Celebrate Recovery - Why I Believe CR is for Everyone!

There are multiple arguments I have heard against Celebrate Recovery. I am going to address a couple of the more common ones. In doing this I hope you will see Celebrate Recovery is for everyone. After all, we all fall short of living a perfect life and have all experienced hurts, habits and hang-ups that keep us from living life to the fullest. Celebrate Recovery is a program that allows you to live an abundant life!

Here are the 5 most common reasons I have heard for not attending Celebrate Recovery:

1.       I don’t need Celebrate Recovery because I am not an addict or alcoholic.

2.       I don’t believe in God, and Celebrate Recovery believes in that mythical guy in the sky.

3.       I don’t need a 12 step program to help me. The 12 steps are for junkies and winos.

4.       I am not going to tell a bunch of people my problems.

5.       I don’t need a sponsor to help me live my life.

Here are my responses to the arguments listed above:

1.       So you are not addicted to alcohol or drugs. In fact, you may never have seen drugs or touched a drop of alcohol your entire life. That does not mean recovery isn’t for you. There are many things in this life that we struggle to recover from. That is why Celebrate Recovery addresses more than just addiction. It addresses hurts habits and hang-ups.

HURTS are those feelings elicited from experiencing hurtful situations and other people’s negative behaviors. HABITS are the chronic behaviors and addictions you use to cope with stressors in life. HANG-UPS are negative mental attitudes that keep us from progressing further in life. Everyone struggles with at least one, if not many of these issues.  

2.       Yes, Celebrate Recovery is a Christ-centered program. However, you don’t have to be a Christian to go there. When I first came to Celebrate Recovery, I was an atheist who leaned towards agnosticism. I came because I was depressed and hopeless and the meetings that I had been going to were not working for me. The meetings I went to were overflowing with sobriety but deficient in recovery.  

I needed something different. I needed to be around positive people who did not all refer to themselves as addicts and alcoholics. I found that in Celebrate Recovery. I also found there was a kinship between addicts, codependents, workaholics and people with eating disorders. There was a similarity between my anger, someone else’s depression and someone’s materialism. I had friends that were not addicts and alcoholics but who still struggled with life. That was healing in a way I had never known before. I gained hope and stopped judging myself.

3.       Why don’t you need the 12 steps? Is there a guide you follow to help you live a more satisfying, less chaotic life? If not, there should be and that is what the 12 steps are. They are a game plan for success in life. Who does not need to live a better life? I have yet to meet a perfect person. I know great people who live amazing lives, but they are ALL WORKS IN PROGRESS .  The 12 steps are a guide to making the progress we all need in order to live richer, more fulfilling lives.

4.       I understand why there may be things you don’t want to share with other people. I get that! I was abused as a child both physically and sexually. People knew that I had been abused physically. I was ashamed of being sexually abused, though. I knew I would be judged and criticized if anyone knew, so I kept that secret for over 30 years. I never told anyone. I was speaking at a church when I shared it for the first time. It wasn’t planned, it just happened.

After the sermon, I had someone tell me he had been molested as well and had never told anyone until now. Since I began sharing that part of my life, half a dozen men have thanked me for sharing and told me I was the first person they had ever shared that part of their life with. So my sharing helped others. It also helped me. The burden I once struggled to carry alone has been shared with many others. It no longer feels as heavy and shameful as it once did. I have been met with nothing but love and encouragement since I began sharing that part of my life. In fact, the shame and guilt I carried for over 30 years has vanished!  

5.       The word sponsor here really turns some people off. Instead of sponsor, let’s call this person a mentor. A mentor is an adviser who is both experienced and trusted. Bill Gates, the world’s richest person according to the Forbes 400 in 2013, has a mentor. Bill Gate regularly goes to Warren Buffet for advice. Socrates mentored Plato, Plato mentored Aristotle and Aristotle mentored Alexander the Great. Even in the Bible, we see that Barnabas mentored Paul who in turn mentored Timothy.

If Bill Gates, Aristotle and Paul felt the need for mentors, maybe you should as well. After all, mentors/sponsors are vitally important to making positive changes in our lives. They have a history of making the kind of choices we strive to make in order to have the type of life we desire to live. They have been where we are and have a found a better life for themselves and they share that recipe for success with us!

