FREEDOM IN CHRIST

Belief founds the basis of our personal goals and desires, which in turn guides the direction of our choices.  God’s goals and our goals are originally different.  His goals were divinely established before time, while our goals and desires can be easily influenced and altered in the moment by the world and the surrounding circumstances.  But, if our beliefs are rooted in Christ and how He sees us as His children who are set apart, we will submit to the Godly goals and desires placed within us and spoken over us by God and align our hearts with His will.

God places desires within our hearts to provide us with a drive, a passion, and a hunger for Himself and His goals.  These desires may or may not be fulfilled within this life, but God is goal-oriented.  Though Godly desires are a gift from God, He is looking for those who will dedicate those desires back to the original Giver so that He can transform these desires into Christ-centered actions in order to accomplish His overall goal of redeeming mankind.

At times, our personal goals are blocked, which can lead to anger, anxiety, and depression; however, God uses these emotions to alert us that our focus and sense of purpose has shifted from His goal to our goals. 

Until we are challenged and see our resulting mental, spiritual, and physical reactions, we live in deception and move towards self-reliance, apart from the grace of God intervening to awaken us to the reality of our spiritual walk with Him.  Whether the resistance comes from inward frustration or from outward conflict, God can still use these situations to redirect us and draw out what He has already placed inside of us as saints.  He has ordained a purpose for our lives that completes an essential puzzle piece of His overall goal.  If we give Him our whole lives, including our weaknesses and our strengths, He can use us in unimaginable ways.   In His mercy and love, God can create good out of any circumstance so that our lives become a living testament to the power of God.  There is no person, power, or circumstance that can thwart what God has already ordained.         

When viewed through the lens of Christ’s model, we see that circumstances can be used beyond man-made possibilities.  God is able to bring blessing from the enemy’s ill-intended temptations and trials by divinely molding us within this pressurized environment    to reveal more of Himself in us.  In our flesh, the initial response seems to be manipulation of the person, the circumstance, or the behavior, but if we resist the work and discipline of God, we will miss the blessing embedded within the trial.  God is more interested in spiritually developing and healing us. 

As we continually submit to the molding of God, He is able to move more freely through our lives by cultivating His virtues in us.  God is a rewarder of those who seek Him and daily come to Him in faith.  As we exercise this faith, He is able to continually fill us with His Holy Spirit and make evident His mercy and goodness to others, which propels us towards a life of integrity and excellence so as to be an accurate reflection of God’s character.  When we experience the revelation of who God really is and allow this to impact our day-to-day life, we move beyond an intellectual experience and into an active, living relationship.  From this revealed understanding of the Creator, submission of our thoughts, desires, and emotions to Him becomes a priority because we do not want to move outside of this union with God and behave out of impulse.  We are able to persevere through all trials because we are submitted to the will of the Father and know His fingerprint is sovereignly evident in all circumstances.  This exhibits a growth in Christ-likeness, which gives way for His compassion to move through us.  This outward expression of compassion, untainted by human motivation or profit, reveals the personal and unconditional love of God to each person.  Love is the greatest gift that God has given to us and that God can use to draw others to Himself.  The love of Christ is the foundation of freedom in Christ.

We all have emotional and spiritual rights, needs, and responsibilities.  They were given to mankind by the Creator and meant to be fulfilled and prioritized by Him alone, as a daily choice was made to walk with Him.  However, due to deception and pride, our perspective was shifted, and our approach to having these needs met became self-centered, which has led to a blindness to our own responsibility.  To move beyond our fleshly tendencies, we must filter these through the lens of Christ so that we are able to have a Godly understanding of these needs and of our role in having these fulfilled. Properly relating to other people takes the power of God.  He is the one who has to re-shape our view of others and of ourselves by allowing us to understand who we are without Christ and who we are in Christ. 

We are each looking for acceptance and significance, but we cannot seek fulfillment in other people who are all just as broken as we are.  God can only satisfy those needs because He is the only one who fully understands the depth of our needs and the perfect solution.  Relating to other people is only made possible by a right relationship with God.  We must be committed to God in prayer so that we are able to maintain full submission of our rights and goals to Him, which allows God to exercise His full power in us and through us.  Our life is really His life lived through us. 

