Comments

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen” (Reinhold Neibuhr).

Most people know this prayer, at least in part. Those who have been through Alcoholics Anonymous or some other kind of recovery program know this prayer very well.

I’m not attending AA, but I think this prayer speaks to my heart and to where I am at the moment.

My idea of happiness is that the world I live in will always be as I would have it and that I could obtain that supreme happiness in the here and now. It almost never involves hardship or suffering of any kind.

This prayer reminds me once again that it’s not about me. This life and this world don’t revolve around me and my wants and needs. However, I can make a difference both in my life and in the lives of those around me.

I’m still getting better and living one day at a time and enjoying one moment at a time. It seems my automatic default is to want to hurry on to the next season of life, which currently for me is fall and cooler temperatures.

This prayer teaches me to see things as they are, to step out of my fantasies and my dreams into the world that is, yet to not resign myself to it. By living in it as it is and being wise to know where I can make a difference, I do my very small part to make the world better than it is.

I think the two key words that are jumping off the page at me tonight are trust and surrender. If I can grab hold of those two concepts and really let them sink into my DNA, then I believe the rest of this prayer will follow.

May this be our prayer going forward to see that if there is to be any change in the world we live in, it must and will begin in each of us.

 

 

 

A Great Definition of Repentence

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

“Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged” (J. I. Packer).

That’s it. I think for the longest time I figured that repentance was turning away from what I was doing wrong. It was ceasing to sin.

That’s only half the story. As a friend of mine once told me, you turn away from a sinful behavior, but you also turn toward something positive to replace the old bad habit.

Otherwise you end up like the man in the parable told by Jesus who had been possessed but did nothing to fill the void. He ended up worse off than he was before.

If you don’t replace the sinful behavior with a good and godly discipline, you will simply replace it with another bad or worse habit. The best example that comes to mind is the people at an AA meeting who are chain-smoking. They gave up one habit only to replace it with another.

As my pastor says often, repentance isn’t beating yourself up. It isn’t feeling bad about what you’ve done. It’s like driving in your car one way, doing a 180, and driving the other way. You turn from sin to God.

The older I get, the more I see how much I need to repent from. I also see that even my repentance is a gift from God. I see that God isn’t hovering over me, ready to berate me for my foolish behavior and poor choices. He’s wanting me to claim my true identity not as a sinner but as a child of God.

The more I see myself the way God does, the more I live out of victory instead of defeat. The more I live out of grace and obedience instead of sin and despair.