"What is your life message?"
"What is the one thing you want the world to know? If you had the attention of every Christian in the world and only 8 minutes to share your heart with them, what would you say?"
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"What is your life message?"
Bearing under the weight of a man, Jacob struggled to get up.
He's like some sort of superhuman.
He wrestled trying to get out from under the man's body.
"Giving up yet?" The man asked.
Finally, with what he thought was the last of his strength, Jacob broke free and tackled the man to the ground.
"Not a chance," Jacob replied.
On and on they fought. Man against man. Flesh against flesh. Both trying for more strength and running themselves weak. The man touched Jacob's hip, and the pain became excruciating, but he would not give up. The first beams of dawn finally arrived, and just when Jacob thought he had nothing left, the man said, "Let me go, for it is day break."
"Not unless you bless me," Jacob replied. This was clearly a man who had been given great strength by God; Jacob knew he needed that same kind of strength as well.
"What is your name?" The man asked.
"Jacob."
The man looked up to the heavens and back at Jacob. "No," he said. "Not anymore."
That day, Jacob fought with an angel of God and was given a new name because of it: Israel.
"You have struggled with God and with men and have overcome." (Gen 33:28)
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"What is your life message?"
There is freedom and there is victory.
Simply and perfectly, that is what my heart cries for Christians today. Old, young, new to this life or walking with the Lord for years, there is victory for everyone.
There are moments that can last minutes, hours, days, weeks or years. These moments are ones of pure struggle, where we're constantly being attacked on all sides from whatever force won't back down. There's always a point, several points, where we want to give up; we want to stop fighting and just submit to whoever our attacker is. What are we even fighting for?
Little do we know.
Believe me, I get it. It's so much easier to say we gave it our best try and call it a day. Sin can't be that bad, right? We can just let this little bit of sin into our life and still get by. The fact is, that's not what God wants for us. Not in the slightest. More than anything, God wants freedom for our lives. Freedom from this sin, a situation we're going through, a struggle we're enduring. Freedom. Not just freedom, not just the sense that "I got away from it all" but VICTORY. Victory. Knowing that we defeated this stronghold in our life, buried it in the ground and can dance on the grave.
Sin defeated.
My battle with depression was not an easy one. Like I wrote in my last post, I was overwhelmed at the sight of my attic. Let's talk a little more about this area though, what happened?
Well, a lot of things happened. I'm sure I'll write another post one of these days with the story of how I met Jesus, but let me just give you a detail-free gist right now. I was diagnosed with clinical depression by the age of 10. When I was 15 I had moved past it, but I never dealt with what caused it. The result: a cluttered attic. I truly did think I was all right though. I had been out of therapy for about three years at that point and was convinced that I was over everything that had happened. I started to notice some stuff and went back to Therapy for another few years until I was 18, but I wasn't dealing with the real issue, only the fruit of it.
It was a few months ago that I found myself in the attic. It was a conversation with a friend that brought me there. All he did was answer a question for me, and it's as if the stairs appeared before me. Curious, I climbed them, wondering what could possibly be on the other end.
There is was, the clutter that had never been dealt with.
Don't you think I felt defeated just by looking at it all? I wrote how I fought with The Lord about it, how I couldn't possibly go through it all. I told Him it was a lost cause, that there was no point. Yet, He took me by the hand and completely astounded me. Little by little, I started to realize a beautiful truth:
He's so much bigger than this mess I'm in.
And it may have seemed impossible, but Jesus already gave me freedom from all of that before I even looked in the attic, I just had to claim that victory that was already mine.
Now let's look at a nation that is near and dear to my heart: Israel.
Let's start in Genesis. Chapter 15, verses 7 to 21, to be exact:
He also said to him, "I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur
of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it."
But Abram said, "O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?"
So the Lord said to him, "Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon."
Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure."
When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates-- the land of the Kenites, the Kinizzites, the Kadomites, Hitties, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites."
So what do we have here? It's God promising Abraham that he would possess this land. Sounds simple enough. Now let's skip a few chapters, all the way to Exodus. No specific reference this time, but bear with me for a bit while I explain. The Israelites were living in slavery under the Egyptians, but aren't they supposed to be the descendants of Abraham? Aren't they God's chosen nation for a land of their own? Why are they under the rule of another nation?
Let's make this longer story short. The Israelites got out after crossing the river. I can imagine the feeling of victory and freedom that flooded through their veins. "We're finally out of there!" The celebrations of triumph they must have shouted!
But can you imagine the moment they turned around and realized they still had to go to their land? Sure, they could've hung out in the desert I guess, but there was a Promised Land waiting for them out there.
Let's skip 40 years, shall we?
After wandering through the desert all that time, Israel finally came to Canaan, the Promised Land. I remember when I read this story as a child I thought that the land was just sitting out there empty, waiting for them to walk in and settle down. But when I became older and read the story again, I discovered this wasn't the case at all. Instead, there were giants living in that land.
Honestly, when I read that I thought, "What was your deal God? You said they could have it, so why are there other people living there?"
Plainly and simply, they had to fight for the land. They had to defeat the giants in order to claim possession of the land that was promised to them, the land that was already theirs.
Get it yet?
