Daily Maintenance

We’ve come a long way here over the last 5 weeks, we’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve been talking about the 12 steps of recovery, and last week we got up to step 9. Today I’ve got to somehow get through the last 3 before you all fall asleep. But first, lets just briefly talk about where we’ve been and where we are now. We’ve figured out that we have a problem that only God can solve. And we’ve learned what it looks like to allow God to solve our problem — a mixture of confession, repentance, and accountability. We’ve figured out some of the patterns of behavior that keep us stuck and we’ve asked God to help us knock it off. And, probably most painfully — we’ve made amends for the messes we’ve made in our lives and the people we have hurt. That’s where we are at. At this point, after step 9, theoretically we should have a clean house. This is what the Big Book of Alcoholics says about it:

“If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.

We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.

Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us–sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.”

Is everybody there? Probably not, but it sounds wonderful am I right? The thing is — while this state is preferred and what we should be seeking after, it is not a state of permanence. What I mean is, it’s not a once and done, made it to the destination and now I’ll never leave. Steps 1-9 do not permanently fix us. Which you might be like well why have you wasted 30 minutes of my life over the past 5 weeks then! I promise you that it was not time wasted. That was all of the ground work needed. If we were building a car, thats the assembly process ok? We built the frame, put the engine in and put the tires on. But you know what that shiny new car needs? Yeah maintenance. That frame needs to be washed up. The engine needs the oil changed. Those tires need to be rotated and replaced. If you don’t what happens? It gets dirty. It starts getting a clunking noise, and kinda smells bad when you drive. It pulls to the right or to the left. Eventually it just breaks down and you are going nowhere right? Some of you are like dang yeah I do need to get my oil changed… Stop thinking about that. We aren’t talking about your car, this is a metaphor.

We talking about you. And me. But we are much more high maintenance than our cars. Your car, you’ve got like 3 months or 5000 miles. And you probably push that out even farther. But us… we’ve got about 24 hours before we start breaking down. If we’re lucky. And so the rest of these steps, steps 10-12 are our maintenance program. Our DAILY maintenance program. And they are pretty simple, but are rather wordy. But we’ll get through them together and see that they aren’t very scary at all.

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 [God], praying only for knowledge of [God’s] will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

That might seem like a lot. But I’ll make it pretty easy for you. In fact first I’ll defer to to Jesus and allow him to put this in maybe a more familiar Christian language for us.

Jesus’s Advice

Jesus was always being challenged, because he was a pretty off the wall thinker. So one day, towards the end of his ministry, actually during the week of his life that we begin celebrating this week — after he had entered Jerusalem — some of the religious leaders who were not so pleased with his ways of living and teaching came to him and challenged him. They asked him all kinds of off the wall questions about whether or not they were legally required to pay taxes, about if a woman had 7 different husbands, which one would she be married to in the resurrection. Weird stuff, that I also want to know the answer to. Spoiler alert is Jesus said you have to pay taxes. I know. I’m bummed too.

But the point is that the motive of this line of questioning was really to try to mess Jesus up. To get him to say something that would get him into trouble. The same with this final question, to which Jesus’s answer is the most foundational piece of our understanding of the Christian life.

Common English Bible Chapter 22

34 When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had left the Sadducees speechless, they met together. 35 One of them, a legal expert, tested him. 36 “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37 He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. 40 All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”

The beautiful thing here, is that while these Pharisees are attempting to get something that they can use to condemn and kill Jesus, Jesus gives them — and us — the centerpiece of our mission as Christians and the blueprint for how we are meant to live our lives in the world. Love God, Love Others, Love Yourself.

Or, in the order of the steps.

Step 10 - Love yourself

Step 11 - Love God

Step 12 - Love Others

Pretty easy right? Well kind of. You see love in our modern way of thinking is mostly linked to a feeling. But love, in Jesus’s mind and in the minds of his Jewish and Greek audiences is much more closely linked to actions. The Greek word Agape and the Hebrew word Ahavah imply a giving of oneself, typically in an unconditional and sacrificial way.

So what this means for us is that loving ourselves, loving God, and loving others is about doing something. It’s about taking action. Which is often I think where we fall short as followers of Jesus. We say we love ourselves and we love God and we love our neighbor but we can’t quite figure out how to consistently translate that into a way of life. If that’s you, welcome. Today you are going to learn the how and why.

The rest of this is going to be really practical stuff. So if you have a notebook or something to write with, take notes. If you don’t you can feel free to take out your phone and use the notes app, I promise I won’t be offended.

So if the daily maintenance of our spiritual condition, of our walk with Jesus, requires us to love ourselves, love God, and Love others, then what are we to do?

Step 10

Well, we practice the 10th step, aka loving ourselves, by being honest with ourselves. We continue to take personal inventory, aka the ways that we are succeeding and the ways that we need improvement. And when we find that we need improvement, when we find that we’ve hurt others or ourselves, we make it right, right away. A mental checklist is ok, but if you are like me and you can’t remember why you walked into a room 75% of the time, then maybe you should do something more concrete. So I’m going to teach you a simple, effective journaling technique. It’s actually going to be something that encompasses all 3 of these steps, so we are going to build it one item at a time.

