Someone said to me in recovery “You can’t rely on your story to get you through for the rest of your life.” I disagree. The reason I disagree is because our stories are always changing unless we are dead.

Recovery to me is about ‘SPIRITUAL GROWTH’ If I am still in the same place spiritually today as I was yesterday, last week, last month, ten years ago I haven’t grown spiritually and I have no one to blame but myself.

When it comes to admitting our lives are a mess it is easy for us to convince ourselves they are not.

In the Bible is say’s “The God-setting-things-right that we read about has become Jesus-setting-things-right for us. And not only for us, but for everyone who believes in him. For there is no difference between us and them in this. Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners (both us and them) and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ. God sacrificed Jesus on the altar of the world to clear that world of sin. Having faith in him sets us in the clear. God decided on this course of action in full view of the public—to set the world in the clear with himself through the sacrifice of Jesus, finally taking care of the sins he had so patiently endured. This is not only clear, but it’s now—this is current history! God sets things right. He also makes it possible for us to live in his rightness.” Romans 3:22-26

1 Timothy 1:19 says “Keep a firm grip on your faith and on yourself. After all, this is a fight we’re in. There are some, you know, who by relaxing their grip and thinking anything goes have made a thorough mess of their faith.”

I want to talk today about “MY MESS’ how I made it and how God helped me to not only overcome it but to change it.

Faith is the ‘Truth’ and what we believe about the truth. For me I realised long before I came into recovery “I was a liar.” And, I knew that most of the lies I believed weren’t the truth no matter how much I believed them. So when I first came to recovery in 1987 I began a journey of ‘Discovering the truth’ about myself, my life, and about God. All of my life I have been a believer that God is real and if He chose to He could do miracles in and through my life.

My knowledge of God till I arrived in recovery was this “If you live right you go to heaven. If you don’t you go to hell.” What did I know about living right? You went to school to learn. You learned to get a job. Once you got a job you got married, had kid’s and lived happily ever after. So, I tried to live right.

The problem was:

1. I hated school.
2. Success at work was about how much money you made.
3. Getting married and having kid’s involved caring about someone else and I was not capable at caring about myself let alone someone else.

Because I hated school, I made a mess of it and at the age of 14 left school for good. Because I left school at 14, the only jobs I could ever secure were manual handling jobs which I made a mess of. When it came to getting married and having kid’s because I was incapable of caring about anyone else made a mess of every relationship I ever had.

At the age of 15 I started drinking and taking drugs which only added to my mess. From the age of 15 till I was 25 my life was a mess of my own creation because it became more about alcohol and drugs than it did about going to heaven when you die. As I said in 1987 when I first came to recovery, I began a journey of discovery. When I took time to examine these three areas of my life and looked at the demolition, I realised I had to change and was incapable of change by myself. So I started my search of discovering who God was and how He could help me fix the mess I had created.