Don’t believe your thoughts when they tell you that you have no choice but to live in bondage. Jesus paid for our freedom the same time he paid for our salvation, and if you are not at a place to believe that you are indeed free, let me share some words from a book I am writing.

Before we can fully understand the freedom given to us by Christ Jesus, the truth of His crucifixion must become so alive in our hearts that we hunger and thirst for the righteousness that is Him, and we develop a longing to abide in His word so strong that we daily crave His presence.  When you deeply fall in love with the Savior who already jealously yet tenderly loves you, then you begin to know the Truth, and it is at this place that you realize the freedom that is Jesus Christ.

Jesus was deeply distressed in the Garden of Gethsemane.  His anguish was so great, Luke tells us, that His sweat was like falling drops of blood.  Three times He asked God to release Him from this mission…but when Jesus prayed “If possible, let this cup pass from Me…” it wasn’t as much about the brutal physicality of the cross as it was the heaviness of the sin that He alone would bear, that only He could bear.  The bodily torture He would face was an unthinkable burden to bear, but his grief was about something far deeper than physical pain, more than the knowledge that He would face the cross alone, that Judas would betray Him, His disciples would forsake Him, that Peter would deny Him. 

There would be the moment while He hung in agony, beaten (Isaiah 52 tells us that His body was marred more than any man), crowned with thorns, and nailed to an unforgiving slab of wood, that He would become a curse for us.  The depths of Hell would reach up and place on Him the unimaginable weight of all sin, past, present, and future, and He would become all of the vile ugliness of the choices mankind had made and would make, even yours and mine, as he hung gasping for breath on the cross. 

With the words, “It is finished,” not one more thing had to be done for our freedom, nothing more from Jesus, and certainly not from us.  The full price had been paid, bought with His blood.  Jesus had humbly and obediently completed everything necessary to buy our salvation and clear the way for our adoption into the family of God as a child of God with all the rights of a child, and a royal child, at that!  The blood shed at Calvary is of much more value than anything we can name or desire, and all that it gives us cannot be fully realized with our human minds.  When we accepted Jesus as our personal savior, His blood justified us (made us righteous in the eyes of God). 

As if salvation wasn’t enough, His blood accomplishes even more:  It sets us free:
►John 8:36 AMP – So if the Son makes you free, then you are unquestionably free.
►Galatians 5:1 NKJV – Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage. 
►The NLT says it this way: “So Christ has truly set us free, now make sure you stay free…”
How do we stay free?  By fully trusting in the cleansing, liberating power of the blood.

Trust Him.  Believe Him.   Accept His Gift.

Maybe you are not like me and you normally make good decisions, or at least don’t make the same bad ones twice.  Too many times I give in to temptation knowing I’m going to be guilt ridden later, but I do it anyway.  

Later, I exhaust myself thinking about what a stupid that decision was, how it accomplished nothing good, it wasn’t worth it (like any sinful or bad choice is ever “worth it”). No matter how much I dwell on it, I have no explanation for why my brain and body were in the gear of “Go” instead of “No!” Finally, I stop my obsessing about why and say, “I don’t know why, Lord!” But those five little words are packed with guilt and the shame of failure.   If we have repented, holding on to guilt or not forgiving ourselves weighs us down until we stay where we are and grow stagnant, even though God has forgiven us. Accept His forgiveness and move on.

Sometimes I amaze myself…actually, I dismay myself…with how little effort I put into not following through with a sinful idea before it becomes an action…and I’m not just talking about gluttony. It hit me one day: I have to guard what I am thinking about at all times so that when I am at the crossroad of Good and Bad Decisions, I have integrity before the Lord with the choices I make.

Instead of: “I know I shouldn’t, but I’m going to do it this one (more) time.” I will say:  “I know I shouldn’t, so I am not going to.”

By the way, the stinking thinking that put us at the crossroad where we make those wrong decisions didn’t just suddenly crop up out of nowhere.  We were entertaining things we should have taken authority over long before we got to that point.