Rev. David Holwick ZJ Spiritual Recovery series
First Baptist Church Steps 10 & 11
Ledgewood, New Jersey [well-received]
November 25, 2001
1 Timothy 4:15-16
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Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong
promptly admitted it.
Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious
contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for
knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
I. How transparent are you?
A. Dictionary on "transparent": Free from guile; candid or open.
1) Nothing to hide, completely authentic.
2) Many who have attended recovery group meetings notice the
brutal honesty of what is shared.
3) Churches are often seen to be different.
a) We put more stock in appearances than reality.
b) This is why many in recovery movement never join church.
4) We need to get rid of the phoniness.
B. Salvation is an event and a process.
1) We like to focus on the event.
a) For alcoholics, their final drink. (or last one...)
b) For Christians, the time they became saved.
1> It affects us once-and-for-all.
2) The process is where our attention should be.
a) How far have you come as a Christian?
b) Where are weak areas in your personality or faith?
C. Steps 10 and 11 recognize the continuing nature of salvation.
1) It is not enough to know something has happened.
2) You have to KEEP it happening & move on from where you are.
II. Sinners for life.
A. We must continue to take inventory.
1) Alcoholics never consider themselves fully recovered.
2) Even apparently strong Christians can fall.
B. It is a lifelong process, like salvation.
1) We never outgrow it.
a) There are always new things to learn.
2) We never "graduate" until we die.
a) So where are all the students?
C. Paul tells young Timothy to be diligent about his growth. 4:15
1) Other people should be able to see his progress.
2) He is to put effort into it.
III. Humility - admit shortcomings and errors.
A. Watch life and doctrine closely.
1) It is always possible for us to be wrong.
a) (This is why Baptists believe in pluralism)
2) When we are wrong, admit it.
a) People respect this kind of honesty.
b) One of the truest marks of transparency.
B. Persevere.
1) Don't let your imperfections defeat you.
2) Continue to strive even when you have blown it.
IV. Improve contact with God through prayer.
A. The Christian roots of 12 Steps are clearest in step 11:
"Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious
contact with God ..."
1) Focus is on relationship with God, not just sobriety.
2) God must be more than a solution to our specific problems.
B. If we seek God, we will find him.
1) You don't find what you don't seek.
a) Before high school, I had no interest in spirituality.
b) Christianity was only church - bleech!
2) When God awakened a desire in me, I struggled.
a) Many doubts about whether it was real.
b) And if it was, could I find it?
c) Disciplined study of the Bible convinced me.
C. We often associate seeking with our past.
1) Spiritual desire needs to be a continual concern.
2) We are seeking a God who wants to be found. Matt 7:7
3) What is the best way to seek him?
V. Prayer and meditation.
A. Prayer is central to personal recovery and Christian growth.
1) Continuation of step 11: "praying only for knowledge of His
will for us and the power to carry that out."
2) Bill Wilson encouraged praying each morning and night.
3) Serenity prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr was his favorite:
"God, grant me...
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference."
B. What prayer cannot do.
1) It cannot be an end in itself.
a) "Are You Running With Me, God?" book by Malcolm Boyd,
a liberal.
1> Prayer as a psychic pushup.
2> Nobody is listening, but it makes us feel better.
b) Many forms of mediation are limited to this.
2) It must grow beyond childishness (not childlike-ness).
Letter from a young person to God:
Dear God,
I think of you in my prayers.
Along with my mom and my dad, my sister Paula, my grandma,
my two grandpas, my aunt Jenie, my aunt Gloria, my uncle
Sid, my uncle Jack and my cousins Billy and Sherie.
I spend at least three minutes on you every night!
Love,
Terry, age 8
#2139
3. Spiritual checklist:
a) How is your marriage and other relationships?
b) How much progress are you making in personal holiness?
c) How is your time with God? Is there any?
C. What prayer can be - intimate contact with Almighty God.
1) Prayer is a two-way street.
2) We pour out our concerns to God. (see Psalms)
3) Through meditation, we hear his answers and encouragement.
VI. Seek God's will and power.
A. God's power cannot be stored.
The summer before I married Celeste, I stayed with my folks in
Colorado Springs.
The only job I could get was with ManPower, a temporary agency that
had me dig ditches, lay sod on soccer fields and recycle aluminum
cans.
At the end of the summer they got me something almost permanent:
a flunky at the city power plant.
While I cleared muck out of settling tanks, long trains from Wyoming
dumped carload after carload at the plant's storage area.
Bulldozers pushed it into mountains, and then funneled it onto long
conveyor belts.
From there stamping mills ground it as fine as flour and injected
the coal dust into huge furnaces.
These furnaces were the loudest things I ever heard.
And hot, too.
Their intense heat drove steam through turbines which spun at 3,600
revolutions per minute.
The turbines were housed in concrete-and-steel casings 100 feet
long, 10 feet tall, and 10 feet across.
They generated enough electricity for the whole city of 300,000.
A visitor to a power plant once asked the chief engineer, "Where do
you store the electricity?"
"We don't store it," the engineer replied "We just make it."
When a light switch is flipped on one hundred miles, it literally
places a demand on the system.
That small need registers at the generating plant and prompts
greater output.
In the same way, God's grace and power cannot be stored.
Though inexhaustible, they come in the measure required, at the
moment of need.
But only if you're plugged into the system.
#2088
B. How plugged in are you with God?
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SOURCES FOR ILLUSTRATIONS USED IN THIS SERMON:
#2088 "To Illustrate: Power," by Reggie McNeal of Mt. Pleasant, Texas;
Leadership Journal, Spring 1992.
#2139 "Dear God, What Religion Were The Dinosaurs?" by David Heller,
Redbook magazine (excerpted from his book), January 1990,
page 52.
These and 18,000 others are part of a database that can be downloaded,
absolutely free, at http://www.holwick.com/database.html
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