Tag: Restoration

Tetelestai Recovery

Self-Help Was No Help

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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

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Tetelestai Recovery

Yes and No

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As we leveled up in our new normal, we had to adopt the same type of mindset with our life choices as we did for driving on muddy country roads.  Our decisions and actions needed to be precisely calibrated in order to achieve the results we wanted.  Just as it would be foolish to see how close to the ditch we could drive without sliding off the road, it was also foolish to see how close we could get to temptation without giving in.  

In our leveled-up position, we learned that every action started with a choice. And every choice carried an equal and opposite result. In other words, every choice carried both a yes and a no decision.

If we said yes to sobriety, we said no to the chaos and destruction we once lived. And visa-versa.  If we said yes to a drink or drug, we said no to hope and sanity. When we said yes to thinking out our choices, we said no to making the same dumb decisions over and over, expecting different results.

To level-up, we had to accept our own responsibility for the choices and events of our lives. We had to realize that our decisions, even in little things, mattered.   Whether it was getting a good deal on a laptop we suspected was stolen, or working the system to get benefits we didn’t really qualify for, every decision set off a chain reaction of negative results and consequences.

We evaluated some of our individual experiences and shared them with the group.

One member who had been an addiction to porn, shared his decision-making process when it came to watching television.  He knew which shows would trigger lustful thoughts, so he simply chose not to watch them.  He chose instead to watch sports, cooking shows, and educational programs like Nova. He said yes to living free from his addiction which meant he said no to shows that triggered him.  Each time he made that choice, he placed himself into a position of freedom. He continues to pursue his destiny using the wisdom God has given.  He has leveled up into a mature, godly man who demonstrates great leadership skills. 

Another member of the group shared about self-esteem issues. From childhood, he had been trying to cope with the confusion of trauma, unaware of what to call it. He struggled with feelings of unworthiness and was unable to feel a sense of value.  That all changed when he made the choice to learn about trauma and its effects. He chose to develop a relationship with Jesus, his Healer.  He made a choice to forgive and move away from the pain. Because he said yes to openness, and no to suffering in silence, he now operates in a position of power and serves as an advocate for others. He has the wisdom of God and the heart of a servant.

Another member shared about his past life of uncontrollable rage.  He spoke about feeling as if he had no choice when it overtook him. His experience with rage was like driving on a slippery, muddy road at full speed, headed straight for the ditch, and unable to stop.  It was hard for us to believe he had ever struggled with rage. This was a man who carried the joy of the Lord on his face. His smile was contagious, his demeanor was gracious, and he radiated positive energy whenever he walked into the room.  He often spoke of love and forgiveness as if it were his lifeline.  He had made a conscious choice to forgive whenever he was wronged. He refused to carry a grudge, but instead, chose to walk in love. He said no to rage and yes to compassion. Forgiveness and joy were no longer second nature to him; they were his new normal. 

Tetelestai Recovery

The Revolution

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As we opened our minds to sacred text, the revolution began.  

We discovered new parameters for our belief system.

I Corinthians 2:16 stated, “We understand these things, for we have the mind of Christ,” so we released our mental constraints and became aware of our new understanding.

2 Corinthians 5:17 told us that “Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” Therefore, we resisted the temptation to dwell on the past. We had become a new creation in Christ, so there was no past to lament.

We believed that our feelings were fickle and could not be the focal point of our attention. We did not regard our feelings as a reliable source of information. The Word of God became our compass, and we only said of ourselves what we would say of Christ. We professed that we were in Christ and have inherited the privilege to participate in a life of His perfection. We were the righteousness of God, even when we felt like we had failed. The cross inverted all our wrongs and made them right. Thus, the rightness of Jesus outweighed the wrongness of our misdeeds.

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  • We began to thank God for His provision, even when we felt needy.  

And my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:19

  • We praised God for deliverance, even while feeling imprisoned by the past:

The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 2 Corinthians 3:17

  • We believed God for His righteousness, even when we felt wrong.
  • We believed in ourselves as new creations, even when we felt damaged.
  • We stopped living in regret, even when we felt as if we should.

We no longer identified with who we were, but rather, we identified ourselves as who we became at the moment, we received our tetelestai revelation. We had come to know love which we had never known before. We had received a personal pardon from the King of Kings and according to Ephesians 3:19, we were becoming filled with the fullness of God, which was gradually squeezing out our tendency to be full of ourselves.

Tetelestai Recovery – Finding Total Recovery in the Words of Christ, “It is Finished!”

Chapter 3 – The Revolution

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Tetelestai Recovery

A Contaminated Mind

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Although our spirits were reborn and our bodies were clean from mood altering substances, our minds were contaminated with cognitive distortions. Our thought processes had become corroded with bitterness and disappointment. The original shine of innocence had been dulled by the storms of rage and the heat of humiliation. Our minds were splattered with the dirt and grime of the past. The good memories were cluttered with grief over what we ruined or what we lost. The bad memories made us cringe and flooded us with waves of nausea. Our heads were filled with regrets, resentments, and realities that we wished we could change.

