We commit ourselves to "Trust God, clean house, and work with others." We give ourselves over to respond inwardly and outwardly increasingly more with God's goodness, righteousness, and grace. The doing of all this with a sincere and humble heart situates ourselves for a spiritual awakening.
This description is a basic summary of the 12 step process with an emphasis upon spiritual development. This is a life journey so it takes time. It's a process we can grow with each day. It is a path to freedom, peace, joy, and love.
We admit that our way of living is insufficient, lacking, and that we need help outside of ourselves.
We become willing to learn through new Godly action. We trust God's ways over our own. We are convinced living by God's principles can improve our souls.
We commit ourselves to God. We commit to rely upon God's principles instead of our own. We commit to progressively purify our hearts and cleanse our conscience from our wrongs and hurt. We are ready to take action.
We write down our resentments including any self-resentment. We write down whatever we have done that hurts our heart or conscience. We humbly and sincerely share these with another person and God. We get real about what we have done with a willingness to begin living in correction with God's righteousness.
We learn more about character traits. We study character of God and evaluate our own character for improvement. We humbly and sincerely pray for strength to think and practice more with God's character and principles.
We whole-heartedly seek to restore harm we have done to others throughout our lives. As servants for God, God's interests become ours. We right ourselves with others to right ourselves more with God. We forgive, have mercy, and restore wrongs.
We continue to practice God's character each day. We focus upon how we can learn, grow, and improve with our spiritual character and attitude. We pray, reflect, study, meditate, and listen to our spiritual senses each day. We help others with these steps as humble and sincere servants to God. We learn the lessons of love through experience.
In order to develop our spiritual senses we will need to sharpen our attention to feeling them. Since God is love we will need to focus on how we learn to love. We will need to practice empathy, kindness, gentleness, and affection while learning the results from doing it. Because God is there. Being in alignment with such things is righteousness. We need to do all these things as best we can while seeing we are sincere and in truth. These are all Godly good things to do.
There will be parts of ourselves seeking to sabotage our walk in God’s ways. Pride, fear, self-seeking, and self-deception will have their way with us from time to time.
As we experience cognitive dissonance we can practice surrender to do God's will. "Thy will, not mind, be done."
This growth is a process that is not over night. It is a life-long developmental journey. It’s best to take simple small progressive steps and keep walking toward God.
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