the thief

jerry ralph · Oct 23, 2006

“You’ll never know that God is all you need until God is all you’ve got.” (Rick Warren)

“For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.”
(Romans 5:6 KJV)
The apostle Paul in writing to the Church at Rome referred to the ungodly. As I study the Book of Romans using the Dake Bible, I read where the Jews divided men into four classes. Share this with me.

1. The just who said: What is mine is mine; what is thine is thine.
2. The accommodating who said: What is mine is thine; what is thine is mine.
3. The pious who said: What is mine is thine; what is thine let it be thine.
4.The ungodly who said: What is mine is mine; what is thine shall be mine.

[FONT=Times New
 Roman]As I sit and read this I wonder what class I am in? I can see that in my life I have been in all four classes, and from time to time drift from one class to another. I definitely can relate to the ungodly when I look back over my life to the times of selfishness and self-centeredness that drove me through many years of alcoholism and addictions. I realize today that I have many amends to make to people who I don’t even know. I usually don’t think of myself as a thief, as a matter of fact in the lowest of my character defects I took pride in the fact that I was not a thief. But today I realize that in that thought, I have not been honest with myself. Many times in drunken stupors I have stolen things from other people. Somewhere around the age of eleven I realized that I could take things from people and not get caught. Of course in time I got caught and I remember at the age of twelve having to go to the police station in San Antonio Texas for a talk with the authorities and my parents. I think this slowed me down for a year or so, but when I was fourteen I remember shoplifting clothes at a department store in Kansas City. The next five years from time to time I would steal and in 1965 when I was drunk I got busted for trying to steal a reel-to-reel tape recorder out of an apartment. I got drafted into the Army right after that and my stealing was put on hold. After Vietnam and drugs entered into my life, I became laid back and possibly too lazy to steal. When I was in my thirties while drunk I would get the courage to steal. It was not planned, I never set out to be a thief. It’s just that when the opportunity came up, and I was not in my right mind, I would take things. I never considered myself a thief (a big self-lie) and always had a dislike for those who stole. In 1983 in the midst of one of my drunken rages, I started hanging around with a guy that I had met in jail. One night when we were drunk he asked me to drive him over to his brothers house to get some clothes. I agreed and away we went. His brother lived in an uptown apartment and there was a donut store on the corner. When he returned to the truck he told me he had robbed the store, so away we went. We got busted later that night and all night long they questioned me about the robbery. The next day they took me to Leeds Farm to serve out a ninety-day sentence. I never saw the other guy again. My life was at an extreme low point, and it was at this point that I got a hold of a Bible and started reading. I started in the New Testament and it wasn’t long before I came to believe that Jesus died for the ungodly. Why God would stoop to the lowest forms of humanity and lavish His love upon us I will never understand. But that’s happened, and that Love forever changed my life. I have had times of dishonesty in my life since then, but the Holy Spirit won’t allow me to get away with it freely. [/FONT]
I wanted to write this morning about the beautiful fall colors, and how when I went out to feed the wild birds, how as I looked toward the barn, I thought about the time fifty years ago when I broke my granny’s rain gauge. I was led to a larger confession, thanks for letting me share…………God is doing for me what I could not do for myself……JRE

AA Step Five: Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

the thief

jerry ralph

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the thief

jerry ralph

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