Our minds, once fresh and innocent, had gradually become a gurgling caldron of foul emotions, which continued to bubble up at the worst possible times. Most of us couldn’t even remember what a fresh, clean mind was, nor could we identify exactly when we lost ours. Clever coping mechanisms had served their purposes for a time, but we were tired of being covered in the dirt and grime of resentment, guilt, failure, fear, intimidation, and regret.

Our minds needed to be scrubbed clean if we were ever going to have the confidence and clarity to move into our destiny. So, we looked for answers in our Sacred Text…

Tetelestai Recovery Volume 2 – Our New Normal

Chapter Three – Brainwashed

https://a.co/d/5BARYRi

Tetelestai Recovery

Keeping it Vertical

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We are damaged humans who have been damaged by other humans. Our only hope of recovery is to submit our claims to God and wait for Him to reimburse us for our loss.

We finally understood that when Jesus instructed us to forgive, He was not telling us we had to sustain damage and accept it as okay. He was also not telling us that we didn’t have a valid claim. In fact, He was stating the exact opposite.

The fact that forgiveness was necessary, meant a loss was incurred and damage sustained. He was not denying our claim. He was validating our loss and confirming its legitimacy.

He never suggested we just get over it. He wasn’t instructing us to learn to live with it and then congratulate ourselves on taking the high road.  He instructed us to forgive because he wanted us to access His full coverage comprehensive plan. In other words, Jesus was telling us, “Submit your claim to me, and I will handle all repairs and collections.” He knew that the process was too exhausting and complicated for us to deal with on our own. He also knew that when two humans try to settle, they rarely get it right and they seldom get it done.

Tetelestai Recovery – Our New Normal

Chapter 7 – Keeping it Vertical

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Tetelestai Recovery

Wake the Dead

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We examined the passage in Ezekiel 37, which described the valley of dry bones and the prophetic challenge to call them back to life. In the vision, God tells His prophet to speak specific words to the dry bones. In incremental stages, the bones were told to rise up, collect themselves, and grow tendons, ligaments, and skin.  Ezekiel gave one final command to the lifeless creatures, as instructed by God. He told the four winds to deliver the breath of life and each skeleton begins to breathe. Gathered together, they formed a mighty army and stood ready to defeat the enemy who had once destroyed them.

The excavation process in our own emotional tar pit, revealed decomposing dreams and dried up destinies. Those artifacts might have left us hopeless and grief-stricken over our wasted years, had we not clung to David’s hope from the 23rd Psalm: Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. (Psalm 23:4).

We feared arousing resentments and regret, but with God at our side, we were assured there was nothing we couldn’t face and forgive. As much as we felt our history was set in stone and fossilized forever, we claimed the following Sacred Text over the excursion, “Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:27). In time, we became willing to enter our valley of dry bones and speak life over what had been so dead for so long.

We found the lifeless remains of enthusiasm, which had been suffocated by disappointment. We found fossils of unfinished projects, which could have been profound, had we not given up. We unearthed splintered fragments of gifts, talents, and abilities which had become casualties of our own sense of inadequacy. We didn’t see them as hopeless signs of a wasted life. Instead, we saw them as dry bones coming back to life. By faith, we saw our powerful future rising up from the wreckage of our past.

In our new normal, we spoke life over anything which reeked of death. In our new normal, we commanded those dry bones to rise up in service to our King. We did not think this was too much to expect for we had been given the resurrection power of Christ. We have been urged to follow in the footsteps of our Father, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence things that don’t yet exist. (Romans 4:17)

The winds of change swept through our own valley of dry bones, breathing life into what was dead inside. Slowly, methodically, our powerful army of gifts and talents began to rise. These warriors were character qualities which had been gifted to us from the Spirit:

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Galatians 5:22-23

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Tetelestai Recovery

Time to Come Clean

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But if we confess our sins to God, he will keep his promise and do what is right: he will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9

As we pondered this verse, we came to realize that whether it was our own sins or someone else’s, everything was forgivable, and nothing was a secret to God. All wrongs could be forgiven and thus, all minds could be made whole. Since God promised He would cleanse us from ALL unrighteousness, we were relieved to confess what we knew to be true about ourselves, no matter how distasteful.

We also felt liberated by the fact that we would be cleansed of whatever else was wrong with us. This was our troublesome state of unrighteousness, which in essence, were our damaged psyches. If our minds were to be cleansed of ALL unrighteousness, even the things we had forgotten or buried, we knew we could be completely clean and completely whole. We were safely positioned under the waterfall, jagged edges and all.

