Work the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous with a biblical worldview in mind. Find series resources at https://www.pursuegod.org/steps-to-recovery-series.

Speaker 2 00:00:38 Yeah. So, uh, step number one was, um, we admitted that we were powerless over our addictions and that our lives had become unmanageable. So this step two that we're coming to is, is now we faced that, we faced that idea of powerlessness, um, and now we need something. And so step two actually says, we come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

Speaker 3 00:02:06 Yeah. I've heard, uh, people use the acronym g o d, which is, if you don't have a God, just use good orderly direction, right? And so some kind of feeling or sense inside, some kind of moral sense inside that, what's the next right thing? Choose the next right thing. They used to always say that a lot. And, and so I think, yeah, the, the reality is, is that in the steps, the guys that created the steps, um, are believed to have come from a church and, and Christian background. And so a lot of, a lot of, in these steps, you'll see this, this higher power talk and God, God talk. And, um, it's, it's debatable who knows how much, how much, uh, faith they had or how Christian they really were. But, um, this is, this is something where they, they wanted to open it up, up to more than just church people.

Speaker 2 00:03:39 Yeah, I think that's exactly what it kind of comes down to. Um, it, it's making up your own, God. It's, it almost reminds me, um, as I think about the, the people that I met in some of these secular groups that really had no belief or faith in the God of the Bible that we believe in. And, and it's, it really just seemed like, it's like an imaginary friend and mm-hmm. . And it just comes down to, um, as I, for myself, um, I, I did do that, um, as a, as a younger person. Um, I was in a treatment center when I was 17 years old. And that's, that's pretty much what I did, was made up my own God in my own mind. And as I, as I got older and, um, these steps really didn't work for me. I realized why, um, that's because I didn't really discover who my higher power is, cuz the rest of the steps, they just don't work without, without really knowing who the higher power is. And so we've, we've learned through our lives, um, and through, through seeking truth that that is the god of the Bible. And so we just kind of cut right through, um, all of that and just say, our higher power is the God of the Bible.

Speaker 1 00:06:25 Yeah. You know what it reminds me of in Acts chapter, uh, I think it's Acts 17, is that where Paul is at the Acropolis and he's walking around in this, you know, Greco-Roman culture and, and their, you know, everyone's got their ideas. This is where the philosophers came and they said, Hey, here's my idea of God and here's my idea of God. Here's my, well one of those, one of those, I guess there was a statue or an altar to one of these gods that the, that was just an unknown God. And the inscription read something like to an unknown God. And basically the idea was that the philosophers were saying, look, we recognize in a polytheistic culture that Rome was, we recognize that we might have missed one , right? Mm-hmm. that we might have. What's interesting about that is there was a, there was a humility that acknowledged that they might have missed one.

Speaker 1 00:07:59 And so give it a shot. Give it a try. Because today we're gonna declare to you that God, we wanna show you who he is in God's word. And we do believe that that greater power can restore anyone to sanity and can, can be that missing link. And, and, and it, and it happened for you two guys, mark and Eric. It happened for me, not necessarily specifically with an addiction, but God's completely changed my life. I think he's actually spared me from addiction personally. I attribute that to God. I attribute that to the higher power cuz I've got a lot of addiction in my family. My, my dad grew up in it literally in a tavern. His grandpa, his, his father, my grandpa, uh, ran a tavern on the south side of Chicago. And so most of my, most of my extended family on that side of the family are alcoholics.

Speaker 4 00:09:29 Yeah, that's good. That's really good.

Speaker 2 00:09:57 Well, we can. I I mean, there is so much evidence, for the Bible. It's, it's been, it's been tested, you know, time and time and time again. And, and, and honestly, as time goes on, we're actually finding more and more evidence for the, the Bible being valid, for it being true. And so really what it comes down to, I think, you know, for me and for a lot of people, am I really willing to seek out truth? Mm-hmm. , do I really wanna discover truth? Because, you know, when I was younger, I, I really didn't, I wanted to make up my own idea of God. Because you know, if, if I, if I discover the validity of the Bible, and I know, and, and I come to know how, how true it is, now I'm accountable to that. Now I'm really accountable to, to the God of the Bible. And I think it's, it, it's, it's easier to make up my own God because then I can continue, uh, excusing certain behaviors and keep living, you know, certain ways that I want to live. So, uh, for me, I, I, I just, I think it, it came down to when I was desperate enough to really seek truth, I found it.

