He's Not Done | By Andy Petry Landing Director of Celebrate Recovery

Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1:6 NIV

Walking into my recovery journey, I always had this grand idea of who I was “supposed” to be. Much of my pain in life revolved around seeing how far short I fell of my own expectations of myself. I think that’s because for most of my life I thought that God’s love for me was contingent on how well I behaved. If I was doing everything right, I was good, but if I messed it up, God was disappointed in me. I thought that God only loved me as well as I could follow Him. If you’ve lived that way before, you know how hopeless and frustrating it is. In recovery, we learn that that way of thinking is also dead wrong when it comes to God’s love for us.

The beauty of the Gospel is that God loves us not because of what we’ve done, but because of what Jesus had done for us. And now when God looks at us, He sees Jesus’ righteousness instead of our brokenness.  That frees us to learn how to grow with God. Yes, we will make mistakes. Yes, it will be messy. Yes, we will not be perfect. That’s ok, that’s why God covers us in his grace. We now have the freedom to bring everything we are to God, and let Him change us more and more each day. Philippians 1:6 reminds us that the expectation is not for us to be perfect, it’s just to follow and trust God, today, the best we can. And we know that God has promised to continue to grow us over the course of our entire lives until we get to be with Him for eternity. You see, if I’m not dead, God’s not done. And that’s good news!


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