As a man thinks lesson #3
part 2
- (Continued from previous page)
- Sinfulness! Another area of life today that we convince ourselves in our hearts is the idea that we are
slaves to sin! One of the newer terms you will hear is personalizing a sin and making it your own! My sin is
drunkenness or fornication! As if to say it defines us or we define it! One of the great lies of the Devil
today is the idea that we can't get over our sins! Listen, where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom!
You can be free from sin! If we can't be free, then we give in! But if we can convince ourselves that we can
be free, we will strive to be better! Romans 6:17,18! 1 Corinthians 6:9-11!
- Your life is not in your control! This is one of the biggest problems today: somehow we have got the idea
of freedom confused with the idea of control! We had a dream inside of us at one time or another but now, my
responsibility to my wife or kids or parents or work or God is keeping me from fulfilling my dream! So, we are
in bondage, not to a thing or habit, not to a sin but to our overall life and we know nothing of true "Christian
freedom". Jeremiah 10:23! What is Christian freedom? Turn to 1 Cor.9:16-27! What is freedom in Christ? It
is freedom to serve Christ! True Christian freedom does not come from controlling your own life, but giving
control over to God for your life! Christian freedom is the power to turn from sinfulness and other powerful
habits and yield to God's will! I want you to understand something about the greatest freedom you will ever
know: it is the freedom to say I won't be free! Why would anyone want to do that? Because of love! 2 Cor.5:14,
15! Love does not allow you to be free! Think about it, if you love your wife, you are not free from her!
If you love your kids, you are not free from them! G.K. Chesterton said this; "It is most amusing to listen to
opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke
mysteriously imposed by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke imposed by lovers on themselves.
They have invented a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - "free love" - as if a lover
ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is of the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of
marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word."(1) Christian freedom says because
of what Jesus has done for me, I will now live for him! I will live out his dreams for my life, rather than my
own! Gal.5:1,13! David had a dream in 2 Samuel 7:5-7- I want to build God a house, God said no! God said, I
have a dream for you: I will build you a house: 2 Sam.7:8-16 (9,11,16)
As a man thinks in his heart: are you free? Do you have the capability of being free? Do you have the
freedom that says I will serve Christ now and forever?
How different is life viewed when instead of seeing things in your life as barriers to your freedom but as
objects to display your freedom! As a child of God I do not have to be enslaved to anything that is outside
of the will of Christ and I have the freedom to say to Jesus take me I'm yours! Next week: how do we overcome
thinking our life is flat?
(1) Quoted in Jim McGuiggan's Where the Spirit of the Lord is..(West Monroe, Louisiana, 1999) p.100
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