When I came to Celebrate Recovery I was no longer a proud and angry agnostic who knew it all. I was shattered and hopeless. Life had finally broken me fundamentally and I saw no way out. I had tried everything: Rational Recovery, various anonymous recovery groups, counseling, prescription medication, residential and outpatient treatment, prison, jail, house arrest, probation, parole and finally suicide. Nothing has ever worked for longer than 3 months.

What I found in Celebrate Recovery worked. I have been free from my addictions for over 5 years now. I want to share the hope and happiness I have found with others. That is why I speak in communities and churches. This is the reason I write and post things through my blog. I want to share the strength, experience and hope I found when I experienced Christ’s love and grace with everyone.  Celebrate Recovery works!

If you have any doubts or questions about the efficacy of Celebrate Recovery please share them with me. Send me messages on Facebook or post them in the comments on my blog. That way I can answer them and allay your fears, anxieties and doubts so you give Celebrate Recovery a try. I want you to attend meetings, join a step study group and give it a chance. The only things you have to lose are the hurts habits and hang-ups you struggle with. It worked for me and I truly believe it will work for you!

Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics Chapter 7: Is the New Testament Reliable?

Until the 1450 when Johannes Gutenberg made the practice obsolete, all books were handwritten. So for 1400 years the New Testament was vulnerable to corruption. The New Testament was written by the church. Not all churches had all of the books. When a church received a document from an apostle, they wrote copies of it and sent it to other churches, who in turn did the same thing. They also highly valued the books, so great care was made to transmit them word for word. With that said, mistakes were still made.

There were two general ways to copy books. One way had a scribe who would take the book he wanted to copy, sit it in front of him, then copy it word for word. The other way used a text with several scribes writing while someone read aloud the text. This way was much quicker, but there was a problem with the second method that the first method did not have. Some words sound very similar yet contain different meanings, such as to and too or pare, pair and pear.

To deal with the issues of differences in texts, textual criticism was developed. In this, all extant copies of a manuscript are compared to each other. From there they use various techniques to identify which of the texts are the oldest. If differences are found in the text, then earliest texts are preferred. There is another method, which looks at what text the majority of the copies uses and adopt that.

Needless to say, the more copies of manuscripts we have the more accurately we can decipher the original text. With the New Testament, if we only were to use original language manuscripts we would have over 5,300 copies. Some of them date from as early as 125-130 AD, less than 50 years after the book was written. The Magdalen Papyri is dated to 70 AD and 7Q5, a Qumran fragment, has been dated between 50 BC and 50 AD.

To compare, the writings of Aristotle date 1400 years later and the total number of any one book is 49. Tetralogy by Plato has an earliest dated copy 1300 after he wrote it and there are only 7 manuscripts. The New Testament has 5,300 copies in original language, another 8,000 Latin Vulgate from the 4^th Century and 9,300 earlier version in Coptic, Armenian, Nubian and Syriac.

There are about 200,000 variants in 10,000 different places. Most of these are misspellings, interpolation of words or orthographical. Orthographical differences would be theater and theatre, where both are correct. There are the previously mentioned textual criticism methods to sort out differences, but there are about 400 words comprising 40 verses where the original writing is just not known. They contain no essential Christian doctrine.

Archeology and non-Christian writings have also been helpful. Archeology has consistently and repeatedly confirmed the New Testament. There are also the Jewish historian Josephus, the Roman historian Tacitus, Pliny the Younger (governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor) and the Greek satirist Lucian who speak of Christians, Jesus, the crucifixion, John the Baptist and James the brother of Jesus.

As for the word being inspired by God, Mr. Powell looks at the claim by other books to be divine. To decipher which is, we must first determine which is a reliable historical document. The Bible is backed up by archeology, non-Christian writings as well as a remarkable number of ancient copies. Then we look to Jesus claiming to be God. If the resurrection arguments are compelling, t hen we must take Jesus at his word. If Jesus in turn considered the Old Testament to be the Word of God, and what we have just discussed above in this paragraph is true, we have good reason to accept it as well.

Thanks for reading, hope to see you next time when we look at Chapter 8, which addresses if the Old Testament is reliable.