Comfortable in Our Bondage

[Coconut]

Comfortable in Our Bondage
Day-by-Day

And they said to them, "Let the LORD look on you and judge, because you have made us abhorrent in the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants, to put a sword in their hand to kill us." (Exodus 5:21)

"It is possible for people to become so accustomed to their bondage that they resist efforts to free them. The Hebrews had been slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. Slavery meant that they were not free to do God's will or to go where they wanted. Moses had come to tell the Israelites how they could experience freedom, yet they were more concerned about the reaction of their taskmasters than they were about pleasing God. For them to be free would mean that the pharaoh they were serving would be angry! It would mean that the Egyptians they had served all their lives might attack them. Freedom from their slavery did not seem to be worth the hardships they would inevitably endure.

When God sets out to free us there will often be a price we will have to pay. Grief can be a terrible form of bondage, yet we can become comfortable with it. We can grow so comfortable with fear that we don't know how to live without it. As destructive as our sinful habits and lifestyle might be, we may prefer living with the familiar, rather than being freed to experience the unknown. We may recognize the harmful influence of a friend but choose to reject God's will rather than offend our friend.

As incredible as it seems, the Israelites were angry at Moses for disrupting the life of slavery to which they had grown accustomed. Have you been lulled into a comfortable relationship with your bondage? Do you fear change more than you fear God? Are you willing to allow God to do what is necessary in order to free you?"


- Blackaby Ministries

Exo 4:31 They believed, and when they heard that the LORD had come to them and had seen how they were being treated cruelly, they bowed down and worshiped.

It is notable how quickly belief gave way to fear and unbelief, when the 'taskmasters' attempted to whip them back into submission to their Ruler...

Exo 5:9 "Make them work harder and keep them busy, so that they won't have time to listen to a pack of lies." - King of Egypt

Isnt this the same thing the Ruler of this world has done? Keep the religious man and woman so busy, they won`t have time to realize the LORD came to set His people FREE!


Exo 6:9 Moses told this [the LORD will set you FREE] to the Israelites, but they would not listen to him, because their spirit had been broken by their cruel slavery.

 

[wendy03]

Thanks for this post Coconut- it really spoke to me today as well as the bible verse for the day on the homepage! I see myself in this post. I understand how one can be held in bondage of fear. You get so used to having bad things happen that you get afraid when something good happens wondering what bad thing will come along to make the good seem obsolete. I hate the fear I have over things in my life but it is true- you get comfortable in it even though it hurts because it is what you are used to.
Thanks again for this and I pray you are blessed throughout!!
Wendy
Praise be to God!

 

[jiggyfly]

Isnt this the same thing the Ruler of this world has done? Keep the religious man and woman so busy, they won`t have time to realize the LORD came to set His people FREE!

Good post Coconut, the english word religion comes from the latin word religio and means to bind again or obligate.

Christ truely has set us free but this reality is not evident in many because of religious bondage. The christian religious institution propigates rules based on the old covenant with Israel rather than grace based on the new covenant.

Colossians 1:21-23
21*This includes you who were once so far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions, 22*yet now he has brought you back as his friends. He has done this through his death on the cross in his own human body. As a result, he has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. 23*But you must continue to believe this truth and stand in it firmly.

The truth according to the scriptures and Holyspirit is we are holy, blameless and faultless as far as God is concerned because of Jesus' death on the cross and that alone. So since there is nothing we can do to be more pleasing or acceptable to father neither is there anything we can do to be less pleasing or acceptable to Father. This reality is impossible for the carnal mind to understand, it is a spiritual truth.

Ephesians 3:14-19
14*When I think of the wisdom and scope of God’s plan, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father,* 15*the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. 16*I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will give you mighty inner strength through his Holy Spirit. 17*And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love. 18*And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love really is. 19 May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great you will never fully understand it. Then you will be filled with the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

Pauls says here that Christ becomes more and more at home in our hearts through trusting Him and that experiencing Christ's love (not just learning about it) will result in being filled with fullness of God's life and power (spiritual maturity).

