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September 21 – What Only God Can Do · The Daily Ripples Podcast

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  Hey guys welcome to the daily ripples and got pastor mike and me tori here and
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  today is september 21st what only god can do,
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  the stone god accomplishes in me what i could never accomplish through my strength alone,
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  Practical. Today I will do the
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  work that is mine to do and trust God with what only He can accomplish.
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  I am responsible for my willingness and obedience.
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  The transformation itself belongs to whom? Spiritual.
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  As I faithfully follow Christ, the Holy Spirit accomplishes changes within me,
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  that I could never produce by determination alone.
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  But the more I trust the Father's work instead of my own effort,
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  the more I recognize His grace shaping my life from the inside out.
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  I like where God accomplishes me what I could never accomplish through my own
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  strength alone. That kind of aligns to page 62 in our big books.
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  And that kind of goes on to talk about, I mean, what you've heard about,
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  you hear people talk like that, and they're like, hey man, I'm here working on my resentment.
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  Yeah and i'm working on like i'm working on this and men's and do whatever they're
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  working on and like i and if i come into a position of can't manage my life,
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  you know and then the you got the physical mental side of alcoholism right but i can't manage it,
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  but i want to say that i'm trying to manage this i'm trying to manage this,
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  and i think you know i've been thinking about this a little bit lately i probably
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  think i think i go in waves yeah yeah i think i like i'll you are doing the
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  wave book study now so that's only fitting.
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  Like shameless plug yeah later today 4 p.m tune in,
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  i'll go in like i'll go in deep in this thought over here for a minute and then
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  i'll come over here in this thought but then i'll just be right back where i
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  was you know just you know thinking about things and.
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  So, like, you know, when people say, like, or like when this says right here,
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  I could never accomplish through my own strength alone. Well,
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  like, there is the action of, like, well, let me bring God into it, right?
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  But what does all the other actions look like? And so if I think about,
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  like, when I look on page 62, it says, many of us had moral and philosophical
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  convictions of the Lord, but we could not live up to them, even though we would have liked to.
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  Neither could we reduce our self-centeredness by wishing or trying on our own
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  power. We had to have God's help.
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  So when I think about that, it's like, oh, well, do I just ask God?
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  Do I make a prayer and say, hey, God, can I have your help today? And that's it?
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  Because I don't find that that's it.
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  There's action to it, right? Because on page 63, it says, he provided what we
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  needed if we kept close to him and performed his work well.
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  And so I ask myself, what do I need? and how do I get out of this?
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  So instead of me asking God, hey, God, I just need you to take care of this
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  and this would be the last, get me out of this jail cell, get me out of this back of this cop car.
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  Instead of doing that, I got to do the work. And what's the work?
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  Well, I would venture to say, you know, helping God's kids.
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  Because I can't just, I don't know if you've ever found this,
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  but working on me doesn't get me too far.
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  That makes sense. Right, because you're trying to do the work all yourself at
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  that point. Right. You're trying to fix yourself. And it never moves. No.
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  Because if I'm only talking to myself, then I'm only hearing my own thoughts.
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  I'm not hearing any new thoughts. I'm not hearing any new thoughts.
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  You know, I mean, there are times when I experience, you know,
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  what we call a spiritual experience, you know, kind of a divine revelation or
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  a thought that comes out of nowhere.
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  And if it's for the good of others or in service to God's kingdom,
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  that's usually how I test it to know whether that's the Holy Spirit leading
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  me into doing something, right? Whether it's my higher power.
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  Because I have had those thoughts. I mean, not the least of which is.
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  Man, I could take it all the way back to when I was a year and a half sober
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  and reading the Bible and felt like it was talking to me directly and calling
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  me into ministry, right?
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  That's not an internal thought that I had for myself.
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  That was me and my time with God, and I could hear God talking to me.
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  And I've had other experiences like that, you know, since then.
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  But the first time, I got to tell you, Corey, that was scary.
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  It kind of freaked me out. You know, I put that Bible aside,
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  and I didn't open it probably for six months because I'm like,
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  if that's what you got to say.
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  I don't want to hear it. But anyway, here we are here today.
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  You know, I moved past that, obviously, because.
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  When God is really talking to you and leading you to do something,
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  He's going to keep at you until you submit, until you submit to that, what needs to be done.
