Monday November 12, 2012 -- Step 11 -- Sharing Heart To Heart

Why do we make prayer, meditation, and seeking God’s will a part of our recovery program?

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

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing and perfect will.  (Romans 12:2)

The purpose of prayer and meditation spoken of in Step 11 is to help us learn how to hear God and to sensitize us to a way of life that is being revealed to us through His word. Through prayer, we get in touch with a loving and powerful God who is already at work changing our lives. When we read His word and listen to what He has to say, God will respond and reveal His good and perfect and pleasing will to us.  Jesus said If you stay joined to Me and My words remain in you, you may ask any request you like, and it will be granted! Ask Me and I will tell you some remarkable secrets about what is going to happen. If you need wisdom—if you want to know what God wants you to do—ask Him, and He will gladly tell you. He will not resent your asking. And we can be confident that God will listen to us whenever we ask Him for anything in line with His will. And if we know He is listening when we make our requests, we can be sure that He will give us what we ask for. (John 15:7, Jeremiah 33:3, James 1:5, 1 John 5:14-15)

Using prayer and meditation as tools in our new life with God in recovery, we move from faint hope in some vague higher power to a deeply experienced relationship with a loving friend. We begin to invite the Holy Spirit of God into the deepest, most confused, most fearful, most painful, and most practical areas of our life. We don't seek to simply learn facts about God but rather to be safely at home in His loving presence with all that we are, all that we have been, and all that we long to be.  We stay close to God because living in this atmosphere renews our whole being, body, mind and spirit.