If we are going to be an accurate reflection of Christ’s love and life lived out through us, we cannot attack another person’s character.  Either as a result of projective, self-judgment or a tendency to dismiss our sins based on our reasoned intent, we are prone to see others’ sins and quick to criticize character, but the goal of addressing needs and concerns is to bring about restoration.  If we instead focus on the other person’s failures and our rights, the problem will remain unsolved and will leave the other person spiritually and emotionally bitter and deflated with no way to rise.  But, as Christians, we were not commissioned to judge and decipher the hearts of others; instead, we are called to allow God to test our own hearts to reveal any blatant or hidden impurity within us.  Upon dealing with our own results of this spiritual testing, we are able to realize the rotten core of our man-made morality.  Then, by submitting to the solution-based discipline of God as His children, we are able to experience God’s love and His desire for us to grow from our fumbles, rather than decay in perceived failure and false character labels.  From this, we can better comprehend that every blessing is a grace-filled, merciful gift from Christ despite our sin.  We are able to use this understanding to willingly apologize without defense when we are wrong and to walk alongside others in support as we each renew our minds, address concerns in love, and rely on Christ’s strength to break the stronghold of sin.

Christ lived a perfect life.  He is the standard of perfection and has every right to sternly hold us to this level of perfection, but He shows us mercy and grace despite our sinful tendencies and His perfect rights.  Love covers a multitude of sins, and God is love; therefore, our sins are covered under the grace of God because He is the very definition of love.  The revelation of Christ’s acceptance and affirmation of who we are in Him sparks a spiritual enthusiasm that propels us down a path of joyful service and submission, relinquished rights, responsible evaluation of our role, and full trust in God’s power to meet our needs.  Our emotional and spiritual satisfaction can only come from a true spiritual relationship with God, who wraps us in His grace and love.

The word of God is living and powerful, and this word came to life for us when God was made manifest in the flesh as Jesus.  Christ revealed the perfect love of the Father, who is personal and deeply involved in each of our lives.  In His patience and mercy, He compassionately led His followers and modeled the perfect relationship that should be held between mankind and the Father.  He showed us how to faultlessly experience emotions, relate to believers and non-believers, show forgiveness, submit to authority, and respond to and flee from temptation.  Christ revealed His final and infinite power over all creation and even death by conquering the cross and the grave.  When we receive the spirit of God given to every believer as the Holy Spirit, we too have this same power to perfectly relate to others and to God, as well as the same power over Satan and his servants.  We share in the same identity, inheritance, and blessings that have been bestowed upon our Savior who has been given all authority in Heaven and on Earth.  Bold and fearless freedom in Christ is found when we realize the power that we have been given through Jesus’ victory won on the cross. 

Before we can walk in freedom, we have to step into the realization of our freedom and put on the armor of God to protect our minds and this stance of freedom that we have been given in Christ.  However, realizing our freedom and walking in freedom are two separate facets of the freedom posture.  God wants us to maintain this freedom in Christ and actively walk alongside Him in faith.  The maintenance of our freedom is sustained by maturing in Christ, which comes with time as we daily fellowship with the Father.  To do this, we must take personal responsibility for our relationship with Christ and submit our lives to His will and to His purification. 

Under the influence of this world, our flesh has a tendency to revert to old patterns or be guided by deception, if we neglect the renewal of our minds.  We have an inclination to gradually deviate from our path of freedom and spiritually regress.  If we begin to fixate on either the past or the future, we become paralyzed.  If we live in the unchangeable past, we cause ourselves to be filled with anger and guilt, which feed a stronghold of bitterness, cynicism, and unforgiveness.  If we live in the unreachable future, we cause ourselves to live in fear and take on a general state of anxiety.  These spiritually hazardous ways of life affect how we relate to others and how we relate to God.  We are unable to connect with others and be a light for Him if we are bogged down by anger, guilt, fear, and anxiety.  So, to keep ourselves focused and active in the present, we have the responsibility to renew our minds by subjecting ourselves to His refining of our thought patterns, motives, and desires.  As we submit to God’s will, He will be able to divinely intervene and bring glory to Himself out of our past and also direct our present steps.  Because of this, we are better able to follow Christ as He uses our past and present for us to be spiritually successful in the future, walk boldly in Christ, and fully thrive within the parameters that He has preordained for our lives.

