Tag: prison

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This week’s post is by Liz Tryens.

By

Elizabeth Tryens

 

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.  For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. Romans 10:9-10 (NIV)

NEW PARENTS

When I was a small child, the thought of a new birth fascinated me! I thought a new mother or a new father would be a personal liberator, someone like Jesus Christ whose love is never ending. But a child cannot choose his own parents, and neither could I. 

Without new and improved parents, I had to find a different path towards the love I desired. And in doing that, I needed to face some of the worst things about myself: the prison of my defeats, my unbelief, my lack of trust. While John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son..”, the love of God was not always something that I saw in my house or in the church, God’s house. For a long time, my own prisons kept me in bondage. I needed to realize the second part of the verse: “whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

THE BONDAGE OF PRISONS

Freeing myself from my own prisons was not an easy task. I needed a spiritual rescue! Just as athletes need to train before they can swim, ski, or box, I needed to train my spiritual muscles. The power of evil that has surrounded mankind since the fall in the Garden of Eden needs to be fought off! In was in that Garden that God’s words established the covenant of spiritual death to those who ignored God’s words.

Freeing yourself from spiritual prisons is a difficult task. We may not be able to choose a new mother or father to take the place of the ones who failed us, but we CAN choose to take God as our Father, and his son as our brother.

We can step out of the prisons we have created and have new life in Him. We can be “born again” into a new and loving family.