Release Article: The 12-Step Movement and Becoming What God Intended

The twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous is considered to be the most effective recovery program in the world.  Extensively used in the United States, it is also found pervasively in alcoholism-riddled countries like the Russia Republic.  It has a well-deserved reputation.  In fact, AA Recovery has become the model for a huge variety of other recovery programs, including addiction from sex to chocolate.

The Becoming What God Intended (BWGI) approach that emphasizes the Christian Trinity and Christianity’s Identity found in Christ is not a substitute for the AA Recovery program.  Becoming What God Intended does have something of great importance for the Christian Recovery movement that can effectively supplement the AA approach.

The Recovery Movement is powerful because it assaults two of the great weapons of addiction: relational isolation (loneliness) and the availability of the great variety of addictions.  By placing the addict in a group and supplying a sponsor, the movement assaults the social isolation that addiction creates, and it also does an effective job of restructuring the life so that the opportunities to obtain the addictive material are greatly diminished.  Furthermore, it forces the addicted individual to openly and repeatedly confess the addiction: “Hi, I’m Joe; I am an alcoholic.”  All of this can be very helpful.  The goal of the AA program is the restructuring of the life and of the heart.

Becoming What God Iintended Ministries is particularly dedicated to the restructuring or transformation of the heart.  Countless numbers of people have happily shared how the material has been profoundly affecting to them.  They have experienced spirituality transformation in the inner life.  A testimony to this effect is provided below.  The seminars, books, tapes, video material, and discipling all are directed to that aim.

Becoming What God Intended trains the heart to:

• Become a liberated observer of compulsions instead of a slave to them
• Use the imagination the way God intended
• Live from the new identity found in Christ, and not from the addiction identity
• Relate to God as a Father instead of remaining isolated
• Manage moods and desires instead of being drowned by them

Addiction and its behaviors create a powerful compulsive mindset within an atmosphere of anticipation, moods, and self-absorption.  The Becoming What God Intended material is designed to attack that compulsiveness by helping the person create a completely different approach to the inner life.  The Recovery Movement restructures the life and relationships; several of the steps deal with the inner life, but Becoming What God Intended Ministries specializes in helping people with the life of the heart so that the dreadful scourge of compulsion can be nullified and replaced, setting the heart free by the fruit of the Spirit:  love, joy, and peace.

How It Works:  A Testimony

A person named Janie, who has struggled with alcohol and prescription drug addiction, described the benefits of the recovery group and the BWGI small group, “I was blessed to learn how to study the bible verses of what the New Testament teaches in a bible study group of women to whom I could be honest and open and who held me accountable to dealing with my addiction issues.  And I joined a Christian recovery group that I still attend.  The third thing was that we joined a small group fellowship where we began studying the workbook Becoming What God Intended.  After struggling for about a year, I finally was able to see past my problem with substances and get my focus on being loved by God and growing a desire to know God .”  Note that her sense of the love of God came out of the BWGI material.

She went on to answer why the BWGI material was so important in the recovery process. “Because I felt like such a miserable failure in life, I thought for sure God had turned His back on me . . . Once I got my focus off the sin, I was able to work through how to have a personal relationship with God.  I realized that my identity wasn’t as a substance abuser – it was as a child of God.  Then freedom just became a normal progression.”