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  And I don't think that I would have peace today if I had not followed what God wanted me to do.
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  But in context of this one today, because we've been talking all month,
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  it's September, it's the ninth month, so we're talking about the ninth step
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  a lot, the making of the amends.
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  And so as it's reading through here, especially the practical ripple,
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  you know, today I'll do the work that is mine to do and trust God with what only he can accomplish.
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  Well, what is the work that is mine to do? Well, in the context of the night
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  step, that is make my direct amends, you know, humble myself before the people
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  that I've hurt and make a direct amends.
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  And whether that's emotional damage, whether it's financial damage,
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  whether it's physical damage, you know, whatever the case may be.
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  I don't know. I used you this about a week ago on Sunday. I don't know if you realize that or not.
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  Because I opened up with a cold open, I use your mailboxes, right?
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  And so, you know, I was breaking down, you know, direct and indirect amends kind of stuff.
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  And because, you know, the direct amends is I got to go stand the mailbox back
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  up. Right. You know, or pay for it.
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  If it's been too much time, they've had to pay to fix it, you know, reimburse.
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  And apologize to people I knocked the mailbox down to begin with.
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  But an indirect or a living amend is never going to stand in that mailbox back up.
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  But anyway, that's just—so the work to be done, the work that's mine to do,
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  is to make those direct amends when I mess up.
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  Kind of the promise that I see, you know, through what we're talking about here
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  today, though, is that it says, you know, in that spiritual side,
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  as I faithfully follow Christ, you know, the Holy Spirit accomplishes changes
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  within me that I could never produce by determination alone.
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  So in other words, if I just dive in and start doing the work that God has called
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  me to do, and in the context of step nine, that is making direct amends,
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  it will produce changes in me because that faithfulness that I'm exhibiting
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  by setting aside my ego and my
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  pride and going directly to the people that I've hurt and owning up to it.
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  I mean, that's not easy. It wasn't easy for me to do.
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  I don't know about you, but it was not easy for me to do, but it was vital because
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  now that I've done that work, I can experience the promises the big book talks about in there.
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  But I never did any of it alone.
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  It's kind of like Philippians 1 and 6 says that he who began a good work in
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  you will carry it on to completion.
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  Well, God begins a good work in me by the Holy Spirit telling me what I need
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  to do, giving me the good orderly direction.
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  And then if I faithfully follow God's instructions, He's going to do—you know,
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  in the Methodist tradition, we call that sanctifying grace.
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  It's the grace of God that reforms us into the person that God wanted us to be when we were created.
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  You know, back into like 77, you know, where it says, right,
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  as I faithfully follow Christ, the Holy Spirit accomplishes changes within me.
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  I could never produce by determination alone and so like when I was reading
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  this out loud and my phone was ringing anyways and my head got all out of whack where I was.
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  But you know but what this says to me really is like you know we get all these
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  people I know that hang around the rooms that we hang around in and others just like it.
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  Talk about these defects of characters and shortcomings and all these things, right?
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  And they're really profound with it. Man, I've gone to some cool meetings on
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  defects of characters, listening to these people profound and get into depth of how these.
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  People are working on their defects of character.
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  And it's interesting because back to what I said before, it says in your thing, right?
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  I could never produce by determination alone, right?
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  Yeah. And so when I look at that and back to 62, just to clarify that what it
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  says, neither could we reduce our self-centeredness by wishing or trying on
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  our own power to have God's help.
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  So when I think about these character defects and all this stuff,
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  right, the way the book is set up, and I know we talked about this,
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  but on page 77, the next page after eight, after eight and nine on 77.
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  And you know, after eight and nine, that's a couple, that's what eight pages,
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  eight pages, eight pages. I recently counted it. It's eight. Yes. Eight pages.
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  That's talking about eight and nine. But on the second page of it,
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  it says our real purpose is to fit ourselves, to be a maximum service to God,
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  the people about us fitting myself.
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  So what does that look like when I'm fitting myself?
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  Well, I'll tell you like in And real time, what that looks like for me is I
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  wrote out a letter, well, wrote out a text message today, and I...
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  Gave my sponsor a call about this amends of this approach I'm making.
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  And if it's a good, like if it's, if he, you know, checks marks the approach
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  I'm making with this individual so I can send it. And then I can,
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  hopefully they'll want to talk to me so I can talk to them.