Jesus modeled this full submission to God by completely relying on Him for direction.  He only did the will of the Father, and He understood this will by continually submitting in prayer.  The more we grow to know God and spiritually mature, the more we realize that we need God.  Apart from Him, we are hopelessly lost in our futile self-efforts.  God is not obligated to remove our struggles nor change our will; however, through daily submission in prayer and meditation upon His word, we permit the mind of Christ to reveal lies along with their effects and replace them with His truth, which we can verbally announce and prayerfully cling to for the destruction of strongholds.  We must empty ourselves and allow Him to fill us with His Spirit.  The power to walk free and to maintain this freedom dwells within our daily trust, submission, and renewal of our minds through the transformative perspective and power of Christ.

Emotions originate from within our focused thoughts; in turn, the more we focus on the thoughts, the more we strengthen the emotional output.  When these thoughts are fed by the memory of wrongs committed against us, we allow space for a root of bitterness and of unforgiveness to be planted within our hearts.

Under the influence of our flesh, we can so easily become bound by unforgiveness.  We feel the weight of the inward pain placed within us by another person and consequently look to them as the one who must remove the inflicted pain.  As we passively suppress the emotions or seek to avenge the wrongdoer, we feed and deepen this root of bitterness, which is never satisfied.  As the pain lingers and the root deepens, our hearts grow colder, harder, and more cynical because we do not understand why the hurt remains.   Within the bounds of this self-focused view, we move away from the Christ-founded qualities of patience and love and allow our emotions to take control, halting our spiritual growth.  We cannot grow nor produce the Fruit of the Spirit if we are feeding our lives with a selfish or a fleshly perspective and harboring unforgiveness. 

Unconditional love and forgiveness are both drawn from a source that is beyond the scope of human understanding and origin, so each of these can only be extended through the strength and the love of Christ.  The debt of damaged feelings surpasses the capacity of all possible scales or forms of payment.  Earthly restitution is not feasible, and by insisting this repayment, we are emotionally demanding the humanly impossible from a human being. 

We must draw upon Christ’s strength and example in order to look beyond our feelings and extend forgiveness.  Forgiveness is not outwardly forced but is tenderly instilled within our hearts as the love of God softens our hearts.  We do not forget nor downplay the sin or wrong committed against us, but we feel the weight of the Father’s love expressed in spite of our sin-stained lives and are compelled to extend this same grace and mercy to others.  When we understand the gravity of our own sinfulness, our eyes are opened to the impossibility of humanly making restitution and restoring someone to wholeness. 

As we reflect on the grace of our holy God, we resolve to live with the consequences of not only others’ sin but also of our sin.  Jesus chose to live with and be impacted by the consequences of our sin, and He did this without grudge and without retaliation.  Jesus received all of our sin and experienced the weight of our guilt, shame, and agony.  Even though He was without sin, He knows the unrest involved with the separation that sin forces between us and a holy God; He understands the hopeless trap of sin.  And, because of His love for us, God reached out to us first through Jesus Christ.  Forgiveness is a one-sided choice made possible only by the love of Christ.  As we specifically pray for God to reveal unresolved hurt and the associated emotions, we are able to draw upon His strength and forgive both ourselves and others.  Because Christ lives in us, we can allow this same forgiveness and love to flow through us, uproot all bitterness, and free us from the stronghold of unforgiveness.  Through Christ’s love, we can live in freedom and victory.

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Emotions are mirror images of our thoughts.  These emotions are ever-changing because of the ability of our minds to naturally produce a continuous flow of thoughts. When we consciously choose to interrupt this stream and validate a thought, whether of Godly or fleshly origin, we give power to the thought and bring about an emotional response. 

