Change Me....Part Two

GAIN FREEDOM FROM THE WORLD:

          Lesson Three, You can’t straddle the fence.  You can’t be of the world and of God too.  You have to make a choice.  You either live in the world or you live like Christ is in you.

Galatians 5:1 ESV, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

          When you are of the world you are a slave to sin.  I know that before I dedicated my life back to Christ that I was a slave to sin.  My heart had gotten so hardened against what was right, that being wrong seemed right to me.  My conscious no longer worked.  I couldn’t hear God’s voice if he was standing at my ear with a megaphone.  In the world, I battled alcoholism and drug abuse. I battled debt and insecurity.  I was angry all the time and my hope was in earthly things.  I got so far down that I felt that the dirt and rocks at the bottom of the pit were on top of me.  I couldn’t see up.  I was so good at being down.  It took a lot of hard knocks and for me to be in that pit to realize how much of life I was missing.  Not just a regular life, a God-filled life; one that gave me peace and joy even when the darkness was still there on the outskirts.  When I reached inside of myself and clung on to the light that Jesus had there waiting for me I felt a freedom I had never felt before.  For so long I felt unworthy.  I felt incapable of being loved by anyone. 

          I had made so many mistakes that I felt, “Why would God deal with me?”  Even though God loves me despite my sins and my failures, I still have to fight the world.  I have to break free from the chains that it put on me.  I say have to because it is a daily battle.  I can read my bible every day.  I can pray every day.  I can praise the Lord every day.  The world doesn’t just disappear.  The fight has to be fought all the time.  It is an ongoing battle.  You might not have to deal with the same issues but something will come up. 

          You will see.  Once you start the fight and the battle lines are drawn.  You will start to stay off the middle and move closer to God.  That fence will grow so tall between you and worldly desires that there is no way for you to straddle it.  You won’t even want to.  You will be at such peace that the idea of giving that up to experience what the world has to offer does not interest you any longer.  

DIE TO SELF

          Lesson Four, Luke 9:23-24 (NIV) Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it."
          Die to yourself.  Take the, “you”, out of the equation.  Stop living for you.  Live for God, live for Christ, live to serve others.  Just like I said earlier, we are not in control.  We are a creation of God’s.  He made us and if He wanted to he could control us.  He chose to allow us to have free-will to choose to love and worship Him. 
          We are not mistakes.  God made us for a reason in His own image.  He has plans for us.  Those plans can never manifest if we do what we want in this life.  I have figured out the hard way that doing what I want will not make me happy and it serves nothing but my own selfishness.  The desire I have now to be used by God overshadows any want for myself.  As human beings, we will always want nicer things.  Worldly possessions, status quo, you name it we want it.  But unless it is God’s will and plan for us, no matter what we end up getting it won’t make us happy. 
          I still want things in life.  I just want the things that God want s in my life.  I realized that by not aligning myself with God and doing His will, I was hurting myself.  I was stuck in one place, going nowhere fast.  I will never claim to be the perfect Christian because I would be lying.  I am making baby steps myself and dying to self is one of the things I really have battled.  That little voice that says, “You do what you want to do, when you want to do it”, is still there.  The difference is that I have enjoyed blessings from God since I made the effort to walk in His ways.  I still have a ways to go, but I am trying.  I am not content to be self-centered and selfish any more.  I want to be like Christ.  I want to die to me and live for Him.