What we are going to do is spend some time, not a ton of time, but some time in the morning and in the evening just answering some simple questions. 3 in the morning and 3 at night.

Since step 10 is about being honest with ourselves and righting our wrongs, we are simply going to answer these questions. In the morning: Do I have any unfinished business? (Step 10)

and then in the evening - What are my wins for the day? (Step 10) Do I owe anyone an amends? (Step 10). Pretty simple. But here’s the deal. This is very very important. And the reason that it is important is that if our hearts are cluttered up with guilt and resentment and shame from going through life like mini tornados, causing little bits of destruction and then storing all up in our hearts, then we will find that we are going to be unable to really love God or our neighbors. So, foundational to loving anything other than ourselves is to first love ourselves. And we love ourselves by cleaning our selves up. When we have done this we are more able do what it takes for us to love God and love others.

Step 11

Step 11 says that we sought to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out. The practical part of this step obviously comes through that prayer and meditation part. But it is important that we have our thoughts collected, so we answer these questions:

What am I grateful for? (Step 11) What is disturbing me? (Step 11).

These frame our prayer for the morning. We get a view of reality by acknowledging what we are grateful for - our lives are not as bad as we sometimes think. And by putting words to what disturbs us we have the ability to ask for God’s peace and will to be done in our hearts regarding those situations. When we frame our morning prayer life in this way, we are connecting ourselves and our world to God and then turning our lives over to him, a day at a time.

I don’t think I can really frame this conversation better than some others already have framed it, so I’ll just read it:

Practicing the Eleventh Step involves a daily discipline of prayer and meditation. This discipline reinforces our commitment to recovery, to living a new way of life, and to developing further our relationship with our Higher Power. Through this daily practice, we begin to glimpse the limitless freedom we can be afforded through God’s love. We have found that following such a discipline also results in a firm belief in our own right to happiness and peace of mind.

We see that, regardless of the presence or absence of material success in our live, we can be content. We can be happy and fulfilled with or without money, with or without a partner, with or without the approval of others. We’ve begun to see that God’s will for us is the ability to live with dignity, to love ourselves and others, to laugh, and to find great joy and beauty in our surroundings. Our most heartfelt longings and dreams for our lives are coming true. These priceless gifts are no longer beyond our reach. They are, in fact, the very essence of God’s will for us.

And that friends, is really what we are aiming for in this step. The ability to know just how deeply loved we are and the to have the ability to enjoy the blessings that come from it. But as you know, step 11 isn’t the last step. So I’ll just let those same authors transition us into our final step: Step 12 which states

Step 12

“having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all of our affairs.

so that previous reading goes on

In our gratitude, we go beyond merely asking for the power to live up to God’s plan for our own lives. We begin to seek out ways to be of service, to make a difference in the life of another addict, to carry the message of recovery. Our spiritual awakening has opened us up to spiritual contentment, unconditional love, and personal freedom. Knowing that we can only keep this precious gift by sharing it with others, we go on to Step Twelve.

Essentially, once we are good with ourselves and we are good with God we have the capacity to get out of the way and actually be a positive influence in the world around us. We are able to carry the message and love of Christ to those in need because we are able to see past our own mess and selfish desires and see what God is up to in the world around us and how God is calling us to be a part of it. So the final question that we answer at the end of every day is this:

How did I love others? (Step 12). It’s important to be concrete about this. It’s also important to know that you are going to have to answer this question, and to be consciously looking for opportunities to actually help someone else. There’s nothing more humbling than putting up a giant goose egg on this question. But it will happen, trust me.

The point is that we try. We try to carry the message of Jesus through our loving acts of mercy and justice to the world around us. And we do so based on the principle of love that Jesus so graciously taught to us.

Now I know that we had to really breeze through these, but if you take those questions and fearlessly answer them every day, I promise you that your life will continue to change. And there is no better week to start than this week. As we celebrate the entry of the King of Peace into our world, and as we remember the lengths and the depths in which he went to show us his love.

On your way out today I have something for you to take with you. It is palm sunday. But we aren’t giving out palms. Rather, I’ve got a card for you. And it has a prayer for you to say each day. Maybe stick it on your mirror. So when you are looking at your beautiful self you might be reminded that this world, its not all about you. It’s known as the peace prayer and it goes like this.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me bring love. Where there is offence, let me bring pardon. Where there is discord, let me bring union. Where there is error, let me bring truth. Where there is doubt, let me bring faith. Where there is despair, let me bring hope. Where there is darkness, let me bring your light. Where there is sadness, let me bring joy. O Master, let me not seek as much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love, for it is in giving that one receives, it is in self-forgetting that one finds, it is in pardoning that one is pardoned, it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

Amen.