“If the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” John 8:36
When we lean on the Lord in faith, we not only believe in Him, but we put our active trust in Him. In a relationship with the Lord, He will cause us to experience a powerful liberty from anything that has a binding grip on us. There is nothing that is stronger than our God! We can have freedom from sin, addictions, feelings of shame and guilt, feelings of fear and failure, and feelings of insufficiency. We can also have freedom from our past, from what others have done to us, from what we have done to others, and from the opinions of what other people think of us. We can be absolutely and completely free!
The first thing we have to understand is that we need to surrender. That means we have to trust God with every inch of our lives – the parts we consider good and beautiful and the parts that we consider bad and ugly. Some people hold back a portion of their life from God because they want to try to fix it first. Some people hold back because they don’t trust Him with their pain. Others hold back from God because they have a distorted idea that there is something that can satisfy them more than God can. In order to experience the surrender of faith, one must know that God is caring, loving, and merciful. We have to understand that His way is the best way. God doesn’t want to control us, but He does want us to trust Him as a loving Lord and trustworthy Father.
A person who is bound cannot set himself or herself free. We need the power of God to set us free. Isaiah 10:27 says, “The yoke will be destroyed because of the anointing oil.” Bondages are broken when we hand over our messes to the God who delivers and the God who restores. We could spend decades striving to free ourselves with little to no results, or with one touch of the Master we can be gloriously set free. The key is in the surrender of faith. When we come to an end of ourselves, we can begin to know what it is to be truly set free!
Application: Giving God 50, 75, or 99 percent of your heart is not enough. God needs 100 percent of you or it’s not a true surrender. You can trust God to go to the buried places of your life where either someone hurt you or you failed someone else. He is the only One that can heal you and make you whole again. Trust Him. God does not have the shortcomings that people do. God is God, and His love is higher than the love of a person. He will not use you, manipulate you, disappoint you, abandon you, or condemn you. Open up your heart and let Him in.