A recent post on Crossroad Junction’s Facebook page:
Category Archives: Bondage
Letting Go
For most Christians, the greatest struggle is not resisting sin but in being willing to let go of our hurts. More than sin, we allow our hurts to define us, and find it difficult to leave the familiarity of our pain for the unfamiliarity of a truly new life in Christ. Even among Christians, few risk the grace of confession, forgiveness and repentance to become whole and complete in Him.
Really, it’s not that difficult…
Here’s a story of one man’s journey: Getting to Simple.
Slaying Giants
On Christmas eve several years ago, Marianne and I spent time with about thirty brothers in the jail. During our time of fellowship, one of the men read the poem below.
Here’s the story behind the poem, then the poem …
Earlier that December, I shared with those men how our journey in the Lord is like Israel’s journey from slavery in Egypt, through the desert, and then into the promised land.
God takes us out of the bondage of Egypt, but then uses the wilderness to burn Egypt out of us.
In the wilderness, God prepares us to take possession of the promised land – that place where we are able to own and responsibly manage the things He has created us to both be and do.
The Power of God
We don’t go looking for or emphasize miracles, but in our fellowships we’ve been seeing the miraculous happen time and again.
We had one man collapse and then die right in front of the paramedics and the fellowship he had been helping to start in the jail – and then come back to life shortly thereafter on the gurney in the jail infirmary after brothers gathered together to pray for him.
Becoming Our Past
Often, longstanding hurts, disappointments and emotional wounds are like old, familiar friends. We let them become so engrained into our sense of identity that they begin to define us.
When that happens, we often aren’t willing to transparently expose and turn them them over to Jesus, but tightly hold onto them like a child clinging to a security blanket.
Instead of finding transformation and wholeness, we become our past.
If this is a struggle for you or someone you know, let me suggest an old blog I wrote years ago called God Shows Up. It’s a good starting point on the road to healing.
A Hollow Gospel
Sometimes I get angry and need the Lord to settle my spirit.
I am so frustrated over the shattered lives of man after man who I help find the Lord in jail, who then go to some on-fire, podium-focused, pastor-centric church when they get out.
The Show
Inevitably, I will see those men back in jail again a year later, or I’ll hear that they have relapsed and fallen back into addiction or bondage.
Why are they back in jail or back in bondage? Because that “church” is little more than glory-halleluiah feel-good meetings with exciting sermons framed by manipulative emotional intensity which masquerades as “worship” – all deliberately designed to serve as a platform to showcase the gifted pastor and his gifted team.
I Saw Satan Fall
On Tuesday evening, I understood how Jesus felt when his disciples finally “got it” and reported back, after He sent them out to minister on their own for the first time, that the sick were healed and darkness conquered. In His joy, the Lord said He saw Satan fall from Heaven because of them.
On Tuesday I’m teaching and mentoring a class of students on how to minister in the areas of confession, forgiveness and repentance. After seven weeks of foundation laying, the students this week started doing ministry sessions on their own and – wow! – it was amazing what God did through them that evening.
Shameful Silence
When loyalty to the leader trumps integrity, and folks sit silent, then it’s no longer a church – it’s a cult.
Government Run Amuck
S&P downgraded the United States last night.
I hope and pray that this will serve as a wake-up call for the Church to realize that Biblical precepts can’t be mocked if any nation wants to survive. If God’s people don’t begin to understand, articulate and follow those precepts, then there is no hope.
One of those precepts is that God has ordained certain roles and responsibilities for civil government, and Scripture has lots to say about how individuals, families, the Church, the State and voluntary associations are to function.
However, there is not a single verse or example in all of Scripture which lends any credence to the view that God has given civil government the right or responsibility to re-distribute wealth or provide for our individual health or income. See The Growing Idolatry of Civil Government.
Freedom
In return for a little less freedom, civil government ever seeks to solve problems we should be solving on our own through individual responsibility, family support, personal charity or voluntary associations. As we’ve continued to trade liberty for government “solutions” (which never in reality actually solve much, but often make things worse), little by little we’ve become increasingly enslaved.
Every American should watch this cartoon from 1948 and heed its warning about Utopian promises to fix all of our problems. It is more relevant today than ever before.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVh75ylAUXY&feature=player_embedded%5DMay we once again find the courage, and the common sense, to stand tall as free men and free women.
For a related bog, take a look at The Growing Idolatry of Civil Government.
God Shows Up
As “Mr. Analytical,” I’m the least probable person I know to be doing pastoral counseling, but God seems to have given me a special grace to walk with people to those places where He wants to meet them in very powerful, transforming and healing ways. I guess it’s one of those spiritual ironies that God uses to confound us. He works through the least likely to ensure that the glory is His.
Whether in the jail or in my home study, I deal weekly with issues that – believe me – exceed anything you might imagine. But the Lord meets us in amazing ways, and folks find freedom in just one or two sessions from decades of emotional and spiritual bondage.
God shows up!
Restoration
The Lord patiently, lovingly wants us to go to those places in our lives where we need his healing. Those places are at the core of our beings, where all the accumulated “yuk” lies. But it’s hard to go there, because there’s pain and hurt there.
My job is to help people get there. When we do, I simply ask Jesus what he has to say. The Lord then dramatically speaks to them in real, personal ways and brings healing and peace to some of the most unspeakable experiences and issues in their lives – including sexual abuse, child prostitution, occult oppression, abandonment, drug and alcohol addiction, sexual compulsions, anger and fear.
I’ve done this hundreds of times, and have never needed a “re-do” session where God has spoken his gentle truth. When God speaks (and He always does if there is a willingness to expose what needs to be healed!), the lies at the center of the hurt and the pain – which have caused bondage and been so controlling – immediately die. Simple and complete; wholeness and health. It’s wonderful to see.
