“A Christ-centered approach to recovery and coordinating small group meetings”
Step Two
“Came to believe that Jesus Christ could restore us to sanity.”
The idea of being restored to sanity is a very sensitive issue. Even people who have been in recovery for a while gulp on this one occasionally. Defensively we say, “I am not insane.” If we take this rigid posture, it may keep us from doing this step and experiencing the benefits that flow from thoroughly working all the steps.
In former times, insanity was related to somebody as a raving lunatic bound up in a straight jacket. There may be a few of us who fit into this category. However, most of us see ourselves as fairly rational people. We are able to discern the important aspects of reality.
We tend to see things through the filter of our past problems and have a distorted picture of what is happening around us. These distortions caused us to guess wrong about our circumstances. Then we make wrong decisions about how to respond and reap the negative consequences.
We keep having problems and our lives get worse and we don’t know why or what we are doing to bring undesired results. Insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results. Insanity is also escaping reality into an addictive substance or behavior. This is more of the kind of insanity we refer to in recovery.
We are able to identify our problems when we go to meetings and listen to others with similar backgrounds. We are able to identify with the problems and then eventually able to believe there is hope for us too. We hear how other people applied these spiritual principles to their live and how they got better.
Through listening to others, we learned how others were touched by God and their minds were renewed. Our thinking was changed and our feelings changed. Then our actions changed and we benefited by improved results.
This second step is one of obtaining hope. It is coming to believe that the Lord will do for us what He did for others. As we hear the stories of others, we find that they were as bad if not worse than us. We have to conclude that if God helped then, He will help me.
We can’t sit around and hear the many personal testimonies of how the Lord healed and changed lives without coming to believe that this stuff is real. God is real and that there are many people just like us who are walking miracles ? alive and happy by the grace of God.
We can’t hang around recovery very long without noticing the overwhelming evidence of the Lord’s redemptive love and healing power! Millions of otherwise hopeless lives have been transformed through applying these spiritual principles as outlined in the Twelve Steps.
Apart from God’s healing grace, there is no program and there is no recovery. This second step is one of acquiring faith. A key part of this step is the willingness to listen to others. We need to listen to others with a sense of expectancy that they have something important to say. Listen with an expectancy that God will speak to us through even the least likely person.
Few people were healed in Jesus’ home town because of their unbelief. Scripture says “He healed them all” in referring to the ministry of Jesus traveling from place to place. “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness among the people.” (Matthew 4:23) Believe!