Speaker 1 00:11:56 I don't care if you've just determined you're gonna be an atheist and you are gonna be against, you're gonna be set against God. Jesus is saying, you will never know whether God's word is true, because the, it's, what it's saying is, if you're unwilling to submit, if you've already decided I'm unwilling to submit to God's will, your pursuit is over before it has even started. Mm-hmm. . But, but the other side of that is, if you're willing to come to God on his terms and take him at his word, then Jesus promises, you'll discover truth, which I think means you'll also understand that God's word really is true and authoritative in our lives, right? Mm-hmm. . And so I love that passage again, go read it for yourself, uh, to the listeners, John seven versus 16 and 17, I think it talks about the kind of the preconceived notions that you come to the Bible with.

Speaker 3 00:13:21 Yeah. You know, one of my favorite definitions for humility is being teachable. Okay? And so, um, to be teachable means that you're gonna admit that you don't know everything. But, but so you can, there's things for you to learn and someone out there can teach you. And, and we're saying that, uh, the Bible and Christianity can teach you about this spiritual life that the steps they're talking about, but don't actually get to. And that's why we're looking at the steps with a, a biblical worldview, right? Th th this is the idea of being open-minded is saying, I don't know everything. I need to quit being so stubborn and, and, and say, okay, this, and this is how it happened for me, really was I grew up in, in a Christian home and I had a zeal for God. And, but then as I grew older, I kind of, I fell away and fell into my own passions and living worldly and into my addiction and everything.

Speaker 3 00:15:14 Um, but, you know, go going back to the premise of, you know, why can we trust the Bible? Um, there, and, and you guys have brought up evidence. Um, but first you gotta come to it in humility, right? Being teachable, being willing. You have to admit that you're broken enough to say, look, all the ways I've tried, everything I've believed in has got me where I am today. And so what do I have to lose to pursue God, honestly? Mm-hmm. , I've almost lo most people are in a place where they've lost everything. What do you have to lose to go and pursue God? Yeah. Right. You know, that's good. And so, so we look at the Bible and yes, there is a lot of evidence. We have a, a, you know, in, uh, what topic is it in? Pursue God, topic two, right? Yeah, that's right. Topic two in the pursuit, um, on pursue god.org is, is why the Bible? Why do we trust the Bible? There's historical evidence, arche archeological evidence. There's, uh, you know, manuscript evidence, you know, dead Sea Scrolls, all of that that we can get into. It's, it's, it's pretty fun stuff. If you're kind of geeky about it.

Speaker 1 00:17:04 And those stacks aren't even gonna be close. The, the evidence to, to me, you can't prove faith. Faith is not provable. Any faith isn't provable. Right? But to me, there is, it is. So, I'm so convinced that God's word is reliable and accurate and that we can trust, we can go to God's word, which is a good thing, cuz otherwise what is, what do we have our, our word, our opinion. Mm-hmm. . So it's so nice to know that God's word, which has been around for thousands of years, really stacks up. And here's a few things. Let's talk about historical evidence. Ancient manuscripts and archeological digs have stacked up in favor of biblical reliability. So here's how manuscripts work, okay? Um, when I say a manuscript fragment, we're talking about, um, writings from, uh, you know, ancient writings from a long, long, long, long time ago, right?

Speaker 1 00:18:49 I don't know. I'm not really up on all the archeological digs in the last few years, but let's say 49 copies. All right? The next one is doing better. Homer's The ID is one of the best in terms of ancient writing. It's one of the best out there. They have 643 copies in existence of homers. The id I remember reading that in high school. Okay, so 643 copies of that. That's pretty good. I mean, to think that they went through that, that's a lot of copies of that, of homer's writing. But consider now the New Testament. The New Testament has almost 5,700 Greek copies in existence. And we're just talking about Greek copies. So we go from the second best on the list. The silver medal goes to Homer's Iliad at 6 43. And the New Testament wins the gold at 5,700. That's crazy to me. And that's just Greek copies. If you think about all the other languages, air, Aramaic and Hebrew, whatever, Latin over 19,000 copies in other languages. So it's not even close when you look at the manuscript evidence. The Bible really is reliable. Now, go ahead, mark. Did you wanna say something?

Speaker 1 00:20:49 Yeah. So, Eric, what were the Dead Sea Scrolls and how does that, how does that fit into this, you know, proving the reliability of that manuscript evidence? Can you explain that to us?

Speaker 1 00:21:04 Your 47.

