The Truth about Ourselves

But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth.  But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being.

~ Romans 1, The Message

In the recovery world we have this marvelous process summed up best in the fourth and fifth steps:

4.  We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  AND

5.  Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

These two steps help us deal with the most valuable truth of all - the truth about ourselves.  Yesterday I proffered an example of confused truth - using God’s word as a weapon to get what we want (no divorce) rather than as a surgeon’s scalpel in the hands of the Holy Spirit to perform heart surgery (on us not another).  I love how specific the steps are and I have born witness to the healing power of telling the whole unvarnished truth about ourselves to God, self and another trusted listener. Sometimes we get wrapped around the axle of what we want versus what we know.  The steps and God’s word help us refocus but neither can make us care enough to actually change our behavior. Nevertheless, there’s more:  

What happened was this:  People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives.  They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.

~ Romans 1 The Message

Let’s get real.  Are there any cheap figurines you have clutched in your hands for dear life?  They are not life.

Confession

16 Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.  

James 5:16, NRSV

Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs

Confession is a term that points us in the direction of a number of spiritual practices.  We can’t confess until we’ve done rigorously honest self-reflection, for instance.  We can’t confess without surrounding ourselves with community who are willing to hold us accountable to our certain way of seeing, who we, for our part, trust to do so.  

The 12 steps provide us the mechanics required to carry this process out (in step 5 and its surrounding steps).  We take a moral inventory, we share it with God and a trusted accountability partner.  

The Bible casts a more obviously spiritual vision for confession (though, of course, the 12 steps are profoundly spiritual), a vision which includes healing, forgiveness, acceptance, redemption, restoration, and community up-building.  That's a powerful list.  We can't over-emphasize the importance of confession.