Too often we forget that God wants to restore us to health, and have fellowship with us, because he loves us in deeply personal ways. After all, God valued Adam so much that he walked and talked with Adam in the garden during the cool of the day. God values us just as much, and desires a relationship where we can once again commune with him, and He with us.
Anyone who knows me knows how much I value the historic tenets of our faith, but we can’t major on correct doctrine to the neglect of the personal relationship God wants with us. Doctrine and Biblical truth provide a context for our day-to-day faith, but are not a substitute for intimacy with God and learning to hear his voice. We need both.
Hurt or Health?
It’s sad but true – too many churches have become a refuge for hurt people, led by hurt people, rather than a place of health that reproduces health.
It’s OK to be hurt – there’s no condemnation in that! But we have an obligation before God to seek his healing and restoration.
Perpetual Hospital Ward or Health?
I’ve had lots of challenges in my own life: emotionally crippled close family members, the death of several very close friends, a degenerative and potentially fatal autoimmune disease, an unwanted divorce, and the need to start over again financially. But despite it all, I have chosen life, not hurt.
Too often, as we go through the motions with our day-to-day routines, we forget why God redeemed us. Instead, we slip unawares into a rut of accumulated hurts and emotional pain, and start believing that’s normal.
I encourage those who are burdened with hurt to choose life and seek help.
True Repentance
Jesus, in his parting instructions to the disciples, told them to go forth and proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:44-48). That “great commission” applies to all believers, even now!
We have distorted repentance and think it simply means saying we’re sorry, or else we confuse it with confession. That’s not repentance – although authentic confession and forgiveness often are essential components of repentance.
The Greek word for repentance, as used in the New Testament, means to change the way we think so that we then change the way we act. In my experience working with and mentoring lots of men as they get out of jail, it is rare that someone can change the way he acts unless he lets God change the way he thinks. Having the will power, dedication and commitment to change how we act, without letting God change how we think, is seldom enough.
Changing the way I think means much, much more than believing correct doctrine or precepts in the cognitive, rational part of my mind. It also involves changing what the experiential and emotional side of my mind believes. You may rationally believe that “all things work together for the good of those who love God,” but when you lose your job or your daughter comes home drunk or you get a deadly disease, your emotions and reactions demonstrate your true belief. Our emotions and how we react to things spring from, and point to, our true beliefs.
Exposing the Crap in Our Lives
Life’s Septic Tank
For God to change the way we truly think, we need to be willing to open up and expose those beliefs, and their source, to Him. To help make this process understandable, I tell guys in jail that our lives contain a septic tank, and it holds lots of crap and stink. Although God forgives us, He still wants – and needs – to replace that crap and stink with health and wholeness. But to do that, He needs us to remove the septic tank’s lid so all that nasty stuff inside is exposed.
This process of removing the septic tank’s lid and exposing the crap and the stink is confession and repentance – and it often does not involve sin (although it can)! It may simply involve wrong beliefs based on lies that took hold in our lives through no fault of our own – often before we became Christians and often due to experiences during our childhood when our lie-filled belief system formed about ourselves, others, the world around us and God.
Emotions Show Beliefs
Our emotions – based on what we really believe despite cognitive facts and logic – are pathways that lead back to root lies. If we want to allow God to change the way we think so that He can then change the way we act (and react!), then we need to expose those lies to God by taking the lid off of the experiences and emotions that contain them. Once we expose those lies to God, we can invite God to speak His truth to us. In the jail, as God speaks His truth to men about themselves or about things that happened in their lives (as opposed to me giving them a cognitive to-do list of right living – which may be needed, but that’s another process for another time!), wholeness and health floods in and replaces the crap and stink!
This, then, is what we’ve been doing in the jail. God shows up and changes how men think by speaking to them His truth about them in deeply personal ways. And when he does, His truth sets them free!
His Truth Will Set You Free!
God’s Truth Displaces Lies
When God speaks His truth, lies are displaced. Horrendous memories and experiences that were a source of pain, hurt and bondage become places of righteousness, peace and joy. Our job in the counseling sessions is to simply facilitate the ministry of the Holy Spirit as the men take the lid off the septic tanks of their lives and let God pump out all of the crap and stink, then bring health and wholeness by speaking His personal, loving truth to them.
Sometimes it’s not easy for people who come to me for help to do this, because they don’t want to expose the pain and the emotions. But when they do, God speaks his truth to them in tender, loving, personal ways and the lies that previously held them in bondage disappear.
Sometimes, after these counseling sessions, I have to sit quietly to let the glory of God’s presence subside enough for me to reconnect to the so-called “real” world.
Reproducing Health
Our churches were never intended by God to be hospitals or way stations, and our Sunday gatherings are not places intended by God to perpetually sooth our hurts. My vision is that our churches and our lives become places of health that reproduce health.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have problems or have issues, but do we have the zest to confront life and let our sovereign, personal God continually transform us, even through hard times, into the people He calls us, and created us, to be?
Are we willing to repent by opening up the crap and stink in our lives so that God can speak His truth to us and bring His transforming peace and joy?
That’s what the world wants to see – not perfect people, but imperfect people who can traverse life’s issues with God’s grace evident in us.
God is not about covering over or burying our hurt and pain, like old wounds under thick callous scabs. Rather, He calls us to repentance so that He can get at the lies in our lives and heal us through His truth – which means not only doctrinal truth but also truth about our past, who we really are, how God really sees us, and who He created us and wants to empower us to be.
That process not only changes the way we think, but also can’t help but change the way we act.
~ Jim Wright
Related article
- Whole Health (crossroadjunction.com)
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