Freedom Within
God wants to conform us to the image of His Son. To do so may require us to leave our comfort zones.
“Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self ?”- Luke 9:23-25
One of the hardest transitions in the Christian faith is moving from our desire for comfort to allowing God to pull us out of our comfort zones. When we fully surrender our plans for His, then joy and peace rush in. But dying to our plans is hard!
The only way to do this I have found is one day at a time and even one prayer 🙏 at a time. We have to fully trust that God’s plans are better than our plans, as Isaiah 55:8-9 says. When we find areas that block this trust, we must pray through them and allow the word of God to demolish the strongholds that keep us captive and hold us back from total surrender. 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 says “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
This verse tells of the obedience required to win this battle between our need for comfort to feel as though we are in control, and our longing to be truly set free by the power of the Holy Spirit to fully follow and embrace Christ with 100% abandonment. For as 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 says that is what leads to real deep and lasting freedom: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
#doughallmedia #thewell #freedomwithin