Actual emotions do not come by choice, but the thoughts that we choose to claim as our own directly impact the resulting emotions. If we allow the enemy to exploit this direct thought-emotion transfer, he will use this to turn ourselves inward to our feelings, instead of having us look outward to the Truth.  Though humanly authentic in nature, these feelings that are produced by thoughts of deceptive origin cannot be trusted.  In our deception, if we take these feelings at face value and assume they are an accurate reflection of reality, we will live a defeated life filled with an unpredictable sequence of happiness and depression.

The ability to experience emotions was originally created to be a good and Godly reflection of our personal and creative Father; Christ displayed a Godly expression of the very emotions that He created. Honest emotions can be brought about by a reaction to an outside stimulus or an internal fluctuation in our body’s internal chemistry, but most emotional imbalances are spiritual in nature.  Under the influence of our flesh and deception, our feelings become a spiritual weapon against ourselves.  The ground upon which these emotional deceptions and strongholds are founded is at the core an issue of not trusting God, His goodness, His sovereignty, nor His promises; in our weakness, we choose to trust our emotions.  Our proneness to trust in ourselves can result from past experiences, learned patterns and responses, or traumatic events in our lives.  As we trust in our emotions and experience the pains of the ups and downs, we learn to shield ourselves by ignoring issues, avoiding conflict, suppressing an emotion, allowing an outburst of emotions, or turning to worldly pleasures and coping mechanisms.

God is the only One who can break Satan’s stronghold and control of our emotions, once we have yielded our will to His. However, we must be honest with our Father.  Though He already knows our hearts and thoughts before we even speak them in prayer, voicing them to God allows these emotions to be submitted to the only One who can reveal the deception and provide the solution to the root problem that gave way to the fleshly expression of the emotion in the first place.  Once we come to the end of our self-effort and realize the unquenchable desire for the stability found within the peace of Christ, we allow ourselves to fully experience the love and the sole satisfaction of a personal Father who loves us in a one-on-one relationship.

In and of ourselves, we cannot modify our feelings by changing our outward behavior, and we cannot change our beliefs by modifying our behavior.  We must focus on the truth of God’s word and His promises.  Meditating on His truths and staying connected to God through an intentional and attentive prayer time allows this truth to sink into our minds.  Through the power of the Holy Spirit revealed in prayer and in God’s word, confirmations of these truths and the love of God will be made evident to our spirit eyes, allowing the revelation of God’s truths to be owned as our beliefs.  These beliefs will be ingrained in our mind and will spiritually sift every outward and inward thought so as to produce Godly behaviors and desires; the more time that we spend with God, the more our desire for that direct fellowship with God will grow.  This increase in personal relationship with God will produce in us the Fruit of the Spirit, which involves both love and self-control; these will allow us to produce God-honoring feelings that are rooted in the truth and the love of God.  We can then use this Godly knowledge of truth-based emotions to not only allow God to work on us but to also allow Him to work through us in order to lift others up along the way. 

Deception is the most powerful weapon that Satan uses to come against mankind.  He whispers lies, condemnations, and twisted truths into the minds of both Christians and non-Christians.  His desire is to mislead and trap each person within a maze of thoughts, in order to bring about stagnation, regression, or total abandonment. 

Each of the enemy’s deceptions and strongholds are rooted in some sort of unbelief.  When we begin to selfishly analyze and question the eternally firm truths of God, we open the door for Satan’s lies to settle within our minds and slowly collect.  We become comfortable with the tone of his voice and continue to listen to his faulty logic.  He leads us away from the truth by tricking us into focusing on a hollow promise of happiness, success, or some other form of fleeting fulfillment.  But, this mirage of hope disappears when we reach the end or grow tired of the journey, only to find a crumbling counterfeit of Satan’s promised reward. 

The entangling lifestyle fueled by deception is only unwound by the grace of God.  Due to the nature of deception, we are unable to see our own deception, unless the mercy of God opens our spirit eyes to the truth of God.  Only the presence of God can scatter the darkness to reveal the hidden secrets, motives, and deceptions embedded within our hearts; He is the only one who knows our hearts.  However, God not only knows the deceptive tendencies within our hearts, but He also knows the identity of Christ which He has placed in the hearts of His children.  He has tuned our hearts’ satisfaction to the voice of God and has set in us an eternal drawing for Christ’s perfect fulfillment. 

