John 2:1-11
At the most recent Celebrate Recovery meeting I attended, this week was an extra week - meaning that it was not scheduled for either a testimony or step study. The leader* took the opportunity to talk about what he called the "Divine-Human Cooperative." He explained that what this meant is that we work in partnership with God, God does not work for us.
With reference to addiction, since this is a recovery program, we cannot simply pray for God to remove our addiction (or our co-dependency, or our eating issues, etc.) and expect the he will take it away so easily. True, we can rely on God for strength, but he will not do it all for us. We must do the work in addition to the prayer.
There is the saying, "Pray like everything depends on God, work like everything depends on you." I believe this is the simplest way of defining the Divine-Human Cooperative.
The leader went on to ask, "What's the first miracle?" After a moment of silence with no response from the group, he said, "Most of us in here are drunks. We should know this!" He referred to the miracle of Jesus turning water into wine: John 2:1-11. He illustrated his point by indicating in the scripture where Jesus had the servants fill the water pots and told them to fill the pitcher and take it to the host (John 2:7,8). The only thing Jesus did was turn the water into wine because we as humans could do the rest. Why should Jesus be expected to do ALL the work? The others were perfectly capable of filling some jugs with water and carrying a pitcher to the host.
We must be willing to believe that God can and will perform miracles, and to trust that he will provide, but we cannot rest on our laurels waiting for something to happen. After all, no one will open the door if we haven't knocked.
Amen! :D
*Due to anonymity being a foundation of the program, I obtained the leader's permission to use his words without his name in this blog
No comments:
Post a Comment