Recovery for EveryoneSample

Going to the Right Place

I’m going to get a little theological for a moment to explain where your healing and freedom is and why. I want to share with you a revelation that helped me make sense of why I needed to confess to another person to be made free. This is why “just Jesus and I” wasn’t working, and why I couldn’t get free earlier in my life. 

After Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead, he visited earth a few times. He was on the road to Damascus with two men, then with 10 disciples, then with 11 disciples, and then with 500 of his followers (1 Corinthians 15.) 

Now, Jesus was with 500 people prior to the medicine era. Surely there was an opportunity to heal, but there’s not one recording of the resurrected Christ doing any healing. 

However, turn to the last page in the gospels and you’ll find yourself in the book of Acts, and healing is happening everywhere (Acts 3:1-10.) Amazing healing miracles happened through the apostles and other believers in Jesus. Why? The healing power of Jesus transferred from the head of Christ to the body of Christ. If you wanted healing or recovery, it was (and is) found inside other believers. I had been ignorantly going to the head of Jesus for what he places in his body. I was banging my head against the wall, thinking God didn’t hear me or want to set me free. All along, I was simply going to the wrong place or using the wrong principle to get the results I truly needed, which were healing and recovery. 

You see, like so many other Christians who have addictions, I was forgiven, but I wanted healing or recovery. When I started to use the principle of confession, the healing and freedom in Christ’s body was able to flow through my roommate to me. I was then able to get healed, get free, and stay free. 

If you and I are 100 percent willing to get honest with another person of the same gender, we can heal and be free. If we protect our pride and our perceived spiritual reputation, we are guaranteed to stay sick. One of the major things I have learned in counseling people for more than 25 years is that “what you love is what you protect.” 

If you love your addictive choices and behavior, you will protect them. You will lie, minimize, blame, and get angry, sulk, or do whatever you have to do to not be 100 percent honest about your participation in your addictive choices or behavior. If you love real people in your life, including yourself, you will be 100 percent honest about your addictive choices and behaviors, protect the people you love, expose those choices and behavior to the light of another believer, and walk the path of recovery.