Helpful Steps

'Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other’s burdens …’, Galatians 6:1-2

‘Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed’, James 5:18

Sometimes people can become captured by behaviour to the point of addiction.

Probably the most well-known process for helping those caught in addictive behaviour is the Twelve Step program used by Alcoholics Anonymous. This process originated in a Christian context and was then adapted for use in non-Christian settings. Its widespread use across the world is evidence of its effectiveness.

These are the twelve steps:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. We made a list of all the persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when doing so would injure them or others.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and practice these principles in all our affairs.

The Christian foundation for this program is immediately clear; we have already studied many of these steps in this series this month.

Two psalms are understood to be prayers for addicts.

Psalm 142 is seven verses long and could be understood as a prayer by someone who is not familiar with spiritual things.

Whereas Psalm 143, which is almost twice as long, is much more specific and relationally based and is understood by some to be the prayer of someone who loves God but is addicted in some way.