“Step 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God, as we understood God.”

1. We admitted we were powerless...over our dependencies- that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe...that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. We made a decision…to turn our will and our life over to the care of God as we understood him.

We admitted we were powerless; we came to believe; we made a decision.

It is my hope that you are beginning to see, even if you have never heard the Twelve Steps talked about before, that there is a spirituality here that is embraceable by everyone. These steps are a way of growing our awareness of God, of ourselves, of our relationship to all of Creation.

The faith we have, the faith that any believer anywhere has in a power greater than themselves involves a decision. It may be an easy decision, a decision that rises from living in an environment where a loving, gracious, and good God has been taught about, thought about, and is easily perceived. I share with you the belief that the Jesus of the gospels, enables our faith to grow in such an environment. I share with you the belief that following Jesus, from the moment we decide to so, allows us to discover and begin to live in the Kingdom of God on earth. And I share with you the belief that following Jesus- following his examples, his teachings, his will- bears much more good fruit in my life and for the world- than does anything I can conjure up out of my own will. Those shared beliefs make it possible for us to act in faith, to pattern and plan our actions and our lives after someone who has shown the way, the truth, and the life.

But those shared beliefs that bring us together under this one roof this morning are not the beliefs of many people. And that makes this decision to turn one’s will and life over to God a very, very difficult one for those many people.

Let me explain that by looking at a few verses from Deuteronomy, one the books of the Law of the Hebrew Bible. It’s Deuteronomy 30: 15-20. As I read it, connect the dots in your mind as you react to these words. Think about how they make you feel toward the God who is speaking them. Moses is remembering these words of God as he remembers the covenant relationship established by God with the people of Israel who are, at this time, still wandering in the desert, but about to cross over, after forty years, into the promised Land.

15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

19 This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

If you heard and focused on the words of “life and prosperity” being spoken, along with the promise that in choosing to love and follow God “you will live and increase, and the Lord will bless you,” then the reasons you are here today have almost surely come naturally and comfortably. You’re reasons for wanting to be here with a community you care about and that cares about you are the compelling ones which got you up on a day you could have slept in, or gone to the lake, or even headed for a mall somewhere.

I hope no one here is here based on the fear of God if you don’t show up. I hope that you heard the words that God was speaking about the destruction which comes to a people who choose to live outside these commands of God, but I hope those admonitions- those threatened trips to a heavenly woodshed out back- are not the motivating factors in your being here- in your decision to turn your will and your life over to God.

But we all know that that is the case for many people in many churches, and for many who have turned their lives over to the fear based teachings of fast-talking Svengalis and Rasputins. In other words, I pray that you are motivated more by wanting to follow Jesus, than by any fears of what might happen if you don’t follow Jesus.

The trouble is, fear is a powerful motivator, and- this is very particular to American Christianity- fear has replaced love in getting many people to church and into a relationship with God. Fear of what other people might think, fear of financial and family failure, and fear of damnation, of the eternal fire and brimstone being stoked even at this moment for all those who fail to squeeze through the oh-so-narrow gates of an angry, coercive, faraway God.

Now many people who grow up with that fear bearing down on them for the first sixteen or seventeen years of their life make a mad dash for the exit as soon as they have a set of car keys and enter into the only alternative world they can see at that point- the illusionary land of freedom where anything goes. Or, even if someone has had no religious or spiritual training at all, the alternative of a loving God, a caring Jesus, is all but invisible. The last Christians they saw on TV were those despicable members of the Westover Baptist Church of Wichita, Kansas protesting at the funeral of a soldier by holding up “God Hates Fags” posters. (By the way, those jerks from Westover Baptist have no relation whatsoever to any Baptist church you know! They are a one family, fear-based cult, but the media loves them, because they feed so many preconceptions of what Christianity is all about.)

But imagine someone coming from either of those scenarios, someone who has come to the realization that their life has become unmanageable for whatever reason, and who have tentatively begun believing that only a Power greater than themselves is ever going to get them out of the mess they are in, imagine such a person now wrestling with the decision to turn their will and their life over to the care of God. God? That angry big guy in the sky who is just waiting for me to mess up again, and who already has my name on an invitation to hell? God? That “loving” God who allowed my dad to beat my mother, that “caring” God who took away my baby brother, that God of the bullies at school, that God of the holier than thou neighbor man who made me promise never to tell anyone- that God? Get outta here!

