Tag: God

Tetelestai Recovery

Post-Traumatic Strength and Stability

lastwordrecovery

And the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. 1 Peter 5:10

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This came as a shock to those of us who grew up in the psycho-babble era, where therapists were gods who slung letter-label disorders at us like lightning bolts. Most of us had been zapped by at least one label or another which altered our identity. Sadly, that movement brought such a self-defeated attitude; many of us doubted the power of the cross over our disorders.

Thankfully, after receiving the message of Christ’s finished work, we concluded that our dysfunctional labels need not remain our identity.

  • We claimed the powerful promise from Romans 8:37 concerning our sense of powerlessness:

In all these things we are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us.

We subjected our past trauma to the truth found in Romans 8:28:

We know that all things work together for the good of those who love Christ, who have been called according to His purpose.

Paul didn’t write ‘some things’ or ‘the good things’. No, he said that all things, even the least expected or most traumatic things, will work together for our good and for the Kingdom’s expansion project.

We realized that it wouldn’t benefit the Kingdom if its soldiers and ambassadors were traumatized, weak, and frail (either mentally or physically). No military unit would succeed with a platoon of disabled soldiers charging in to take a hill. Fighters in poor condition would be counter-productive to the cause. When charging into enemy territory, only the healthiest, strongest, and well-trained are called up to active duty.

Knowing that God has called us up to active duty, we also trust that He has given us health, strength, and solid training. We have discovered the spiritual law of the Kingdom where trauma turns to triumph and frailty turns to strength.

Chapter 4 / Post-Traumatic Strength and Stability

https://a.co/d/0G3atR1

Tetelestai Recovery

Self-Help Was No Help

lastwordrecovery

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

John 14:27

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Jesus gave us this promise of peace, translated from the original word shalom, meaning: wholeness; nothing missing; nothing broken. Therefore, if we failed to experience it, we needed to know why.

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Was He a liar? Did He tease us with hope and then pull it away like Lucy holding the football in the Charlie Brown cartoon?

We developed resentment toward this Higher Power who seemingly yanked away our hope, time after time. If He controlled the universe, why didn’t He just snap His fingers and make all our misery disappear?

We questioned Him and His ways. We saw other people receive deliverance and healing from their dysfunctions and we were jealous. We finally concluded that the odds of a miracle landing on us were about the same as a rose petal falling from the sky and landing on our heads.

We knew we couldn’t raise our hopes for a miracle of our own if it was simply a cosmic lottery. We were driven to figure out what we could do to make it happen. We had been taught all our lives that a person gets what they deserve. We feared our relapses and failures had deemed us unworthy.

We knew how to work in the natural realm to get what we wanted. We worked hard. We had built personal empires and seen our own efforts succeed in other areas of life. This made it extremely difficult to understand why we couldn’t succeed in our efforts to maintain consistent sobriety.

We wanted to work for recovery and thus, control the results. We wanted to work for it, so we could own it. We wanted to know we had earned our sobriety. We wanted to receive accolades for how courageous we had been. We wanted to know it had come to us honestly, through hard work and perseverance.

Tragically, we discovered that our work just didn’t work.

Chapter Six, Shalom

https://a.co/d/j5VZuII