FREEDOM + FEAR

I remember almost being caught, almost. My parents did not check up on the computer a whole lot so there were some close calls...but the closest I had been to being caught was probably at my friend's house when would be watching the "bad" cable channels and then his mom would come down stairs and we would change the channel to the playstation input on the TV and act cool and calm like nothing was happening. This happened a lot. My heart would beat out of chest as she came down the stairs.

Fear can control you. To some point as a teenager it controlled me. God desires us to be free. He came to give us freedom. Freedom is anti-fear. Freedom from fear of being caught. You may struggle for the rest of your life with this junk. But you still can be free. Check out this passage from Romans 6 in the Message.

You can be free. Sin does not have the last word.

 15-18 So, since we're out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we're free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it's your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you've let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you've started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!

 19 I'm using this freedom language because it's easy to picture. You can readily recall, can't you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing—not caring about others, not caring about God—the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God's freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?

 20-21 As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn't have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you're proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end.

 22-23 But now that you've found you don't have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God's gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.

Live like you are free. Because you are.

This video is of Chad, you may have missed its release a month ago. He has an amazing story of being caught and being free.

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