There are many deceptive voices intertwined with the tender calling of Christ, only one of which leads to a fulfilling and free life in Christ.  Instead of wasting our time trying to study the lies of Satan or decipher his voice, we need to study the truth of God’s word and seek to understand His voice so that all other voices fade.  Knowing the voice of Truth dispels all lies.  We are not called to fight Satan and figure out his plans; we are called to take all of our thoughts captive and bring them to God so that He can reveal His truth and His voice to us.  When we filter every thought through the mind of Christ, absolute truth will be revealed, the deception will be uncovered, and negativity and cynicism will not cloud our spirit eyes. 

For this to take place, we must first submit to the will of God.  This total abandonment of our will and worldly purposes allows God’s will and power to flow through us without fleshly resistance.  Because of this, we are able to resist Satan in the power and in the name of Jesus, and he will flee from us.  Through the victory of Christ, we have been given authority over Satan and his demons, who tremble in fear even at the sound of His name.  Once the hounding of our minds has been quieted, we are able to clearly hear the distinct voice of God and draw closer to Him, which allows Him to have room to draw closer to us. 

As we see that we first have the responsibility to lay the submissive groundwork for God, we are able to experience the personal grace, love, and power of God as He builds upon our obedient submission in order to reveal His power over all dominions.  His strength is magnified by our weaknesses, of which He can use to build a marvelous masterpiece.  Human weaknesses in our hands and under the deceptive power of Satan yield destruction, but in God’s hands, there is no power that can override the craftsmanship of His work. 

Daily prayer and submission to His will allows an eternal perspective to settle within our minds, allowing no room for deception to set in.  When we realize the power of God has been set within us, we shift from a trembling, self-centered focus of requesting God’s help to a confident, Christ-centered focus of being submissively available to both the glorification of God and His sovereign, overarching purpose.

Thoughts can be a byproduct of self-generation or of outward deposition.  The choice then becomes ours to either act upon the thought or allow the thought to exit our consciousness.  Since the mind is the root of every emotion and behavior, this makes the mind the most coveted area of control. 

The mind is a fertile ground for thoughts to take root and direct our outward expressions and inward motivations.  Therefore, thoughts can be cunningly disguised and whispered by the enemy in hopes of establishing a root of deception.  This deception is concealed within seemingly innocent and harmless activities, goals, ideas, people, etc.; however, they are twisted in such a way as to bait us towards a position of spiritual vulnerability to the enemy’s attacks.  When we follow the directions of these whispered lies, we lose spiritual control and become victims of a wayward mind.  This spiritual fluidity within the mind leads to discouragement and ineffectiveness by keeping us blinded to the real source of our anguish.

    We can either be led by our minds under the exhausting control of Satan’s lies, or we can instead choose to allow our minds to be controlled by God.  Non-Christians are controlled by the instability of their thought life because they do not have a standard by which to judge their thoughts; however, as Christians, we have the mind of Christ and a direct relationship with the Father through Jesus Christ, who is the standard of perfection and truth.  In Christ, we have the ability to stand firm in the victory of Christ because He has already won the entire war and equipped us with all power, authority, and blessing accessed within the being of God. 

The end has already been decided through the atoning sacrifice of Christ.  Satan is neither all-knowing nor all-powerful, but he does know that he has already lost and is moving closer to his day of eternal doom; therefore, he is actively seeking to destroy every Christian and prevent each non-believer from turning to Christ.  But, instead of having an obsessive fear of Satan or a passive understanding of his power within this world, we must safeguard our minds by daily putting on the armor of God.  We have already been given salvation and are under the protective hand of Christ, but we do have to take our spiritual life seriously and examine the strength of our walk with Christ.  Through the daily reading of God’s word and attentive, intentional prayer with God, we are able to submit to the will of God.  By faith in the authority of God and His infallible word, we are able to utilize the helmet of salvation, gain access to the authority found within Christ to resist the power of Satan, and deflect the enemy’s deception.  When we realize that Satan is not equal and opposite of God, we are able to protect what we have been given in Christ, see the weakness of Satan’s power compared to God, and stand confidently within the eternal victory of Christ.