We are God's chosen people, automatically making us the biggest threat to the devil and all his plans. Someone once told me, "Satan is only attacking you because he knows what a huge threat you are." He will do anything he possibly can to tear us down and take us out. He doesn't want us working to advance the Kingdom of God! Yes, he can't have us because we've already sealed our eternity in the name of Jesus. Our names are in the book of life. We're on our way up to Heaven now. Satan may have lost the war, but man, will he do anything to win the battles.
But he's already been defeated.
There are moments that can last minutes, hours, days, weeks or years. These moments are ones of pure struggle, where we're constantly being attacked on all sides from whatever force won't back down. There's always a point, several points, where we want to give up; we want to stop fighting and just submit to whoever our attacker is. What are we even fighting for?
Little do we know.
Believe me, I get it. It's so much easier to say we gave it our best try and call it a day. Sin can't be that bad, right? We can just let this little bit of sin into our life and still get by. The fact is, that's not what God wants for us. Not in the slightest. More than anything, God wants freedom for our lives. Freedom from this sin, a situation we're going through, a struggle we're enduring. Freedom. Not just freedom, not just the sense that "I got away from it all" but VICTORY. Victory. Knowing that we defeated this stronghold in our life, buried it in the ground and can dance on the grave.
Sin defeated.
My battle with depression was not an easy one. Like I wrote in my last post, I was overwhelmed at the sight of my attic. Let's talk a little more about this area though, what happened?
Well, a lot of things happened. I'm sure I'll write another post one of these days with the story of how I met Jesus, but let me just give you a detail-free gist right now. I was diagnosed with clinical depression by the age of 10. When I was 15 I had moved past it, but I never dealt with what caused it. The result: a cluttered attic. I truly did think I was all right though. I had been out of therapy for about three years at that point and was convinced that I was over everything that had happened. I started to notice some stuff and went back to Therapy for another few years until I was 18, but I wasn't dealing with the real issue, only the fruit of it.
It was a few months ago that I found myself in the attic. It was a conversation with a friend that brought me there. All he did was answer a question for me, and it's as if the stairs appeared before me. Curious, I climbed them, wondering what could possibly be on the other end.
There is was, the clutter that had never been dealt with.
Don't you think I felt defeated just by looking at it all? I wrote how I fought with The Lord about it, how I couldn't possibly go through it all. I told Him it was a lost cause, that there was no point. Yet, He took me by the hand and completely astounded me. Little by little, I started to realize a beautiful truth:
He's so much bigger than this mess I'm in.
And it may have seemed impossible, but Jesus already gave me freedom from all of that before I even looked in the attic, I just had to claim that victory that was already mine.
Now let's look at a nation that is near and dear to my heart: Israel.
Let's start in Genesis. Chapter 15, verses 7 to 21, to be exact:
He also said to him, "I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur
of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it."
But Abram said, "O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?"
So the Lord said to him, "Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon."
Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure."
When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates-- the land of the Kenites, the Kinizzites, the Kadomites, Hitties, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites."
So what do we have here? It's God promising Abraham that he would possess this land. Sounds simple enough. Now let's skip a few chapters, all the way to Exodus. No specific reference this time, but bear with me for a bit while I explain. The Israelites were living in slavery under the Egyptians, but aren't they supposed to be the descendants of Abraham? Aren't they God's chosen nation for a land of their own? Why are they under the rule of another nation?
Let's make this longer story short. The Israelites got out after crossing the river. I can imagine the feeling of victory and freedom that flooded through their veins. "We're finally out of there!" The celebrations of triumph they must have shouted!
But can you imagine the moment they turned around and realized they still had to go to their land? Sure, they could've hung out in the desert I guess, but there was a Promised Land waiting for them out there.
Let's skip 40 years, shall we?
After wandering through the desert all that time, Israel finally came to Canaan, the Promised Land. I remember when I read this story as a child I thought that the land was just sitting out there empty, waiting for them to walk in and settle down. But when I became older and read the story again, I discovered this wasn't the case at all. Instead, there were giants living in that land.
Honestly, when I read that I thought, "What was your deal God? You said they could have it, so why are there other people living there?"
Plainly and simply, they had to fight for the land. They had to defeat the giants in order to claim possession of the land that was promised to them, the land that was already theirs.
Get it yet?
We are God's chosen people, automatically making us the biggest threat to the devil and all his plans. Someone once told me, "Satan is only attacking you because he knows what a huge threat you are." He will do anything he possibly can to tear us down and take us out. He doesn't want us working to advance the Kingdom of God! Yes, he can't have us because we've already sealed our eternity in the name of Jesus. Our names are in the book of life. We're on our way up to Heaven now. Satan may have lost the war, but man, will he do anything to win the battles.
But he's already been defeated.
[Hanging on the Cross] Jesus received the drink and said,
"It is finished."
With that, He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.
John 19:30
Satan, in all the little that he was, was defeated that day on the cross. Death no longer had a hold on humanity. When we chose Christ, when we accepted His forgiveness for our sins and asked Him to be our Saviour, we overcame death. "To live is Christ and to die is gain." Death is no longer something to be feared, it's the final door to seeing the face of our Saviour and Lord, Jesus Christ Himself.
So, despite the fact that Satan still tries to attack, the fact that we still struggle with sin, the fact that the whatever that seems too big or too impossible handle, the victory has already been given to you, you just have to fight to claim the victory that is your own.
