The Healing Power of Grace
After church one Sunday, Wendy, a dear friend, asked if I would be open to serving in a new ministry that involved helping hurting people called, Celebrate Recovery. It sounded like something I would enjoy, not to mention I knew a little bit about hardship and adversity.
Turns out that I got the honor to minister to and help hundreds of people during our 4-year ministry. But the surprise for me was that this program was the life transformation I had been desperately seeking. I spent the better part of 25-years and thousands of dollars reading self-help books, listening to motivational CDs and attended seminars, and workshops designed to improve one’s life. Unlike the books, CDs, and seminars, Celebrate Recovery delivered the life change I needed to go from surviving to thriving.
Celebrate Recovery (CR) is a program that is based on Jesus’ teachings from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus describes “Eight Ways to Be Happy”, known as the Beatitudes from Matthew 5. The Beatitudes are the eight principles in CR that help an individual to achieve wholeness and spiritual maturity.
CR focuses on the future, rather than past. The program teaches you to focus on Christ’s power, not your power. Regardless of your past, the solution is to start making wise choices and rely on Christ’s strength to make them.
CR emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility versus playing the blame game. It helps people to own up to their poor choices and teaches them how to make wiser decisions. When we stop wasting time on placing blame, we have more energy to resolve the problem. When we stop denying our own faults, the healing power of Christ’s grace can begin to work in our minds, our hearts, and our lives.
In principle three, CR calls us to totally surrender our lives to the control of Christ, for which LASTING change cannot happen without. CR uses a biblical truth from Ecclesiastes 4: 9-10, that we need each other to grow spiritually and emotionally and two major components for that growth are fellowship and accountability.
CR addresses all types of hurts, habits, and hang-ups. A few of my hurts, habits, and hang-ups were verbal abuse, codependency, perfectionism, people pleasing, and control issues. If lasting life change is something you are seeking I invite you to check out a Celebrate Recovery program in your area.
Check out my podcast in my Blog every other week as I share my first CR Step Study journey from 2010.
