Blind to Barriers of Bondage
Galatians 5:1
This week I saw and touched with my hands a small 10-ft section of the old Berlin wall, known infamously as the Iron curtain. It was built in 1961 in response to the millions of freedom seeking souls that had fled soviet domination.
On this small section, in defiance of oppression, an artist painted graffiti stating;
1. "A wall cannot enslave man, that there is freedom, and true freedom is of God.
2. Below painted on the bottom was Psalm 23
With the Lord as a shepherd we are led in paths of freedom
Man has always sought freedom, those seeking to realize & fulfilling their dreams cherish it.
Who would purposely imprison themselves? A Good example how this happens is this, for example.
Not long ago, in the wall of an old castle in Italy where some repairs were being made, the workmen found a relic that told a tale of ancient barbarity and crime. Some baron of the old days put an enemy in a little niche in the wall, just large enough to hold a man, and then set the masons at work building the wall around him. Slowly the masonry crept up, as stone was laid on stone, until at last it arose and left the man standing there in his living tomb.
A man starts out to build a structure, which he calls "Life." Slowly, as the years pass, he walls in his soul.
1. Life calls, and he answers, "I’m facing obstacles & hardships right now."
2. Setbacks come and he feels, I can’t go forward
3. Failure become a way of thinking
4. A man looks upon his resources, and thinks to himself, I really can-not afford to do anything.
5. Darkness surrounds and all he can see is defeat
6. Day by day, year by year, He pity’s himself and uses the same old excuse:
"Take care of yourself first!"
"Look out for number one!"
"Be just good enough to get by!"
So he builds his living tomb. So he suffocates his soul.
He can’t see, to break free to become
Being Blind to barriers of freedom
1. It is bad to be physically blind -
2. It is worse to be mentally blind - to see the glory of God in the universe
3. It is worse still to be morally blind - where we see;
a) Nothing shameful in vices,
b) Nothing revolting in obscenity and profanity,
c) Nothing repelling in selfishness; so that a man can see nothing noble in generosity,
d) Nothing beautiful in beneficence,
e) Nothing regal in righteousness and duty,
f) Nothing sacred in human love.
4. It is worst of all to be spiritually blind and walled in
Blind to our ability, what we are, and who we are
a) All we see is what we don’t have
b) Fear consumes our existence
c) We Harbor doubt and lack of faith
d) Satan is allowed to have Supremacy over our lives
e) At best we are Worried and frustrated
f) And held In bondage, by chains made by our imagination
THE CAUSE OF MORAL, AND SPIRITUAL FREEDOM, IS THE CAUSE OF GOD!
1. As children of God, we sometimes do not quite comprehend the fact that we have been set free by our Savior.
2. God, who gave us life, gives us liberty at the same time.
3. If you are living in a prison of your own making, you can walk through the doors of freedom today.
Gal. 5:1
"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free"
We have been set free, beyond the prison walls of self.
I. Freedom to Love instead if hate
II. Freedom to be joyous in the midst of sorrow
III. Freedom to have peace in the midst of conflict
IV. Freedom to wait with God, when others moved by circumstance
V. Freedom to be kind when others hurt
VI. Freedom to do good, when others do evil
VII. Freedom to have Christ as your anchor, when others have nothing to trust in.
VIII. Freedom to let Christ lead you in steps of righteousness, and holi-ness
IX. Freedom from self, wrongful passions & desires
The power of God’s freedom
There are some people who are never free outside a prison.
The body can be bound with chains, the spirit never.
When Howard Rutledge’s plane was shot down over Vietnam, he parachuted into a little village and was immediately attacked, stripped naked, and imprisoned. For the next seven years he endured brutal treatment. His food was little more than a bowl of rotting soup with a glob of pig fat, skin, hair, and all. Rats the size of cats and spiders as big as fists scurried around him. He was frequently cold, alone, and tortured. He was sometimes shackled in excruciating positions and left for days in his own waste with carnivorous insects boring through his oozing sores. How did he keep his sanity?
In his book, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, Rutledge gives a powerful tes-timony as to the importance of Scripture memory. Some excerpts follow:
Now the sights and sounds and smells of death were all around me. My hun-ger for spiritual food soon outdid my hunger for a steak. Now I wanted to know about that part of me that will never die. Now I wanted to talk about God and Christ and the church. But in Heartbreak solitary confinement there was no pas-tor, no Sunday-school teacher, no Bible, no hymnbook, no community of believ-ers to guide and sustain me. I had completely neglected the spiritual dimension of my life. It took prison to show me how empty life is without God, and so I had to go back in my memory to those Sunday-school days in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If I couldn’t have a Bible and hymnbook, I would try to rebuild them in my mind.
