An Essay on Step Three
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
There are several powerful ideas associated with the Third Step. Each bears on our relationship with God.
The first deals with our will, the freewill that God gave us. Without our freewill, we would not be able to make moral choices. We would be running on automatic pilot as God programmed us. With our freewill we are able to choose to follow the path God has set for us or to follow a self-directed, self-centered life. We tried that. Our self-will brought us to the state we were in as we entered recovery. Clearly, that path was not a good one. We must turn our will over to God and let Him direct us if we are to recover.
The second big idea is that we must turn our lives over to God’s care. The 20th-century theologian Francis Schaeffer often pointed out that if God was Lord of any part of our life then He must be Lord of all of it. Our faith must be enlivened by the work that God does with us and through us. As James says, “Faith without works is dead.”
Some folks reverse the order of “will and lives” to “lives and wills.” This seems to reflect a misunderstanding of the Bible’s teaching on the relationship between the will and the process of conversion. The root of the Greek word we translate as “repent” is metanoia which means to change your mind, to exercise your will to believe something new. A changed life then follows. The order is never reversed in the New Testament.
The third important idea is that we don’t have to fully understand God in order for Him to work in our lives. Since He fully understands us, He can help us regardless of how incomplete our knowledge is. Indeed, it would be arrogant and foolish for a finite human to presume to have a truly deep understanding of the infinite God. [A]s we understood Him does not mean that we should pick whichever god we desire. There is only one True God, the loving God who sent His Son to redeem us.
But as we understood Him does serve to remind us to be humble because of our limited understanding. Anna Warner summed all we need to know for Step Three when she wrote:
Jesus loves me! this I know,
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to Him belong,
They are weak, but He is strong.
While all of us in this recovery fellowship recognize Jesus as our Higher Power, no two of us have the same relationship with Him. He reaches out to us as individuals, loving each uniquely. Chapter 4 of the Big Book closes with these words:
"Even so has God restored us all to our right minds. To this man, the revelation was sudden. Some of us grow into it more slowly. But He has come to all who have honestly sought Him.
"When we drew near to Him He disclosed Himself to us!"
Reach out and touch faith.