Tetelestai Recovery 2: Our New Normal; Chapter Three – Brainwashed

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Tetelestai Recovery

Fragments of the Past

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Our New Normal offered many pleasant surprises. Some of our upgrades were unfamiliar, yet welcome. We enjoyed becoming an honorable person. We were delighted to be viewed as trustworthy. We stopped demanding respect and began earning it. We appreciated the new opportunities God sent our way. We looked in amazement at the doors which stood open in front of us. We looked with gratitude at the doors which had closed behind us.

The glaringly obvious issues had been removed with Jesus’ words, “It is finished!” and once we began moving out of our active addiction, much of the chaos connected with our former lifestyle settled down. We looked to the future with hope and knew that God was working out the more subtle issues, one at a time, little by little.

Lots of negatives had been removed, leaving a huge gaping hole in our soul. We felt as if our emotional center resembled an excavation site; filled with bulldozers, backhoes, and caution tape. Once the surface-level layers were removed, the process became more meticulous and precise. An archeological dig often begins with heavy equipment, but the expert precision near the treasure is done with a toothpick and tiny brush. So too, our soul dig went through a transformation. It seemed as if it had begun with a total upheaval of our surface level behaviors and lots of changes to the landscape. But eventually, the progress slowed, and we got discouraged. We didn’t realize God needed to use a lighter touch as He sifted carefully through our broken fragments.

His work was so quiet and gentle, we sometimes wondered if He was even doing anything at all. We loved the big, dramatic, exciting changes which we passionately recalled to anyone who would listen. However, the small, hidden changes were tedious and exhausting. They were not nearly as noticeable. At times, we wondered if we might lose interest, or worse, perhaps God might.

Tetelestai Recovery

Tetelestai

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We needed a new mind, a new purpose, and a new sense of identity. It was in this prison of despair, we found the key to our freedom.

From this verdict of our King, emerged an energy which annihilated the grief of guilt, the harassment of hopelessness, and the agony of addiction. We noticed that Jesus’ final word, “Tetelestai,” translated into the English phrase, “It is finished,” seemed to imply a sense of giving up. We found this to be an unfortunate language barrier.

As it turns out, in the original Greek language of the New Testament, Tetelestai is a declaration of victory, completion, and success.

We needed a new mind, a new purpose, and a new sense of identity. It was in this prison of despair, we found the key to our freedom.

From this verdict of our King, emerged an energy which annihilated the grief of guilt, the harassment of hopelessness, and the agony of addiction.We noticed that Jesus’ final word tetelestai, translated into the English phrase, it is finished, seemed to imply a sense of giving up. We found this to be an unfortunate language barrier.

Tetelestai is the comment an artist might whisper after completing his final brush stroke on a masterpiece.

Tetelestai is the report a soldier would bring to his commanding officer when a battle was over, and victory had been secured.

We believe our Savior used His final breath on the cross to declare for all time, to all creation, in every dimension, that there is nothing left undone: It is finished; Tetelestai.

There is no more drudgery to sobriety and no more anguish to recovery. There is no self-effort which must be added to what has been declared, Tetelestai.

IT IS FINISHED

In matters of our recovery from substance addiction and the mental dysfunction which accompanied it, we were completely helpless. We had no thought which could heal our thoughts. We had no disclosure which could remove our secret shame. We had no detour which would lead us out of the darkness. We were lost. We were alone. We were afraid.

But suddenly, in a random, unexplainable moment, the gift of Tetelestai was revealed. We had run out of options, yet in that barren wasteland of emptiness, we stumbled upon a treasure trove of truth.

For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Romans 5:6

Tetelestai Recovery: Finding Total Recovery in the Words of Christ, “It is Finished” https://a.co/d/bDUe2X7

Tetelestai Recovery

Out of Options

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There is an overpowering conflict which occurs within the mind of anyone who has encountered the desperation of addiction. The struggle to escape one’s own mind by flooding it with toxic levels of mood-altering chemicals is the true definition of insanity. Yet, many of us suffered from this fatal and debilitating disease, consenting to the madness as if there were no other option.

In search of total recovery, we discovered we were not only seeking to be delivered from our dependency on mind or mood-altering substances, but we also searched for freedom from our thought processes, our twisted perceptions, and our obsessive fears.

In this emotional state of chronic crisis, we were exhausted.

We struggled to be free from a mind which plotted its own demise. Our thoughts quite literally tormented us to the point of insanity. We needed a way to manage our feelings and silence our sickness.

Our problem was not that we felt guilty. The problem was that we were guilty.

  • We were damaged and we had caused damage.
  • We were hopeless and infused hopelessness into everything we touched.
  • We were in a death march toward nothingness and our lives had no direction.
  • Our primary purpose was to find a reprieve from ourselves.
  • Our public self was known by our private self as a fraud.

Tetelestai Recovery: Finding Total Recovery in the Words of Christ, “It is Finished”

Chapter One – Out of Options

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