How Can You Help an Alcoholic Unless You Are One?

Tom:

As I mentioned last week, I went through my correspondence files to find some questions or accusations people have written to me over the years regarding Twelve Steps and AA and selected a couple for this segment.  This man wrote—“I get quite angry when I read what you write about Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization which I have no doubt saved my life.  What infuriates me even more is that you imply that AA is un-Christian, yet it was through AA that I became a Christian.  You should be ashamed of yourself for misleading people by telling them things about which you have little or no understanding.”  Now, this was a letter that I received a long time ago.  I can’t remember why it was sent, whether it was something that we wrote in our newsletter, but what about these things, Martin?  We are trying to present information that people don’t have and many have wrong assumptions and haven’t really looked into AA or the Twelve Steps, but this a person who is upset with us.

Martin:

Yes, we get testimonies like that along the way, over the years.  People will tell us that, yes, it’s because of AA that I am a Christian today. However, let’s think of it from the point of view that we have a sovereign God. That God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. That very often we are likely to connect two events that may be unconnected to one another.  They just happened to have occurred at about the same time.  And, I’m not saying that’s what happened in the case of the man who wrote to you, but God can use a variety of things, like I know of people who have been in cults, they have been in cults very deeply and they claim that while in the cult they became a Christian, but realizing the implications of the cult, they left and they are committed believers, but it occurred in the cult and it occurred with some of the elements of the cult.  And as a matter of fact, we even have a relative who was “converted” via the cult.  I say converted by God, not via the cult but he left the cult because of it.  And so, people will be in AA, they will be converted during the time they are in AA because what? They are life time members, and then they attribute to AA their conversion which is, if you describe AA properly and correctly from a biblical point of view, you will have to say that this is a religion, as we have demonstrated, and it is a religion that is not Christianity.  It does not provide the narrow way, it provides the broad way.  It does not have sound doctrine as scripture does, in fact, it has contempt for sound doctrine and it gives you a god, you know, as you understand him instead of the only name under heaven whereby we must be saved.  And you go on and on, and what you do is, you have to look at what it is that he said that he was in that he was saved at the time he was in there.  And then, it’s like any cult activity that would cause a conversion.  We know people who are in the Mormon Church and they were converted and left, but this is a man that doesn’t realize that his conversion occurred in a setting that is really not a biblical setting.

Tom:

Right, in spite of what he was in, not because of it.  You know, I have an analogy that I have used because I have personally been confronted at conferences where I have spoken by people very upset because I talk about just what we’ve been talking about.  But here is my analogy—If somebody was dying of dehydration out in the desert and there was this pool that they came to and the pool had incredible impurities in it, toxic things, but it also had fluids that this person needed for a time to keep them alive.  Well, if they stay at that pool and continue to drink from that pool, inevitably they are going to die because of that.  The analogy being here, that God may have allowed them to get into AA, they had no other choice and it did provide something at the time, but if they stay in it, because this an unbiblical system, it’s a methodology that’s not true to scripture because scripture doesn’t have a methodology, we have a relationship with the true and living God through Jesus Christ, but God allowed that to work in their lives, but just like a cult, they get out of it or they are going to be in bondage to it and haven’t we seen that?  Many people, who call us, write to us, say, Hey, this is my life; I am in AA for life.  Well then, what’s happened here?  They are in bondage to an occult system and we’ve explained that in the last week’s program as well as this one and they are going to have problems.

Martin:

It’s just like individuals who are in cults.  They don’t know the doctrines of the cult, they just belong to it, they have relationships in the cult, and if they truly knew the origins, Bill Wilson’s writing the 12 steps, his background, Bob Smith’s involvement in it, and his background.  If they saw the 12 steps in the context of scripture, if they truly knew where the huge deviations occur as believers having come into the light, if they would see that darkness they would just have to leave, they couldn’t remain in the organization.

Tom:

I had a person call me recently and said, look, I am a Christian and I have been in AA, we use AA, we bring Jesus Christ there, some people object to it, but people recognize that we were delivered through Jesus Christ and they look at this as a way of getting in and proselytizing, bringing people to the true and living God.  Is there a problem with that?

Martin:

There is a big problem with it because, you know, a lot of the New Agers do similarly.  The presentations that they make, they very often sound like scripture.  It’s like—somebody said to me once, Well, Carl Roger—Carl Rogers is probably the best known psychologist of the last century—he said that his crowning discovery in life was that of love.  Well, the love he was talking about was love between persons.  He wasn’t talking about the love of God that passes understanding.  And so, these individuals are turning, again, a cultic system into something that they have combined Christianity with, and I would say that it would be totally unbiblical to take Christ and put him into a system like AA, even if your end for them justifies the means, it doesn’t for me.