Step Eleven: Prayer And Meditation Series

Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for the knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.

Scripture: Col 3:16

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.

Assertion: This step and all the steps are based on the fact that God is alive and capable of revealing himself as he truly is through a personal relationship with Him and others in a group of people or a community of faith.

What is prayer? The simple answer is talking to God. What is meditation? The simple answer is listening to God. However, I think Bill tied them together in this step to ensure we didn’t just rush through our laundry list of what we want him to do for us as before. The foxhole God and the cash register God needed to go. In fact, I think Bill wanted to make sure that our prayer and mediation were tied together so we didn’t go off the deep end and pray to tree. He wanted our prayer life to become more Christ like. Jesus Christ prayed throughout his existence and the reasons he prayed should be ours as well.

It’s fairly interesting to me that when Jesus taught about prayer he began with a word that we might actually translate as “Papa”. You see, praying is meant to be intimate and as Christians, it is with the understanding that we are praying to the Father God, through the Son with the Spirit helping to guide us through this life.

Prayer is an:

1) Admission of God – No matter how you slice it, when we pray we are admitting to God and to ourselves that we believe. If you are earnestly sharing your heart with God, you are also expressing your belief. You can’t call out knowing God is present and not expect Him to answer.

2) Submission to God – When we pray for His will in our life, we are submitting ourselves to His plan. Hence, we become more in tune with what it means to yield our will to His.

3) Conviction (Faith) in God – It said somewhere in the AA’s big book that the only person who doesn’t actually believe prayer works, has never tried it. Now, I’m not saying that if you pray for a million dollars or to win the lottery your going to get it. I am saying that if you pray for God to intervene in your life in powerful way and are open to His movement (no matter what), powerful changes will happen.

4) Relation with God – Prayer helps us communicate to God the desires of our heart. Although He already knows them, our willingly sharing of them creates a relationship between us and God through the Holy Spirit that allows us to hear, sense, feel His will in our life or for the lives of those around us.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. If it’s that simple, why doesn’t he answer my prayers? I pray for his will in my life and it seems like he isn’t around.

The scriptures give five direct answers to that question.

1) There is unconfessed sin in our lives (Isaiah 59:2) – However, we address this situation when we have worked through Steps 4 & 5.

2) We have failed to forgive others (Matt 6:14-15) – Again, steps 8-9 addresses in the cleaning our side of the street

3) We haven’t been obedient to God’s commands on our lives (1 John 3:21-22) We can repent and clean up our past but the old adage remains true. You can sober up a horse thief but you’re still left with a horse thief. Is God commanding you to do something and you are avoiding because there is pain or risk involved?

4) We want something but have impure motives for wanting it (James 4:2-3). Again, the old adage rings true. You can get sober and remain self centered, selfish and egotistical. It won’t be a real happy existence but you can be sober.

5) We misunderstand the will of God and so we ask for stuff not good for us. God wants to give us only good gifts (Matt 7:11)

Now Jesus gives us a wonderful prayer we say at the end of every meeting, it’s called, “The Our Father”. It is truly the model for prayer. In it, Jesus was telling us to pray in adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication. However, there are many prayers in the world that demonstrate this pattern and many that don’t. The dearest to many a recovery person is the serenity prayer. The Serenity prayer was written by Reinhold Neibhur in 1934. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. The prayer as it’s recited at recovery meetings is only part of a much richer whole. In fact, it is the remainder of the prayer that can carry some of the richest gifts for peace and joy. The prayer goes on to say, Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as a pathway to peace; Taking, as he did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next!