Lazurus

Last post, I promised to list the consequences of sin, but I feel I need one more example of how we can choose to live a free, peaceful, joy-filled life, or choose to be bound up in strongholds.

Let's look at the story of Lazarus, in the Gospel of John, chapters 11 and 12.

The story should be familiar to you. Jesus was friends with Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha. Lazarus became sick and his sisters asked Jesus to come, since they knew that He had healed so many. Jesus waited a bit and then came, but by this time, Lazarus had been dead for four days. Jesus came up to the tomb and commanded Lazarus to come out of the tomb. My focus is on verse 44, of chapter 11.

And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”

I want you to notice the three states that Lazarus was in.

1. He was dead.

2. Then he was resurrected, but was bound with graveclothes.

3. He then was loosed from the graveclothes, and therefore fully free.

We can go through these stages as well. We are dead in our sins, until we believe on Jesus. We are then given eternal life, our spirits are made new (II Cor. 5:17), we are saved. It is as if we have died, were buried, and have resurrected, with Christ. (Romans 6:3-6) Now at first we are still bound by our graveclothes, this means our fleshly desires are not done away with. We have to learn how to resist these lusts, and as I said last post, we don't have the willpower, this power only comes from God. It is through reading the Bible and starving our flesh that we grow stronger and can resist.

Now we can live the rest of our earthly lives in that bound up state (and unfortunately a lot of believers do, because they don't know the freedom they have), but that is not what God wants for us. He wants us to be free from these constraints. This will only happen when we get to know God better (through prayer and reading of His Word) and realize what being saved really means. It happens when we learn that God has put His Holy Spirit on the inside of us, to empower us to overcome sin. It happens when we learn to yield to the Holy Spirit.

Now if you are walking around your whole life, bound by the graveclothes, does that mean you are dead? No, you are alive, like Lazarus, you just won't live a full, complete, abundant life. You will be hindered.

This is what I mean when I say that Christianity is about freedom. God want you to be free--truly, wholly, completely free. Being saved is not about a ticket to heaven, it is about so much more.

I just finished reading Dug Down Deep by Joshua Harris, and it was so wonderful. In it, he illustrates this concept. He shows that before we're saved, we are chained to our flesh (that is the part in us that wants to disobey God). At this point we have no choice but to be a slave to it and obey it. But once we are saved, the chains are broken, we are free, but that flesh doesn't go away. It is still around (as long as we're on this earth) and will tempt us. We must fight our flesh, attack it, deny it and kill it (Romans 8:13; Galatians 5:24) with the power of the Holy Spirit that comes through diligent, continuous time in God's Word. But too many people actually feed their flesh (and I love his cartoon drawings of this--this little guy bringing a feast to this monster). They think that since we've been freed by the Cross, it's okay to indulge the flesh, but that's not true. When we feed the flesh, it becomes bigger and stronger and pushes us around all the more. We actually need to starve our flesh, so that it will become weak. It will never be completely gone until Christ returns, but if we keep it weak, it's tempting us won't be nearly as hard to resist.

What state are you in right now? Are you still bound up? Need help to be set free? Let us know.