Songs of Deliverance
We often try and fight the strongholds in our lives, but facing these problems on our own, we have proven that alone, we have no hope of overcoming them. Though we try our very best, we cannot conquer the strongholds in our lives, or those of our families. We must turn to the Father with complete humility if we ever hope to be free from the tendencies and insecurities that have long plagued us. God has mercy and God will always accept us, He will always forgive a repentant hear. If we repent He’ll forgive… but what I’m talking about is an issue of being bound to a slave-lord or being free in God and inclined to righteousness.
As I’ve said, we have no hope of ever obtaining freedom on our own. If we face the strongholds and problems of our lives with no more than our own strength, failure is guaranteed. Not only does this mean that we are hopeless to change ourselves, but it means that the only power to break the holds of lies and iniquity in our lives can be obtained from God. Only God is going to do the liberating, but God is opposed to the proud and gives grace to the humble (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5). We cannot come before God as if we deserve freedom on the basis of our own goodness - we don’t. We come before God in complete acknowledgement that we have a problem that alone we cannot fix, and we receive freedom on the sole reason of the blood of Christ which was shed for us. We will not obtain freedom because we are good enough. Only the blood of Jesus Christ was enough to provide these glorious benefits in our lives.
Now, with that said, freedom isn’t just going to pop out from behind a rock and surprise us. The freedom we get will be the freedom we fought and prayed for, but not the freedom we earned, produced or faked. If we get freedom, we must get it God’s way. God’s way, Jesus says, is to replace lies with truth, and the truth will set us free (John 8:32). There are things inside of us that we have not seen or even acknowledged, things that we ourselves cannot search and find. But God will search our hearts and reveal the evils within them. And when evil comes into the light, it becomes powerless in our lives. When the real reason behind our sin is exposed, it lays bare, void, powerless to effect change.
Most problems that lead to sin first start with hurt and rejection. We get hurt so we choose to believe the lies that Satan throws at us about our worth and identity. Now these lies can become evident in our lives in various ways. For example, let’s say that someone who is hurt begins to overeat; they overeat in an attempt to try and fulfill the need to be loved, cared for, and nurtured. The person becomes overweight and feels even more miserable. The person then goes on a diet and looses the weight… in the eyes of the world they appears problem free. But what about the hurts, lies and feelings that drove them to overeat in the first place? They are still there, only now they are buried and suppressed and will in time manifest themselves again in some way in that person’s life if not dealt with. How many people stop smoking and seem to have it all together only to pick up the same (or a different) habit ten years later? Absence is not necessarily deliverance.