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  But when I do that, that's how God fits me.
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  It's not through my actions of me trying to offset the seven deadlies with the
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  seven heavenly virtues.
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  It's not me trying to do that. It's me going and making everything right.
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  And when I do that, hopefully I don't go and do this thing again.
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  Hopefully I don't go and cheat on my fiance because I've made some other things
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  right with some other women that I've done those actions with.
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  Because until I face that stuff, man, I'm just getting by.
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  Because I've never faced, like, you rob a bank once and you get $100,000.
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  Well, you're sitting there and you're out of the $100,000. dollars,
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  You didn't get called. Yeah, probably in like three months. Right.
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  But like the normal person that gets away, gets money from something.
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  Maybe it's not like Robin Banks kind of extreme. Sure. But like,
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  you know, they do it again.
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  Yeah. They do it again. Well, and I think about, because I've heard,
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  you know, stories from people in recovery, you know, and even people in the
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  church, obviously, and things like that.
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  So say you go into business and you're performing a service and say that you
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  are a pest control expert, right?
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  You do a job that's in somebody's home that the people who live there that hire
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  you to do it, they're not going to necessarily know if you do that job fully and completely, right?
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  So if you don't have the proper level of integrity, you could start cutting
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  corners, skimping on the service. You start out providing great service and,
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  you know, spraying in every nook and cranny.
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  And then over time, you start to figure out, well, you know,
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  the people that live here, they're never in this floor of their house.
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  So I'm just not even going to spray that part. I'm going to hurry up and get done and leave.
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  And before you know it, you know, you're shafting your customers left and right,
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  right? And so that's how it moves and develops.
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  And, you know, left to my own devices, to my own nature, you know,
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  I might be right there operating that same kind of way, you know,
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  what can I get away with kind of thing.
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  But I don't know, I'm just glad that I don't have to live that way today.
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  Proverbs 14, verse 9 says, Fools mock in making amends for sin,
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  but goodwill is found among the upright.
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  And so I was telling you about a kind of like, so I noticed a lot of similarities
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  on, well, I didn't tell you what I was, anyways, there's some similarities.
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  Yeah. And the similarities in chapter 14 is the word upright.
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  Yeah. And it says it three times in the—anyways.
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  So when I think about fools making amends, fools mock at making amends for sin. Forget the drinking.
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  If I'm living in moral chaos, conundrum, right?
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  I'm crazy. I can't even shut my eyes. I can't sleep at night.
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  That's why people can't sleep at night.
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  But then the other things that it was talking about— I mean,
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  it's a house of cards, and you put one card out, and it's all going to crumble, falls.
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  Yeah, 14.2 says, Whoever fears the Lord walks uprightly, but those who despise
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  him are devious in their ways.
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  Anyways, and then the other one was, The house of the wicked will be destroyed,
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  but the tent of the upright will flourish.
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  I don't know. I was just kind of thinking about how it had a minge in there talking about upright.
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  Anyways, I thought that Proverbs were, I've been doing this thing every day. Yeah, I liked it, yeah.
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  Proverbs a day. Right. And I've gotten a lot out of it.
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  You were talking about how the things that we have to do in AA following this program.
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  And I was thinking about as you were sharing just overall that the AA program
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  trains us to live in a way that is not our normal nature. Right. And...
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  For me, the Bible, our faith, does the same thing.
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  It trains us to live in a way that's not our normal human nature and trains
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  us to live in a way that's in accordance with God's will.
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  And the big book kind of does the same thing for alcoholics.
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  It trains us to live in a way according to God's will, not to our human will.
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  And so for me, the more that I submit to God's will, you know,
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  every day through actions, through study, through all the things that I do,
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  I know the better that my life turns out.
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  And it kind of hits on that, or I kind of hit on that at the end of that spiritual ripple.
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  The more I trust the Father's work instead of my own effort,
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  the more I recognize His grace shaping my life from the inside out.
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  Or to put it another way, page 84 of the big book, we'll suddenly realize that
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  God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Yeah.
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  That's a good way to end it, bud. I recovered.
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  Prayer, sir. Prayer. Father God, thank you for doing in me what I could never do but for myself.
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  Through your Holy Spirit, help me remain willing and obedient every day.
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  Shade me through the example of Jesus. Amen.