“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results. – James 5:16 (NLT)
There is nothing easy about the 5th Step in Alcoholics Anonymous. But if we wish to remain sober, we know that avoiding it isn’t an option.
As I sat down with my first sponsor to begin going over my moral inventory, I felt like I was a defendant standing before the judge. And had that literally been the case, I would’ve been completely screwed. All of the supporting evidence to render a verdict of “guilty” was right there in front of me, 30-something pages worth.
I don’t remember saying much. In fact, I was confused. As my sponsor was looking over the guilt and shame of my past, he was disclosing to me some of his own. For a brief moment it felt like I was the sponsor sitting down with him.
Nor do I recall him saying much of anything about what I had written. There were no gasps, no facial expressions, nothing. He just kept talking about his experience doing the 5th Step with his sponsor.
And yet it was still nerve-racking for me, because I had been (like the Big Book tells us to be) rigorously honest. There was a lot of stuff I’d written down that I was terribly ashamed of. Then again, if an AA hasn’t written several items down in his moral inventory that he’s not proud of, surely he’s not met the standard of honesty that this step calls for.
Having been active in a few men’s ministries over the years, I’m very familiar with the struggle that men have with practicing the level of humility and vulnerability needed to experience real freedom. It’s simply not in our nature. “I’ll never tell a soul about this, ever. This will go to the grave with me.” What many of us fail to realize is that holding on to guilt and shame can easily take us to our graves much earlier than we expect. Especially those of us who have an impressive history of alcohol-related insanity.
So after finishing the step with my sponsor that afternoon, I began to feel better about myself on my drive home. I wasn’t in jail, my sponsor didn’t fire me on the spot for being human, and I had a sense of peace that I hadn’t felt in years.
There’s a story in the Bible, it’s in John chapter 8. The Jewish religious authorities brought a woman before Jesus. She had been caught in the act of adultery. They made her stand in front of the crowd as they addressed Jesus. “Teacher, the law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?” Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “Alright, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down and again began writing in the dust. When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one until only Jesus was left with the woman.
Some believe that it was Jesus’ writing in the dust that caused the Jewish priests to depart, thinking that he had been writing a list of their secret sins. Of course, the Bible doesn’t say exactly what Jesus was writing in the dust. But if that belief is true, it offers us a beautiful illustration of the kind of person Jesus is… a person who we can safely tell our worst secrets to.
Whoever we share our sins to – this person needs to be someone who doesn’t condemn us; someone who, like Jesus, takes note of our private wrongs and writes them in the dust, not etching them in stone and displaying them in the public square. Someone we trust and respect, someone who will encourage us to repent and do better.
Jesus didn’t condemn the woman. He told her, “Go, and sin no more.” He wasn’t surprised by her sin, and neither is he surprised by ours.
So after we finish our 5th Step and move into the 6th, let us remember that God is ready to remove all of our defects of character. Are we ready to hand them over to Him?
Former Blackout Artist 