So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
John 8:36
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
2 Corinthians 3:17
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1
My wife’s mom had become a slave to this world, she was super-driven, and, as a result, had a lot of strife in her life. No one was going to come between her and what she wanted to acquire in this life.
In many ways, I was a lot like that…And, I didn’t even know it.
One day, after we’d found out that mom had brain cancer, I was sitting in her living room with her. We were alone and she looked up at a living room wall that was tastefully decorated with a lot of items she’d worked hard to get. Mom was a gifted decorator and as she looked at that wall, and then around the room, she said something that totally caught me by surprise. She said, “None of it matters.” It was such a relief to hear her words and to know that mom was about to be relieved of so much worldly weight, so much heaviness.
Wow, coming from such a driven person where everything she’d worked so hard for MATTERED, it was quite a shocking statement. As it turned out, my daughter, Faith, led mom to ask Jesus into her heart just before she passed. God had revealed to mom that what she thought mattered, really didn’t and it was an honest moment that began an unloading of the weight that had weighed on mom’s heart, mind and spirit for most of her life.
What matters? What have I been enslaved by? What has this world taught me to carry that shouldn’t matter to me? Lord what am I carrying that I need to cast onto You? What “matters” can You set me truly free from? Please show me how You can lighten my life and spirit. Please set me free, Lord. I want to be like You, free.
One of the most blessed things Jesus has shown me is that He answers prayer. Nothing new, right? But, the type of prayer I’m talking about today is the one where I ask Jesus to show me anything that’s weighing on me that I’m not even aware of. Some “thing(s)” matters and I don’t even know it, consciously. In fact, the only way I find out about something that matters to me is by the Lord revealing it to me. It’s like I’m blinded to the “matter” and then He opens my understanding to it and shows me that He can relieve me of the weight of the “matter.” It’s so cool to be able to just pray for Him to help me with “matters” and then to rest knowing that I’ve asked Him for His help. Then, out of the blue, one day, He just shows me some thing and then relieves my spirit of the care of that thing. It’s an amazing relationship that’s a real, tangible, true blessing. What a Savior we have.
Go ahead, ask Jesus to show you what “matters” to you, some thing that’s weighing on your mind, on your life, on your spirit, and then watch what happens.
It’s really fun and amazing. He’s so faithful to answer that prayer. It makes me so happy when He surprises me by showing me how I can be set free from some thing that doesn’t need to matter to me any more. I don’t understand exactly how He does it but, somehow, He takes the weight of the matter from me and I can actually feel it happening. Incredible. But then, that’s our wonderful Jesus…He’s simply incredible.
God bless,
Mark