In most A.A. meetings, there will be some reference to character defects or shortcomings. In Alcoholics Anonymous, fondly referred to as the Big Book, character defects are so detrimental to sobriety that the middle four of the 12 steps themselves are dedicated to identifying and removing them. These life-changing Steps were derived from the Oxford Group’s principles, which got its principles from the Holy Bible. In that Book, defects in the human character are identified as man’s main obstacle to life itself and is referred to as sin. The 12 Steps of A.A. makes it clear where our difficulties in life come from, and provides guidance for change. In the 89 years since A.A. had its founding (1935), these Steps have proven themselves to help individuals live a lifestyle that is devoid of alcohol and encourages behavior that minimizes many obstacles to a better life.
Over time, many of these individuals have demonstrated positive character changes that are often admired by others outside the recovery community. During active alcoholism, defects of character were glaring. But in sobriety they are often minimized or disappeared as time in the program advanced. That’s a good thing and explains why there are many widely known programs that model themselves after the Alcoholics Anonymous program. They all use the 12-Step program in its entirety. The use of these Steps is also embraced by many Christian-based religious groups, including the largest, Celebrate Recovery. Yet, within recovery circles that utilize these Steps, it is commonplace to find statements that claim how difficult it is to be free of deep-seated character defects. Let’s examine that.
First, some basic generalities. There are several significant reasons why many individuals fail to see good results in the A.A. program and why defects of character continue to be a major obstacle to recovery. The most obvious is that many do not stick with the program. They seem to have only the desire to lessen the consequences from their drinking. Once the consequences are minimized, many of these folks are gone. They will likely need more painful conditioning to make them return with willingness to stay in the program. Then there are others who do initially stick around for a period of time. For these folks, the main reason for failure, including the failure of lifetime sobriety, is that many do not actually believe in the biblical God. If they do, it’s only a general notion that there is a God. They may confess belief in God but not believe God enough to make Him the central fact of their life. It is an erroneous idea in A.A. that any old notion of a god of their own understanding will bring the necessary change to achieve peace and serenity.
The principles of the program themselves can provide sobriety and some better living conditions, even when one is an atheist. Principles that are spiritual in nature will work for believers and non-believers alike. Not because of belief in God, but because they are spiritual in nature and spiritual principles always reap positive results. Therefore, some character change can occur without the power of God. That ability is based upon a person having a strong enough desire to make a change. Desire means an inclination to do something. We always make choices towards the strongest inclination at any given moment. For change to occur our desire has to be based upon gaining a personal reward for change. With no real God in our life our desires are totally self-centered and driven by, as the Big Book states, “worldly clamor.”
Then there are the people who do have belief in the biblical God but seem to have trouble with long-lasting susceptibility to character defects. They read the Bible and understand the need for God’s help. They believe in the gospel message and in the doctrine of salvation, which is the only foundation to build true spiritual growth. The need for salvation is critically important for the successful removal of character defects. The Bible is very clear that anything less than God’s truth will end in failure. For many, there is a common misunderstanding about the process the Steps of the program define for defect removal. The often-misunderstood Steps are the 6th Step “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character,” and the 7th Step “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.”
The misunderstanding is the false belief that it is God’s responsibility to remove our defects of character, also called shortcomings, and all we need is willingness. That is not completely accurate. We must be a part of that process. Here is an example. I put on shoes. They are unlaced. I stick up my foot and ask God to tie them for me. I am willing for God to tie them, but it won’t happen. I must tie them myself. Now, if I don’t, and go about my daily business, I will probably trip and hurt myself. I have a consequence for not choosing to tie my shoelaces. As we know, choice is important to recovery. All choices that are acted on, will always have inherent results. Results that bring us emotional pain are only from our choices, not from the actions of others. We need to understand the full value that our own choice and actions have in the spiritual growth process including the removal of defects. See links below for a more thorough discussion on this topic.
To understand why we must partner with God for the defect removal process, we first must understand that God is sovereign. God’s sovereignty refers to the biblical teaching that God is the ruler of the Universe and exercises His rule over all creation. He is free and has the right to do whatever He wants, not bound by the dictates of his created beings. All things are under God’s control, and nothing happens without His direction or permission. God is the source of all creation. He does have attributes, and we can be assured that He operates in them all of the time. They are all good. The sovereignty of God is a difficult belief for many to acquire. We are conditioned by the world around us to believe only in ourselves and be the captain of our own ship.
