HIGHER POWER

John 4:22-24
22You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."



I work at a facility called Adolescent Center for Treatment (ACT) and we deal with drug and alcohol addicted teens. We teach many groups with the clients in attempt to lead them through treatment and most of these groups are developed around a 12-step program. We teach each kid the 12 steps and how to implement them and we encourage each kid to get a sponsor and we try to walk the clients through these steps on their way to recovery. As some of you may know, the 12 step model for recovery is very spiritual. It deals with many spiritual ideas and mentions God in over half of the steps, while every step focuses around getting right with God and getting right with people. (sounds an awful lot like Luke 10:27 huh!) Well, one of the groups that I teach is called “Upward Pathways” and it deals with coming to identify a “Higher Power” as they say in AA and NA groups. As I have talked with many students about identifying a Higher Power and the importance of that step in recovery, I have heard a confusing and disturbing response from several students on several occasions. The response is this; when being asked about who they would identify as their Higher Power many students have replied saying something to the effect of…”Well, I believe in God and all, but I wouldn’t call Him my Higher Power, I would say that my Higher Power is probably…” That shocks me every time, because in essence what they are claiming is that they truly believe that there is a being out there somewhere in the cosmos that is big enough and powerful enough to create this world in which I live and even create humanity and that this all powerful being is out there wanting to know them and be their “Higher Power”, to be their help, and they’re saying, “nah, I want my help, my “Higher Power” to be my sister or my boyfriend, or I have even heard one of these God believing clients say that their’s was their dog. I leave thinking, how can these clients make statements like that. I mean it makes no sense. I have actually put quite a bit of thought into this phenomenon. What I have come to realize is that these client have been told for years that thee is a God, a creator, or maybe through their own thinking and fathoming about our universe, our world they have come to conclude that there must be a creator, but they have never come to understand who God is. They have probably put very little effort into attempting to understand who God is. Their perception of God is that he is this great big magic character out there somewhere that created our universe and that there are theses weird people on earth that know some magic code and jump through all sorts of crazy hoops and follow all sorts of strict rules and so they kind of know God. That’s it! That is their understanding of God, which couldn’t be further from the truth about who God is. I truly believe with all my heart that if we could strip away all that we know or think or have seen from so-called God followers and strip away all that we think we know of God, and begin afresh with a true understanding of who God really is we would not be able to respond to him in any other way than to worship Him. Worship Him in spirit and in truth.