Giving God the chance to fix you

Give God the chance to fix you, and He will. Give God the opportunity to fix you, and He will. Give God the commitment He needs, and He will. Keep on in that commitment and He will continue to fix you--until you are changed and free. Withdraw the chance, the opportunity, the commitment from Him, and He WILL NOT fix you. Why? Because you must submit to Him to get it. Like they say at church, God will not override the free will that He gave you. Many with life controlling habits and behaviors need help with giving God the big chance to fix them. That is why they go to Teen Challenge. They need to be in an intense, God-centered, Christ-centered situation and stay there until God's major surgery is done. It breaks my heart to see those controlled by drugs and booze and smoking and anger and the like, rare up on their hind feet and leave Teen Challenge in just a few weeks; and still more leave before they finish the one-year stint. They only hurt themselves. They only cut God off from helping them. They only ensure that they will remain a prisoner to their habit, behavior, thinking, hurt, confusion and pain. Those who need major inner surgery must remain in Intensive Care if they want to be free. I know how this works. I didn't go to TC, but I went through that very same thing with God myself. If I hadn't stuck with Him, committed to letting Him change me, I would've been dead today. As it was, I'd already lost wife, daughter, home, neighbors, friends and church to alcoholism; and my job and my career were next in line. After that, I saw just a muddled life lost in booze. I screamed out to God and He sent Jesus, actually and literally. In a vision, I saw his face as he suffered on the cross. He was looking right at me. Then God used a scripture to call me to commit to follow His Son. I wasn't able to do it all by myself, but I wanted to, so I said yes to Him. Then He went to work, keeping me, healing me, breaking my internal chains; and as I saw myself getting better, I knew that God was surely there and working, so I kept on with my commitment--until I was a new man with a new lease on life. But if I had said no, or said yes and taken it back, I would've been left on my own. You have to do it God's way for it to work. And His way is to offer Jesus as your personal savior, and the Holy Spirit as the One who goes inside and does the fixing. But if you cut His work short by running away from submitting to Him, then He cannot  help you. Every addict must make this their battle cry--"Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory though our Lord Jesus Christ!" That is the way, the truth, and the life for every person bound with life controlling issues.