TOO MUCH BAGGAGE
Guess what? We’re not
perfect Christians; nobody is. As hard as we may try to be “good,” sometimes we
make mistakes. We have to admit that we’ve messed up. We may even have to admit
that according to what the Bible says, we’ve sinned. Every Christian still sins
and people sin against us. The best we can do is ask the Lord for forgiveness,
accept it and move on. The thing is, we CAN change. Now when you fly, you have
to pay for extra baggage. It’s the same with our lives—and it costs too much.
So let’s see if we can get rid of some of the baggage we’ve been carrying.
Let’s lighten up our load. We can’t really move forward if we keep adding to
the pile of stuff that we take with us from year to year.
So this is what we can do:
First thing is to think about, then write down one temptation that took us away
from doing God’s will this past month. Look at that thing and forgive ourselves
for doing it.
Jesus is our savior. We
mess up; we admit it; He picks us up. He forgives us and we forgive us. Done.
But how do we stop from messing up in the same way again?
We need to ask ourselves,
“Why did I mess up?” “Why did I allow it?” “What is it in me that may have
contributed to bringing this thing to pass?” Once we can see the answer to this
“why” question and we have an understanding of it, we can forgive ourselves and
get healed.
Any mistakes we make are
not in our spirit man—that’s perfect. But mistakes are in our thinking,
emotions and decisions—all soul-related.
God said, “For I will
restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds” (Jer. 30:17).
There are no wounds in our spirit, only in our soul. God sent Jesus to earth to
show us how to get our souls healed and drop the baggage that is so hard to
drag around with us. The older we get the heavier and more cumbersome the bags
get.
Paul tells us his deep
desire in Philippians 3:10: “That I may know him [Jesus Christ] and the power
of his resurrection.” The original Greek word for “power” in this verse is
“dunamis.” Dunamis is defined as “miracle-working power, moral power,
excellence of soul.”
The resurrection power of
Jesus Christ is the miraculous power that refreshes and changes our souls.
It’s in our souls that we
err against God, but we’ve been given “dunamis,” which is excellence of soul.
We have excellence of soul. Say it, “I have excellence of soul. I have moral
power, by the grace of Jesus Christ and the love of God to me.” It’s the same
miraculous power that it took to raise Jesus from the bonds of hell, that will miraculously
break us free from the bonds of sins and errors in judgement in our soul lives.
The world pushes us to do
things that are not good for us. We are taught by the media and by our social,
business and political environment, that to succeed we must tell half-truths
and lies and it’s okay. We can cheat on some things that don’t seem right to us
anyway. We can park in the handicap parking even though we’re perfectly able to
walk: little things like that, things that don’t seem to matter much. And yet,
they are wrong living. Righteous living just isn’t practical in our world today
and less and less people are willing to risk what it takes to do the right
thing. But what about God? Do we really think that He doesn’t see or doesn’t
care about honesty, morality, integrity? He does. It’s against the flow, but we
truly can live a decent, honest life and even prosper doing it. Jesus helps us
to do it and one thing at a time, we can be the people who really do have
integrity, standards, prudence, sincerity, conscience, justice, kindness,
remorse and virtue.
We have that
miracle-working power of dunamis in us already. We just have to release it and
follow its (His) leading. We can release it by letting the light of dunamis
power invade our souls. Like it says many times in the Old Testament, “open the
gates.” We say, “I have miracle-working power in me I have excellence of soul
and moral power because God gave it to me.” Excellence of soul is to make the
right decisions, right choices, the right thoughts according to the spirit of
God in Christ in us. It is a choice against the norm. It is a fight for what is
right, even if it is a fight against ourselves, against what society dictates.
We have the right to win this fight and be free of the bonds of the world
around us.
We soak in dunamis like
we’d soak a stained piece of clothing. We don’t just dip it in and take it out.
It needs to be immersed for a while. We soak our innermost being by meditating
on the truth that Jesus Christ wants to heal in our souls. The results are
miraculous, not natural, and that’s why we have to keep going to the Lord and
soaking in what the Bible says is right thinking. You won’t find right thinking
in the ways of the world, only in the ways of Christ, that we find in the
writings of those who were inspired by God to write what He wanted said.
Second Timothy 2: 24-26
tells us that when we don’t have excellence of soul in a category of life, we
are opposing ourselves and that we are to “awake ourselves out of the snare of
the devil.”
As we start to claim our
right to exhibit excellence of soul and moral power we will begin to see in our
lives where the origins of our errors came from. It takes some reflection.
Did something make you
feel rejected or not good enough as a child? And do those triggers still come
up and do you react the same way as you did as a child? Are you still seeking
what you lost a long time ago? Do you feel you have to close the door on your
real self in order to protect and defend yourself? Did something or someone
make you so angry you did and still do things to hurt yourself or others? Did
you hide in pain killers or alcohol to protect yourself after a disaster you
caused or something else you saw that you don’t ever want to see again? There
are so many things in our lives that can keep us doing the wrong things and not
stepping out bravely as adults, to do the right thing.
It’s totally
understandable, but also totally changeable with Jesus’ help. We may not be
able to help someone else with their baggage, but we can understand that they
do have baggage just like we do. To change the world, we change ourselves
first. We start with our own baggage.
Many of our hurts and
errors in judgment started when we were children, or they started at the points
of trauma in our lives. Everyone has drama and trauma as a child and as adults.
But we have the power to confront the drama and the trauma. God’s Word says we
have the miracle dunamis power within us, that as we shine the light on it, we
can have our souls changed and healed.
God tells us: “For
I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds,
saith the Lord” (Jer. 30:17).
Those “wounds” include soul wounds: defeats, blows to our minds
and our emotions, causing erroneous defenses, actions that hurt us and others. As
we look to God’s Word, that extra baggage that we are still paying for, drops
away and we can become the true free people we want to be, an example of
integrity and light to those around us.
Love, Carolyn
EXCITING LIFE-CHANGING
STORIES:
No comments:
Post a Comment