Our Deliverance
In my Heartlight.org post this week, called Delivered, I reflect on Jesus “dominating the dominion” of darkness and delivering us from the powers that hold us captive. Paul mentions three specific habitations of the dominion afflict us:
- Rulers and powers, both spiritual and political
- Consequences of our wrong and rebellious choices
- Rules, laws, and the whole effort to justify ourselves through religious systems
So will you abandon the addictions that hold you and follow Jesus, relying on His community to help you find new life? (Finding ways to get out of our deception mode and trusting others to help us is crucial, but feels very dangerous to us.)
Will you trust Him to lead you through the consequences of our rebellions to a better place and a fuller life? (After all, it is our own rebellious spirit that got us into most of our troubles to begin with.)
Will you abandon rule-keeping as the basis of your salvation and trust His grace to be your source of goodness? (For those of us who are religious, especially those of us claiming to be followers of Jesus, maybe we need to go back and read the Gospels and assume that Jesus’ comments to the religious leaders of His time are intended to make us think and evaluate ourselves!)
What is holding you back from fully trusting Jesus to help you escape? (Be honest with yourself. What will you not relinquish to the Lordship of Jesus?)
Those are tough questions, but ones I hope you will answer either in the response section below, or share with a couple of other folks seeking to follow Jesus.
Thank you for this reminder, Phil. The scary thing about rulers and powers, both spiritual and political is that we often are so overwhelmed by the powers of darkness that we fold under the pressure. I have folded more than I want to admit.
Unfortunately I can understand how Peter could deny that he knew Christ when he was surrounded by darkness and pressed for an answer. I have too often felt the deep remorse of both saying and doing things for which I am totally ashamed!
It was, to say the least, not popular, maybe even dangerous, for Peter to admit to following someone who was going to be hanged on a cross. Even though Jesus warned Peter that before the rooster would crow he would deny him three times, Peter still denied him. Even though I know how weak I can be when it comes to serving the Lord, I still fail just when he needs me the most!
It was what Peter did next that I know we need to do as well. When the rooster crowed and Peter realized what he had done, he wept bitterly and turned back to Jesus to serve him, even to the death. When our deeds or our words deny the Christ of glory and Satan has hold of our ankle to drag us down further into a tarpit, we are not done for! (Like Phil in the tunnel, when he felt totally and hopelessly trapped—through Christ we can escape!) None of our horrible deeds can be used against us when we belong to Christ. No dangerous trap can hold us, no drugs can control us, no darkness can extinguish THE LIGHT—-nothing can separate us from Christ and his Love!
“Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.
No in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,
neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Romans 8:35-39.
Praise God that he did not spare His Own Son, but sent Him to die for us! Praise God that Jesus did not use his power to escape death on the cross! Praise God that his power and Christ’s perfection fueled the resurrection when death’s hold on us was broken!
If we do not take advantage of Christ’s offer to rescue us from Satan, where else could we possibly turn for help? Let us, those who would otherwise be stuck in Satan’s traps, encourage each other to totally and completely accept Christ’s saving hand of rescue. Nothing in this world or the next could be more important than being in Christ’s protection. Nothing.
Jerita
28 Sep 08 at 8:58 pm
Hi! Phil
Today our minister delivered a sermon about The 10 Commandments and he also mentioned Jesus’ crusifixion. How God is so ‘jealous’ of other ‘gods’ in our life that He sent His own Son to die for us on the cross so that we could be saved from other ‘gods’ which has a hold over us. He also compared the 10 commandments to a dance of life, because we had a baptizm in church this morning.
I’ve also listened to the radio this morning before church where a guy talked about the hold drugs can have over you, before he gave His life to Christ.
So many things can have a hold over you and then you hurt other people in the process to go where you want to go in life and that makes you feel empty inside eventually.
HELMA KELLERMAN
DURBANVILLE
SOUTH AFRICA
Helma Kellerman
5 Oct 08 at 7:34 am