Here’s where those four words at the end of Step Three become so important: “We made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God as we understood God.” But as important as those words are, something has had to have happened to make a new understanding, however small, possible. And that something is someone: it’s us.

It’s us, second of all, who are sitting around that God-shaped table at a Twelve Step meeting. We’ve been where that person is sitting over there, fighting through the life-saving, life-affirming, life-changing decisions and conclusions he or she has come to so far. All we can do- which is everything and the most important thing we can do, is share our stories: our stories of admitting we were powerless, of coming to believe, and of making a decision. All we can do, is offer those stories in love, in testimony, and in gratitude. All we can do is be the love that person has missed so far, at home, or in school, or at church, or in life. We can accept that person for who they are, despite what they are, maybe for the first time in that person’s life, ever. We can be welcoming like the God as we understand God is welcoming. Any one at one of those meetings is willing to be called upon in the middle of the night or day by that new decision maker for words of strength or encouragement, or even a ride home from the bar, because we know the God of second, third, fourth, and fifteenth chances.

But even before the “us” of that Twelve Step table, that person who is getting ready, getting strong enough to make the most important decision of his/her life, that person has had to encounter someone else- the first “us”- the rest of us. And that can be any of us.

There is not a person who has ever sat down for the first time at a Twelve Step table; there is not a person anywhere in the world today who has made a decision to follow God, who has not first encountered one of us. A person may claim to have been knocked off a horse on the road to Damascus, or to have had a one-on-one encounter with the Holy Spirit all by themselves, but I guarantee there was some one, some person, some one of us, that helped make that encounter possible. Some one prepared the way of the Lord, which is all that John the Baptist claimed to have done by the way. Some one had to model the grace of God to us, some one had to demonstrate to us, in a way that made us curious enough to want to know more about the one-sided love of God and God’s people for us, even us. Some one had to kick some the rocks and hurdles of fear and judgment and prejudice that clutter the way to God, out of the way. Some one had to demonstrate that the following of Jesus is a joyful, not a fearful, journey.

Only then were our own on-going encounters with God’s Holy Spirit able to begin. Only then, will anyone who needs to, find their way to a Twelve Step table and community. Only then, does the decision to be whole, for any of us, maybe for the first time ever, begin.

That’s why we must always be on, be ready, and be willing to point the way, to demonstrate God’s love for another. It may be loving someone so much that you must lock them out of the house. It may mean sitting with them during that first uncomfortable and embarrassing meeting. It may mean going to meetings all by yourself so you can learn what it is your loved one is facing. It may simply be being the only person in years who has shown the respect due a beloved child of God with a hug, or an ear, or a little time.

Hear now, finally, these words of God as spoken by the prophet Isaiah. Hear them with the fierce, unbounded desire that God has for each person who has lost their way, who has been afraid to come too close, or who is so ashamed that they feel God would want nothing to do with them. Some selected verses from Isaiah 54:

4 "Do not be afraid; you will not suffer shame.
Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated.
You will forget the shame of your youth

6 The LORD will call you back
as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit—
a wife who married young,
only to be rejected," says your God.

7 "For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with deep compassion I will bring you back.

8 In a surge of anger
I hid my face from you for a moment,
but with everlasting kindness
I will have compassion on you,"
says the LORD your Redeemer.

That’s God the Redeemer’s final word to each person, each addict, each of us: “With everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you.” It is God’s final word that we, each of us, can know and see demonstrated in the life of Jesus. It is the word which the world, some of us more desperately than others, needs to hear. And it is through us- the first us- through our actions and words and demonstrations of God’s everlasting kindness, through which God speaks to the world today.

Next week, Steps 4 and 5:

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

This is where we must get out the acetylene torch and hack saw, and start cutting through chain links. This is where learn what Jesus meant when he said, “I have come to set the captives free.”

Bring a friend.

Amen