1John 4:11-19
11*Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. 12*No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us.
13*And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. 14*Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15*All who proclaim that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. 16*We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in him.
God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. 17 And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we are like Christ here in this world.
18*Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of judgment, and this shows that his love has not been perfected in us. 19*We love each other* as a result of his loving us first.

Here we see John affirming what Paul was teaching earlier. If we are fearful of God's approval or disapproval of us because of our good works or bad works, then His Love has not become a reality to us and matured us. Again this is only done by HolySpirit assuring and reassuring us of our total redemption and reconciliation with Father through Christ's blood on the cross.

It is so simple yet our vanity (carnality) just won't allow something so wonderfully undeserved to become reality because in many cases we reason (carnally) that someone helpless is of little value or worthless. We, because of our vanity can not bear the idea of being valuable and yet being totally helpless concerning our complete redemption and reconciliation with Father.


Just as Paul prayed, "that from God's glorious, unlimited resources He will give you mighty inner strength through His Holy Spirit."

 

[Coconut]

God revealed something so wonderful to me this morning through this devotional, and an email conversation I was having at the time I read it. I`ll try to convey the gist of it...

First, in reading the passage from Exodus, it dawned on me that the LORD was the determining factor in setting his people free, he MADE it happen, in spite of them. (His people)

I looked back at my life after I read that, and asked myself, why did I leave my religion behind to pursue a relationship with God? I found no real answer to that in myself. Sure I can point to times of unrest, times of questioning, etc, but really, I didnt exactly look up to God and say, FREE me! I thought I was free. I mean I certainly rebelled enough, and was called a rebel by times, because I would`nt follow all the religious rules, and I enjoyed singing 'I did it my way' (which I thought was Gods way), while still being determined to be a part of the 'in' crowd. They would`nt dis fellowship me as long as I was in attendance, and let them see me worship.

But God had a different plan for me.

This lady wrote to me "I'm not sorry I left this religion, but I do understand why some return...cause they are not strong enough to stand alone and that's basically what you have to do. But I would not trade the freedom in Christ that I have to go back for any reason! It's like people have to have a "revelation" to be set free! We thought when we first were set free that we could go back and help others in this religion to see the freedom we now had, but that didn't happen. We now realize they need a true revelation from God to see the "need" to be set free! And sometimes the Lord has to put us in "tight" circumstances to make us squirm a bit so we want more....! We need to pray that these people will become dissatisfied with what they have and become hungry for something more from God...that's when the revelation can come."

This lead me to the most amazing part...for the past while I have been feeling sorry for myself. Yea, self pity is a real charmer...you can really get used to its company. Its been a long time since we enjoyed real fellowship in this area, and the feeling of aloneness was troubling me. Am I doing something wrong? Did I get lost somewheres along the way? Why is it with all this talk about the joy of freedom to be found in Christ (and that part is so true)...yet most of us who have truly experienced delivery from religious bondage, go straight from bondage to the wilderness. That thought does`nt seem to go to well with freedom does it? Yet every story I hear, or read, for those who have been set free, is a story of the wilderness - a time, (sometimes lasting several years) of loneliness, rejection, condemnation, slander, questioning, and labeling ...and yes that can all be explained by 'take up your cross and follow Christ.'

But yet this was troubling me...and I knew when I was reading this devotional that there was something the Lord wanted me to see...we like to talk about the Israelite`s in the wilderness, like they did`nt know a good thing when they seen it...but we are`nt so much smarter you know...we dont find much good our personal wildernesses either...but here is the reason for it...if we can grasp the mind of the Lord...

Exo 13:17 When the king of Egypt let the people go, God did not take them by the road that goes up the coast to Philistia, although it was the shortest way. God thought, "I do not want the people to change their minds and return to Egypt when they see that they are going to have to fight." Instead, he led them in a roundabout way through the desert...

I`ll leave it at that...there are waters to swim in there for anyone who wants to go deeper :embarasse

Blessings