I tried desperately to recall snatches of Scripture, sermons, gospel choruses from childhood, and hymns we sang in church. The first three dozen songs were relatively easy. Every day I¡¦d try to recall another verse or a new song. One night there was a huge thunderstorm, it was the season of the monsoon rains,and a bolt of lightning knocked out the lights and plunged the entire prison into dark-ness. I had been going over hymn tunes in my mind and stopped to lie down and sleep when the rains began to fall. The darkened prison echoed with wave after wave of water. Suddenly, I was humming my thirty-seventh song, one I had en-tirely forgotten since childhood.
Showers of blessings,
Showers of blessings we need!
Mercy drops round us are falling,
But for the showers we plead
I no sooner had recalled those words than another song popped into my mind, the theme song of a radio program my mother listened to when I was just a kid.
Heavenly sunshine, heavenly sunshine
Flooding my soul with glory divine.
Heavenly sunshine, heavenly sunshine,
Hallelujah! Jesus is mine!
Most of my fellow prisoners were struggling like me to rediscover faith, to re-construct workable value systems. Harry Jenkins lived in a cell nearby during much of my captivity. Often we would use those priceless seconds of communi-cation in a day to help one another recall Scripture verses and stories.
One day I heard him whistle. When the cellblock was clear, I waited for his communication, thinking it to be some important news. ¡¥I got a new one,¡¦ he said. I don¡¦t know where it comes from or why I remember it, but it¡¦s a story about Ruth and Naomi.¡¦ He then went on to tell that ancient story of Ruth following Naomi into a hostile new land and finding God¡¦s presence and protection there. Harry¡¦s urgent news was 2,000 years old. It may not seem important to prison life, but we lived off that story for days, rebuilding it, thinking about what it meant, and applying God’s ancient words to our predicament.
Everyone knew the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm, but the camp favorite verse that everyone recalled first and quoted most often is found in the Gospel of John, third chapter, sixteenth verse¡K With Harry’s help, I even recon-structed the seventeenth and eighteenth verses.
How I struggled to recall those Scriptures and hymns! I had spent my first eighteen years in a Southern Baptist Sunday school, and I was amazed at how much I could recall. Regrettably, I had not seen then the importance of memo-rizing verses from the Bible, or learning gospel songs. Now, when I needed them, it was too late. I never dreamed that I would spend almost seven years (five of them in solitary confinement) in a prison in North Vietnam or that thinking about one memorized verse could have made the whole day bearable.
One portion of a verse I did remember was, Thy word have I hid in my heart.¦ How often I wished I had really worked to hide God¡¦s Word in my heart. I put my mind to work. Every day I planned to accomplish certain tasks. I woke early, did my physical exercises, cleaned up as best I could, then began a period of devotional prayer and meditation. I would pray, hum hymns silently, quote Scripture, and think about what the verse meant to me.
Remember, we weren’t playing games. The enemy knew that the best way to break a man’s resistance was to crush his spirit in a lonely cell. In other words, some of our POWs after solitary confinement lay down in a fetal position and died. All this talk of Scripture and hymns may seem boring to some, but it was the way we conquered our enemy and overcame the power of death around us.
Conclusion
With the Lord as our shepherd when we are led in paths of freedom.
When in spirit we know. "A wall cannot enslave man, that there is freedom, and true freedom is of God.
When we cast off the imaginary chains that Satan hand out
There are some things we will never say after we have been released
Never again will I say, "I can’t," for "I can do everything through Him who gives me strength" (Phil. 4:13).
Never again will I admit lack, for "My God will meet all your needs accord-ing to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 4:19).
Never again will I fear, for "God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love and of self-discipline" (2 Tim. 1:7).
Never again will I harbor doubt and lack of faith, for "The Lord is my light and my salvation--whom shall I fear" (Ps. 27:1).
Never again will I allow the supremacy of Satan over my life, for "the One who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world" (1 John 4:4).
Never again will I admit defeat, for "God always leads us in triumphal pro-cession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him" (2 Cor. 2:14).
Never again will I lack wisdom, for "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him" (James 1:5).
Never again will I be worried and frustrated, "Casting all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you" (1 Pet. 5:7).
Never again will I be in bondage, for "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Cor. 3:17).
