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The Recovery Zone
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Faith / God
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Faith:
(Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material
evidence.) |
All passages
below are taken from the 12 & 12 .
You now declare that none but a
Higher Power
can remove our obsession.
The effectiveness of the whole A.A. program
will rest upon
how well and earnestly we have tried to come to "make a
decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care
of
God as we understood Him."
It’s the quality of
faith
rather than its quantity.
This has been our blind spot.
At no time had we asked what
God's
will was for us;
instead we had been telling Him what it ought to be.
Belief meant reliance, not; defiance.
As long as we placed self reliance first, a
genuine reliance
upon a
Higher Power
was out of the question.
Refusing to place
God
first,
we had deprived ourselves of His help.
Only by action can we cut away the self-will
which
has always blocked the entry of
God.
The more we become willing to depend upon a
Higher Power,
the more independent we actually are.
Prayer and meditation are our principal means
of
conscious contact with
God.
We ask simply that throughout the day
God
place in us the best understanding of His will that we can have for
that day, and that we be
given the grace by which we may carry it
out.
As the day goes on, we can pause
where situations must be met and
decisions made, and renew the
simple request:
"Thy will, not mine,
be done."
This was not only
faith;
it was faith
that worked under
all conditions.
We discovered the best possible source of
emotional
stability to be
God
Himself.
Spiritual development almost always insist on checking with
friends or spiritual advisers the guidance they feel they
have received from
God.
The grace of
God
will not enter to expel our destructive
obsessions
until we are willing to try this.
We'd have to have outside help if we
were surely to know
and admit the truth about ourselves.
Step Five was the answer.
It was the beginning of true kinship with man and
God.
When we are honest with another person, it
confirms that
we have been honest with ourselves and with
God.
Many an A.A., once agnostic or atheistic,
tells us that it was
during this stage of Step Five that he first actually felt
the presence of
God.
If we ask,
God
will certainly forgive our derelictions.
We humbly asked
God
to remove our shortcomings
We know that
God
lovingly watches over us.
When the hand of
God
seemed heavy or even unjust, new lessons for
living were learned,
new resources of courage were uncovered
The conviction came that
God
does "move in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform."
But its object is always the same: to improve
our conscious
contact with
God,
with His grace, wisdom, and love.
True ambition is the deep desire to live
usefully and walk
humbly under the grace of
God.

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