What each study covers, who it was written for, and why scripture and recovery work belong in the same room, at the same table, on the same morning.
There is a moment in many recovery rooms when someone opens a Bible and the temperature changes.
Sometimes it warms. Sometimes it cools. It depends almost entirely on what happens next, whether the book gets used as a mirror or as a hammer, and whether the person holding it is walking beside you or standing above you. Scripture is an integral part of the history of American addiction ministry, and anyone who has been in the rooms for long has seen that.
Mark Twelve offers six Bible studies. They are free, they always will be, and they are written from the mirror side of that line.
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“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” PSALM 119:105 |
Notice the scale of the promise. Not a floodlight over the whole road. A lamp at your feet, enough to see the next step, and no further.
That is a strange thing to promise a person who wants a plan for the next five years. It is exactly the right thing to promise a person trying to get through Tuesday. Recovery has always been built on the shortened horizon, and scripture, read honestly, tends to shorten it further. This is not a devotional gloss on clinical work. It is a parallel practice with its own logic, and it holds up under the weight.
What we ask of a study is simple: does it tell the truth about the reader’s condition, and does it point somewhere real? Studies that flatter fail. Studies that shame fail faster. The six below have been tested against people who had every reason to walk out.
MARK 12 — The Four Dimensions of Loving God
Our flagship recovery study and the verse the foundation is named for. Heart, soul, mind, and strength: four faculties, four sessions, one whole person. It is the study that argues, at length, that recovery that addresses only the body or only the spirit is not yet recovery.
PSALM 139:14 — Love Yourself as God Loves You
Written for the reader whose inner monologue would be considered abuse if it were spoken to anyone else. Shame is not a side effect of addiction; for many people, it is the engine. This study takes it apart slowly.
MARK 12:31 — Love Your Neighbor as Yourself
The relational work: amends, forgiveness, and the long repair of the people who were standing nearby when everything went wrong. Note the order in the verse. You cannot give away what you have not received.
JOSHUA 1:9 — A Bible Study for Combat Veterans
Be strong and courageous, spoken to a man about to walk into something terrible. Written specifically for service members and veterans, with room for the parts that do not get said over coffee.
PSALM 62:8 — Pouring Out Your Heart
On honesty before God, the moral inventory of the psalmist, who complains, accuses, and pleads without ever once being told to calm down. For anyone who suspects their real prayers would not be welcome.
MATTHEW 5:4 — Blessed Are Those Who Mourn
Grief work. Recovery hands a person their losses back, all at once, sober. This study sits with that rather than hurrying past it.
In a small group. One session per week, one facilitator, no requirement that anyone read aloud. The single most important rule is the one most groups skip: no cross-talk, no fixing, no one’s answer being corrected by someone with more sobriety time.
One-on-one. A coach and a person, a table, and two cups of coffee. This is how most of our studies get used, and it is where the material does its best work, because a study cannot be honest with a room, only with a person.
Alone, as devotion. Slower than you think. One passage, one question, a pen. If you finish a session in ten minutes, you have read it; you have not yet used it.
Because a person deciding whether to get help should not also be deciding whether they can afford a workbook. Because the cost of a study is not what keeps a church from starting a recovery ministry, the absence of a good one is. And because these were written to be given away, which is the only thing that ever made sense to do with them.
Download them, print them, and hand them to someone. Use them in your church without telling us. That is not a loophole. That is the point.
A lamp to the feet. Enough for the next step, and then the one after that.