In the creation story and the fall of man, humans had the ability to make choices based on their desires. They had free will. The serpent influenced their free will with a strong inclination or desire to be like God. They chose that path and were removed from the Garden of Eden. They lost their free will and now men are born with the inclination or desire to sin. Sin is defined by theologians as the inclination to live totally for satisfying our own desire. We speak about this in A.A. in the terms of selfishness and self-centeredness. This is not what God would like but we are born with the sin nature. God would prefer for us to have the desire to be righteous. This gap is what we face when we encounter character defects. Character defects are merely the human expression of the desire to sin – to please ourselves. But there is more we need to understand.
We have lost free will but still have free moral agency. That means the ability of choice which comes from our thinking faculties, which are governed by our individual beliefs and thoughts. The mind is a wonderful faculty with the ability to think, but susceptible to error. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was deceived by a lie from Satan, and it caused them to sin; to go against what God had told them not to do. There was a consequence for their choice to disobey God’s commandment. God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden because they sinned against Him by eating from the tree of knowledge. This meant they no longer could access the tree of life. They became susceptible to error as a result of the lie from the serpent that caused it all. It’s the same thing that goes on in today’s world. We have all inherited this ability to be programed by lies, develop bad beliefs, and make bad choices on those beliefs. And bad choices always bring bad consequences.
Character defects are the result of lies in our belief system. Life is a battle between righteousness (truth) and unrighteousness (sin). We are captive to sin until we are saved by God. This is why salvation is so important to meaningful recovery. Without the biblical God, the true God, we will not experience real joy. In the biblical book of James, we are instructed to consider it pure joy when we face trials of many kinds. The book of James is one of the three parts of the Bible that were considered “absolutely essential” by early A.A. It is a natural human response to think that living through trials and negative circumstances would not be an occasion for joy. Choosing to respond to life’s difficult situations with inner peace and serenity isn’t the norm for todays self-centered world. The Lord is the originator of true joy, and our common Christian experience proves this truth. It is an attitude full of character defects based on bad beliefs full of error and lies, that steal real godly joy.
To remove defects, it is necessary to remove the lies we have in our beliefs. The acceptance that we have bad beliefs and that they need a major overhaul is a must. To accomplish this, we need to become open to truth and become a seeker of it. A serious study of our own human makeup is helpful. A major part of that is our thinking. In the Doctors Opinion in the Big Book, regarding denial, we find “the sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false.” It’s not just about our attitude towards alcohol. Error in our thinking has penetrated every aspect of our mind. In early sobriety its near impossible to x-ray our belief systems or capture a fleeting thought to examine it. But there is hope.
Exposure to A.A. and its fundamental character-building process moves us to becoming open-minded about God. This is a result of changes in our belief system, as lies get replaced by more truthful beliefs. We get better and it’s not a mystery as to why this happens. We are simply being programmed with better beliefs, and the effect is a more productive and better life. Our individual turning point was the acceptance that our problems had been from our individual beliefs and behaviors, and therefore we became willing to look at ourselves. It is in us alone where the defects lie. They need removal. So we ask at this point, how does God remove our defects?
Our recovery problem is two-fold: a lack of truth in us that influences our behavior, coupled with a flawed nature that influences us to do the opposite of what we know we should do. The mind itself, under the influence of the sin-nature, wants to self-satisfy, so it develops beliefs that are self-centered. The flawed nature is driven by our self-centeredness and a belief system that makes choices from beliefs that promote self. That is as simple as it gets. The truth is, therefore, that selfishness and self-centeredness doesn’t bring true happiness but brings pain and misery from the choices we make. That pain has a purpose, and previous articles have discussed that purpose. See links below.
What we need then is a full solution to our two-fold human problem. We need something that can offset our natural inclination to sin, and a process to remove years of lies from our belief systems. Lies are the source of our pain. Pain is God’s way of telling us we have lies in our beliefs. The only solution that will completely remove the lies and the pain and the defects requires a change in our nature; a nature that is no longer captive to sin; a nature that has the inclination to be righteous; a nature that can help us get control of our God-created faculty of thinking, so that we are set free from the deception of uncontrolled thought; a nature that desires the removal of lies from our beliefs which in turn will remove character defects. This is something we alone cannot accomplish; God has provided this full solution. And He has not left us out of the execution of the plan.
