What is Step 7 AA?

Once you have completed all of the first six steps of AA successfully, you will be ready to move on to step 7 AA. The decisions that you made in the first six steps consisted of you making the decision to turn your life over to God. You should have also mastered the task of completing a moral inventory of yourself without fear. In this next step, you will enable yourself to ask God or your higher power to remove any shortcomings that you have. You will need to understand the true definition of being humble in order to complete this task successfully.

Learning & Understanding Humility

The best way to picture humility is by picturing different instances in your life where you experienced it and how these emotions can have an effect on your interaction with God. Being humble simply means to not be arrogant or proud. In other words, you should be modest at all times. Humility is a good lesson learned in life. A natural response to a kindergartner being complimented on a beautiful picture that he or she created after showing it to the class is pride. After that point, you made the decision to transition to modest pride, arrogant pride, or natural pride. In order to stay humble, you are not allowing any superior feelings to take over. You will experience natural pride as a result. This is the biggest difference between humility and arrogance.

Modest Humility & AA

In order to successfully complete step 7 of AA, you will need modest humility. You will have to approach God to try and understand him with the same attitude you would have if you were accomplishing something special without arrogance, but with modesty.

If you approach God with arrogance, you will have defeated the purpose of asking God to remove any of your shortcomings. You must understand that by asking him for help, you need him. You need to be modest. Humble has many definitions, another one being “having a feeling of insignificance, subservience, inferiority, etc.” Remember that as you are approaching God, you are putting yourself in a position of subservience and inferiority as you try to understand him. By doing so, you will understand that God is more superior and powerful than you are.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is simply this: In order to understand God and experience His power to remove your shortcomings, you need to place yourself in a position of humility minus any arrogance. You should also gain inferiority towards God. Step 7 of AA involves humility which is necessary for succeeding.