Speaker 1 00:22:54 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, what's interesting is when they, when those Deads Sea scrolls were first found, um, non, non-Christian pundits said, oh, this is gonna finally take down Christianity. They said, when we, when we fi finally figure this out and dig into this, we're gonna see how much the text has changed, right? Because the oldest copies of, say for example, Isaiah that we had before the Dead Sea Scrolls that we discovered in 1947, the oldest copies were 800 ad mm-hmm. . That's a lot. That's 800 ad that's 800 years. I mean, that's, well, that's even more than that. Cuz Isaiah was written in the, you know, 800 BC so that's 15, 1600 years. So that's, yeah. You know, I think it's legitimate to say, how do we know that it didn't change over all that time? So think about that. The, the mare tech that we had for Isaiah 800 AD and then the Dead Sea Scrolls were dated back the, the, the scroll of Isaiah, which we have almost the full scroll of Isaiah.

Speaker 3 00:25:10 Yeah. I would say it even, you know, the, the other way around. If, if God is powerful enough to create the world and be able to, you know, be sovereign over his creation, then he's also powerful enough to preserve the scriptures. You know, if, if we believe there's a creator and he had that power, then certainly has enough power to protect a book. Right.

Speaker 3 00:25:33 Brother and a soul. Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:26:33 You know, he was persecuting Christians and wanted to destroy that movement mm-hmm. and for him to, to become such a different person. I mean, he was so full of hate mm-hmm. really, and, and I mean, he's going and hunting Christians down to, to preaching First Corinthians about love. Mm. I mean the, the things that Paul says about love. And that right there is, is an example of changed lives. But, but for me, I, I remember personally, um, at, when I, when I came to step one, when I really admitted my powerlessness, and I started looking at this kind of step two here, um, I started thinking about the people I knew who had faith. I knew that they had faith in the God of the Bible. And there was just something that just started to click as I started to think about these people. And, and that, that right there, it, it's, that's just further evidence.

Speaker 1 00:28:14 I think God wants to set people free. Um, yeah. So that personal evidence is, is huge. I mean, think about this, the, the 12, the 11 disciples, Judas is dead at this point. He'd hung himself. Um, after you betrayed Jesus, Jesus goes to the cross, what happens? They all bail on him. Mm-hmm. , I guess the beloved disciple, John was the only one who was there at the crucifixion. So one out of 12 is even there. And, and you know, Peter Deni famously denies him three times. Everybody else scatters. Everybody is just scared. And I mean, I'm not trying to point fingers, maybe I would've done the same thing, but, but what happened that every one of the, except for, except for John who died of natural, natural causes and was exiled to the island of Patmos, where he wrote the book of Revelation, aside from him, every single other disciple of Jesus ends up dying for the cause. So what happened? What, what happened between when they bailed on him, when he went to the cross and died on the cross, to now within years, within gener, within months or years, they all end up not just following him and preaching the message and starting the church in his name, but dying for that faith when they wouldn't even stand by his side when Jesus was dying. What could have possibly happened in those three days? Eric, do you have any suggestions for what might have happened? Well,

Speaker 3 00:30:40 You know, they go and turn the world upside down. So much so that if you look at world history and you look at the way that things operate just all over in the world, even how we keep track of time and our calendars and all that type of stuff, it is all centered around the, you know, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. You know, the holidays that we celebrate. And so certainly Jesus made a huge impact on the world, um, you know, practically that we can see. It's, it's tangible. One more thing, cuz we were gonna quit being geeky. It seemed like you guys were getting to the more, you know, the feelings and emotional parts, , I just wanted to be one more, one more quick thing. Okay. And then we can move on from the Bible. I mean, we, we don't have enough time to tell you everything about the Bible, but just some more numbers is, you know, the Bible is 40 different authors mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 00:32:23 And so let's talk about that Jesus, because Jesus is that higher, well God, let's say God. And really God is, you'll have to, people have to listen to our Trinity podcast if you wanna learn more about how God is one being and yet three persons, God the Father, God the Son, Jesus God, the Holy Spirit, and God is our higher power. But specifically, let's talk about the person of Jesus. Uh, because again, I think it's really important for, for listeners to hear this. If you want to have, if you want to tap into that higher power, who can save you from your addiction. Let's go back to the ancient teachings about Jesus. There are five teachings in the early church on the person and work of Jesus. You can find this in the New Testament book of Acts chapter 10. And let's just go through these kind of one by one guys. And I want you to apply these statements to men and women who are struggling with addiction. The first statement, I think this was Peter who preached this message, Peter said this, there is peace with God through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all, there's peace with God. Why do we need peace with God? Doesn't God just love everybody? Aren't we just all God's children? Why do we need peace with God?