The Bible in its entirety points to His recovery plan for all of humanity. And that is the Christian Walk. He knows we are full of imperfections and that we need a direction to walk towards. A direction that minimizes obstacles and brings real joy to replace the misbelief that happiness lies in the direction of selfishness and self-centeredness, as the world promotes. And we need to tie our own shoes before traveling the path, always looking ahead to prevent stumbling. The human mind is at the center of it all. One of the slogans we see on the walls of A.A. meetings is Think, Think, Think. The difficulty is not that we have this fabulous ability to think, it’s the fact that the thoughts we think about are full of lies.
The advantage that an individual who has been saved (a believer) has over an unsaved person (non-believer) in the A.A. program is easily defined. An unbeliever in order to have the removal of character defects can only participate in the process to the point that his selfish sin-controlled nature will allow. No change can happen if it doesn’t suit the individual in some way. He is still chained to wanting his own pleasure. For example, a person can stop drinking because his wife will leave him if he doesn’t. His individual desire to drink may still be there but is offset by the consequences if he does. He makes a choice not to drink for his own benefit. Many folks come into the A.A. program for similar reasons. Pain does that to us. It motivates us all, saved or unsaved.
All individuals can participate in the removal of lies in their belief system, but for an unsaved person, all change is hinged upon the individuals own ability to make that change. Jonathan Edwards, who many call the greatest theologian America has ever known, tells us that what we choose is not really determined by free will. It’s what the mind thinks that makes the choice, and the mind is corrupt. Jeremiah the prophet states that the mind of man is deceitful above all things and exceedingly wicked. Edwards understood that and claimed that unless God changes the way we think, our minds will always tell us to turn from God, which is precisely what we do as unbelievers. Not a big surprise for alcoholics and our consequences certainly bears that truth. This is why salvation is so important.
A believer, on the other hand, who is born again in a new nature, a nature that does not have the inclination to sin, now has the desire (inclination) to be righteous. But it takes more than that for defects of character to be removed. It takes a renewing of the worldly corrupted mind by the power of God’s Truth, the Word of God. A saved person can still be sinful. But it’s not the inclination from their new nature that causes it. It is the left over beliefs and habits that linger in our beliefs and thoughts. With the salvation process we are given inside help (power) by the Holy Spirit, who lives within the Christian, to appropriate to the fullest our thinking faculties. Having the foundational abilities that only salvation brings, we come to the real solution.
2 Corinthians 10:5 NIV says, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” As believers we are told to take control of our thoughts and make them obedient to Christ. The Word of God, which is absolute truth, tells us we actually have the ability to focus clearly on our thoughts, see the error in them, and replace them with truth. That’s what it means to replace error with truth as we capture and replace the thinking patterns that govern defects. If you recall earlier, we stated how difficult it was to slow our thinking and examine our thoughts in early sobriety. Bad thoughts only erupted as bad choices, as defects ruled our behavior. Now with proper understanding illuminated by the Holy Spirit we can demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. Taking your thoughts captive means choosing what you allow to take root in your mind. But that’s only part of it. We need to replace the error with truth.
Romans 12:1-2 NIV provides the rest of the process: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
It is the renewing of the mind that couples with the created ability to examine thoughts that gives us the ability to remove character defects. We participate by using our God-given thinking abilities. God helps us by giving us His Truth which we find in the Bible and providing inside help or power which we need to choose and act on that Truth. Then, it is all about practicing the truth of God’s Word. That’s a choice. It will not suffice if you sit back and do nothing, expecting God to tie your shoelaces or for Him to remove your defects. Do your part. Recognize the defect and the lie behind it and choose the righteous way. Thank God that He did not create us to be robots on one hand or puppets on a string on the other.
We are free moral agents and God created us with the faculty of choice. As a Christian, born from above spiritually, we have inside power to choose and walk the righteous path. It comes from the grace of God. Grace does not grant permission to live in the flesh; it supplies power to live in the Spirit. To live in the Spirit is to hear, read, and practice God’s Word. And that involves our own ability to choose once we are freed from the bondage of sin. That’s the grace provided by salvation. If you don’t have it, seek it aggressively. And if you have been saved, and you are pondering some choice, remember this: God’s way is always the right way, and His Power is in you to help choose it and do it. Remember, pain is from a wrong choice. Blessing is from a right choice. From the absolutely essential book of James this promise becomes fulfilled through choice: But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do (James 1:25).
Reference Links
Building Character – As God Sees It – Killing The Pain – ETERNAL SOBRIETY