“When we don’t do the daily things we need to do to live and be free, when we don’t face things and deal with them, when we don’t admit our faults, when we sweep things under the rug, we give up our freedom. We are then in bondage, and this is manifested by, expressed by, all kinds of problems: alcoholism, drug dependency, codependency, and so on.” Joseph Daniel Mcquany
I was newly sober in the spring of 1980, when I met two men who changed my life forever, the late Joe Mcquany, a man who dedicated his life to helping alcoholics recover and Dr. Robert Lewis, a founder of Fellowship Bible Church, author of half a dozen books or more and founder of the international Men’s Fraternity.
I was going to AA meetings every day, and one of them was Joe’s meeting at the house on Roosevelt Road where he also taught the history and precise meaning of AA’s 12 Steps.
Joe sobered up in 1962, and sobering up other people became his passion and his vocation. Despite the disadvantage of being black in a southern state during the nineteen sixties, Joe, a Christian, helped integrate AA meetings in Arkansas and founded Serenity Park, a treatment facility for men (adding another for women later). He also joined two others in founding the Wolfe Street Center, wrote a curriculum for treatment centers and was known worldwide as a speaker.
Joe used to say, only partly tongue in cheek, “If I hadn’t been an alcoholic I probably would have amounted to nothing.”
Joe became known worldwide in recovery circles, but rarely mentioned it and focused instead on helping people get well. He was a man of significant wisdom who sometimes packaged his serious message in homespun humor. Here’s a sample.
Self vs. God.
“I look at the battles that go on in life, and I look at the resentments and fears, guilt, and remorse, and how these things block us from God and shackle us to the self. Then I look at love, tolerance, patience, courage, and wisdom. These qualities have come from God and they are always within us. In our outer and inner conflicts, we can see the powers of self-contending with the powers of God.
Our powerlessness.
“The truth is that many of the problems we have in life we can’t fix. We are powerless over a whole lot of things…sometimes we have to say, ‘I can’t fix it.’”
Letting go
“To illustrate the necessity of letting go, I often ask people the question, ‘What is the first thing you have to do if you want a new car?’ Usually, they say something like ‘Go to the bank,’ or ‘Go pick one out.’ I say, ‘No it isn’t. The first thing you have to do is give up on the old one.’”
Praying for potatoes.
“Somebody told me once that when you pray for potatoes, the next thing you do is go get a spade and start digging.”
First throw out the ballast. Then go up.
“Everyone thinks change is based on what you’re going to get, but change has a lot to do with what you’re willing to get rid of—like a hot air balloon that goes up when you throw the sand out of it. A lot of people don’t want to throw the sand out; they want to keep the sand and still go up.”
Practice—not theory—makes perfect.
“There has been a lot of discussion about these steps, but they are simple, basic tools of change. They are based on one of the oldest laws of human nature; whatever you practice, you become good at. Whether it’s baseball, piano, or typing, you learn that skill because you work at it. You can’t go to typing class, learn the theory of typing, and become a good typist.”
The search for truth can be hard sometimes.
“Another part of our insanity is our blindness to reality. There is a story of a guy who had two horses. It worried him that he couldn’t tell them apart. So finally, he cropped one’s tail, and he said that worked for a while, but the tail grew back. Then he thought he would mark one horse’s hooves with chalk, and that worked for a while, until the horse walked through some water. Finally, his son got a letter from him saying, ‘Well, son, I’ve finally figured out how to tell those two horses apart. I’ve discovered that the white one is four inches taller than the black one.’”
In a maze, the mouse has the advantage.
“When we are searching for a way out, we are like a mouse in a maze. You can put a mouse in a maze, and when he comes up against a wall, he will search for alternatives until he finally works his way through the maze and gets out. If you ever put him in there again, he will remember the way and go right through. That’s how we do it, too. Our believing might be wrong, but if we believe wrong and decide wrong and run into bad situations, all we have to do is come back and change what we believe and try again until we are finally successful. One advantage the mouse has, though, is that once he makes a mistake, he won’t make it again.”
Fellowship Bible Church
Dr. Robert Lewis was one of three students at the University of Arkansas who were inspired by a vision for a new kind of church. Robert and his associates, Bill Parkinson and Bill Wellons, believed that God had equipped them to do something spectacular in the name of Christ, and in 1977, the group, with fewer than 30 worshipers began meeting in a home in Little Rock, and Fellowship Bible Church (FBC) was born.
By 1980, when my wife and I joined FBC, it had already begun a spectacular journey that is well documented on the church’s website and is a major resource for those who are struggling with an addiction.
Whereas Joe focused on dealing with alcohol and other drug addictions, Robert speaks more broadly of what’s wrong with the human race including the addictions that make us turn to drugs and other destructive solutions to life’s problems.
Robert says, “We have bought into a set of incomplete answers that have some validity but are inadequate as full explanations of the human condition.
As examples of these half-truths, Robert cites:
Poor self esteem—a theory suggesting that the problem with people is not that they are bad but rather that they think badly of themselves.
Others are to blame—”the problem isn’t me, we say, it’s you.” Men in particular are prone to this excuse, as in “if my wife was just better, or if my job were just more fulfilling, I could get things right.”
Lack of education- if we were all educated enough, society’s problems would be eliminated. Despite the shortcomings of our educational systems we are probably better educated than ever before, but it hasn’t helped.
Defective genes– this view suggest that our problems can be traced to genetic issues, i.e. “It’s not my fault that I do bad things my genes make me do these things.” To find the whole truth we must go deeper.
There is something deeper and more profoundly wrong with the human race, Robert says, citing the apostle Paul’s words in Romans Chapter 7, “I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate….I know that nothing good lives in me, that its, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Romans 7:15, 18-19, 24
“What Paul describes in this verse is the deeper problem with the human race, the heart wound. It’s a wound every one of us has,” Robert says.”Because of the heart wound you are born with you must be reborn if you are going to go from the superficial to the authentic. Here are Robert’s three fundamental truths about rebirth.
Rebirth is supernatural
“Rebirth is not something you can engineer for yourself. It must come from the hand of God, graciously given to you as the Holy Spirit recreates you from within. Here’s how john describes the rebirth that occurs when a person believes in Jesus. To all who did receive him, He gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of the man, but of God (John1:12-13). By this birth our sins are forgiven, and we enter into the lifelong process of overcoming the heart wound by becoming more like Jesus Christ.”
Rebirth is irreplaceable
Religion, good works, church attendance, and personal moral reform education—none of these things can replace the necessity of rebirth. As Jesus said. “Unless someone is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God…do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again.” John 3:5,7
Rebirth is Personal
To each of us Jesus says, “It is you who must be born again.” It’s an issue between God and us individually. Christianity is not something you are drafted into because your parents are Christians or because you happen to attend church. Rebirth happens only when we pray to God in faith, accepting His son and His forgiveness on the cross and asking God to change our hearts.
Joe’s summary was also on the mark. “I believe,” he said, “the happiest an individual is going to be is when he is in this pattern of living, relying on God and on other people. This is the design of life.”
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