Speaker 3 00:34:45 Yeah. We, like you said, you know, we, we sinned against God. We, we went, turned our backs on him. Right. And, and so as I said before, God created the world, but we, we fell away and we went, wanted to go our own way, trust our own opinions, our own ideas. That's what sin is. Um, we became, the Bible says enemies of God. Right. And so we're at war with God in our, our sinful nature where we're wanting to live however we want. We're at war with his words, with the way he wants us to live. We're at war with him. And so that word peace there, you know, I think what he's getting to is that we are all, um, you know, kind of stuck in, in this place of we're gonna have to face our opponent at the end of, at the end, end of the day, we're gonna be, be judged. And why not settle for the peace treaty, right. The peace treaty that he sent when he sent his son. He's saying, I can, I can take care of all this. Uh, there is peace for you in, in Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 00:36:36 After several weeks? Yeah. . Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:37:07 Not at all. No. Yeah. Our addictions, you know, while we're talking about our relationship with God here, man, they affect all of our relationships. There is absolute chaos in every relationship in our lives it seems because of , because we're not at peace even with ourselves. Right? Yeah. And, and so it just trickles into everything.

Speaker 1 00:38:14 So now, but it's gotta start with that peace, with that higher power is that we get right with God first and then we can actually get right with ourselves and we can get right with the people around us. Mm-hmm. . But it, that relationship with God is more important than most people understand. Two more things. Okay. So that's the first teaching is about about peace. The second we're gonna kind of jump through the jump past these second two teachings from Acts chapter 10. Second thing Peter says is that Jesus went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil. Okay? So what he's trying to, what Peter's trying to do is to say, I want to re, I want to make sure that you understand who Jesus was while he walked on this earth. Probably most listeners have a sense for that mm-hmm.

Speaker 3 00:39:37 Mm-hmm. and, and that death on the cross, just, you know, to be clear, and I think we'll talk about it again next week, but just understanding that that's what gives us that, that peace, first and foremost, it wasn't just Jesus coming, but it was actually the sacrifice of him dying. That cross was something that he didn't deserve. He lived a sinless life. He did not deserve to go die on that cross, but he took our place, the place in which we deserve. We deserve death for all of our sin. He took our place and he exchanged his, his righteousness for our sin. That, that day when he hung on that cross. And that is why it is important that we believe in Jesus. We need that exchange with God, right? Yeah. That's,

Speaker 1 00:41:17 He was put in a rich man's grave. Mm-hmm. , which is what happened. And I love what verse 10 says. It was the Lord's good plan to crush him, to cause him grief. Yet when his life has made an offering for sin, he'll have many descendants. He will enjoy a long life, and the Lord's good plan will prosper in his hands. That's a prophecy about his resurrection. Mm-hmm. . So here, Isaiah 53, prophesize, which again is more proof, this is textual proof that the Bible is true, is you've got prophecies like this that get fulfilled like to the detail 800 years later in the person of Jesus Christ. And the point, the the point to all of that is again, that, that the word God's word can be trusted. But even more than that is God's son can be trusted Jesus in what he did because he died on the cross, he rose from the dead. And then the fourth thing that Peter says in his sermon, and this is connected, he says, Jesus is the appointed one by God to be the judge of all the living and the dead. I think this is a message a lot of churches miss nowadays, that God is going to judge us. We are going to be judged for our sins. But the, again, the good news is like you said, Eric, Jesus paid for those sins on the cross, but only for those who would trust in him.

Speaker 1 00:42:38 Will have their sins forgiven through His name, through

Speaker 2 00:43:24 Yeah. I, I think, you know, for me, when I really came to understand the truth of, of Jesus' death and resurrection and, and it, it started to hit home for me because I was so oppositional to Christianity. I was so oppositional to Jesus. And, and what the Bible says is, yeah, he, but he still died for me even when I was mm-hmm. his enemy when I wanted nothing to do with him, Jesus still died for me. And, and for somebody to, to love me that much on a personal basis, that's, that is who I want judging me at the end because I'll come to him and say, you're right. Yes, I I am guilty. Mm-hmm. , I am guilty, but thank you for what you did for me. And you know, he, he just, he takes that burden, that burden away.

Speaker 1 00:45:06 And so Jesus, not just some light bulb above your head, Jesus is the higher power step number two, we come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore a insanity. And our contention and your stories bear this out, Eric and Mark, our contention is that greater power is Jesus the God of the Bible. And in the next lesson, in step number three, for anyone who hasn't done that, we're gonna give people an opportunity. We're gonna talk about, okay, well how do I, how do I hand that over to him? How do I, how do I trust in Jesus? You know what, Peter was preaching about an Acts chapter 10 at the end of the day. He said, turn to Jesus, turn to Jesus and he'll set you free. And so for people maybe who have never done that before, we're gonna get into that in the next lesson.