Seventh Step prayer 76:6-10
When ready, we say something like this: “My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellow. Grant me the strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen. We have then completed Step Seven.
The Seventh Step prayer is an expression of humility. We are acknowledging our need to have God’s help in overcoming our defects of character. We have analyzed our character and admitted to God, ourselves and another person, what it is in us that blocks us off from God. By doing this, we become ready to have God remover our defects of character.
This is not a self-help program. If we were able to live up to our ideals, we would have done so. We are powerless to bring about the total rearrangement of our ideas, emotions, and attitudes that is necessary if we are to live this new way of life. We adopt, as a new guiding principle for our lives, the search to find and do God’s will. We place ourselves in the position to receive God’s help by making a conscious decision to abandon our old idea that the application of self-will would produce happiness and satisfaction.
By allowing God to make use of all aspects of our characters, our strengths and our weaknesses, we more completely abandon self-seeking and self-centeredness.
We allow God to determine which aspects of our character are most useful. What we perceive as a weakness may make us more approachable to others. What we perceive as a strength may diminish our usefulness. We let God decide.
If we were able to do God’s will we would. By practicing the principles of this program we learn how to access this Power greater than ourselves. One of the techniques we use is to ask for help in prayer.
We do not seek God’s help to accommodate our self-seeking objectives. The new focus of our lives is to find and do God’s will for us. Our seeking will result in our finding God’s will for us. God’s power is available to us for the asking. With it we will be able to overcome the temptation to act in self-seeking ways.
The steps are not magic tricks that fix us at first try, but rather techniques for living life successfully.