It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. Galatians 5:1, 13.
The more we look at this deliverance that God wants to bring to every one of us, the more persuaded I am that people feel that if they were free from the circumstances which constitute their lives, then they would be really free; but I don’t believe that is true. Too many people are let out of their cages, only to look around and try to find another cage. They pace like an animal that has been caged, but there is no cage there. It isn’t circumstances that are our problem, but the fact that we do not reach into what freedom is all about. Paul stressed this when he said, “It was for freedom that Christ set you free. He sets you free in order that you might attain to freedom. Now stand firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).
The more we look into the Word, the more we see that from the Old Testament on, the Christ who was to come was to give people liberty. In Luke chapter 4, we read that Christ came into the synagogue, opened the book of the prophet Isaiah, and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.” And He closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon Him. And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Luke 4:18–21.
This was wonderful; but before the event ended, the people were ready to throw Jesus off a precipice.
And they rose up and cast Him out of the city, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built, in order to throw Him down the cliff. Luke 4:29.
We must face the fact that people need freedom more in their spirits. You can set a man free in the patterns of his life, in his life-style, and so forth; yet he has a way of gravitating back to the bondage that he carries in his spirit. We become so conditioned by our circumstances that after a while we don’t even reach for the freedom. And if God gives it to us, we don’t know what to do with it. When people get out of their cage, they have a tendency to be overwhelmed with fear because they feel insecure without their cage. They feel insecure without their chains.
I wonder how many people who have been set free by a Living Word from God are going out to look for more chains. They were delivered from one set, but they seem to have a way of getting back into the same situations. The circumstances are a little different, but they are usually the same type of circumstances, and the people go back into them again. I have seen that happen over and over again, and it has become very necessary to tell the people of God: “It is for freedom that Christ set you free. Don’t be entangled again with another yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1). Get rid of the conditioning that you have accepted, the conditioning that goes right back to some form of bondage.”
Habits are that way. People’s life-styles are that way. Consider a man who grew up being dominated by his mother. When he decides to get married, he looks around to find somebody just like his mother who will dominate him again. He does not really know how to associate himself with the fact that his life could be lived with an initiative of faith. The freedom that Christ gave him was to set him free.
That is just one illustration. I wonder how many people need to be reminded over and over again that the will of God does not automatically happen just because the Lord takes the mountain out of your way. The will of God happens because you have faith to cast the mountain into the sea (Matthew 21:21).
The initiative of faith is a necessary part of our spiritual freedom. And you will always find your spirit in some form of bondage, some kind of a yoke of restriction, until in your spirit you see that your aggressive, mighty faith in God is the thing that will bring you forth into what God’s will really is.
Remember how Joshua said to the people, “Here is much land yet to be possessed. Let’s go out and take the rest of the country that God set before us, this promised land.” I think several generations passed before the people realized that they should have done that. People become passive and content with less than what was promised to them. (See Joshua 13:1; 18:1–10; Judges 2:20–23.)
There has to be something that rises up within us. The only fight that we really need is the one Paul talked about: “Fight the good fight of faith” (I Timothy 6:12). We can talk about our need of faith, but there must also be an aggressive struggle, a violence in our spirits to be free and to walk in the perfect will of God. That is what you are set free to do—to serve the Lord. But you cannot serve Him as long as you are conditioned by your former bondages, as long as there are restraints and responses that seem to come up automatically. This could be illustrated by things that happen to us in everyday life. When someone swings his hand toward you, you duck because you are afraid; you have been hit too many times. When firing a gun, you automatically flinch because the recoil of a shotgun bruised your shoulder once. Similarly, you get to the place where that conditioning and that response is deep within your spirit. That is where freedom has to begin—in your spirit. And that is where there has to be a violence: “I am not going to react as I did before. I am not a slave.”
For many years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Abraham Lincoln, the President who saw the necessity of freedom for all men, there were still blacks who followed the procedure called “shuffling Sam.” They kind of shuffled along as though they were stupid and an inferior people, because that is what the whites expected of them. When they were slaves, they got beaten if they ever dared to stand up strong and proud. And even after they were set free, they would continue to shuffle along. That even became a part of American entertainment, to let the blacks get on the stage and do a “shuffling Sam” routine. The people would laugh at them and think that they were so clever and so funny. But they had to stay within a certain mold. That day had to end. The greatest thing that has happened in our generation for the blacks is that they will stand up and be counted, that they will refuse anymore to have the responses of slaves, because they are not slaves. They are going to find equal opportunities. They are going to find what America is all about.
The same thing is true in the Kingdom of God. People are not going to enter into the Kingdom if they still have the response that it is a lot easier to shuffle along and act half-defeated and passive than it is to stand up with faith—the initiative of faith to do the perfect will of God. It isn’t that we are concerned about your circumstances and how they restrict you. We are more concerned about what those circumstances do to your spirit, the bondage put on your spirit. Get out of that. Get out of it!
Begin to think concerning the potentials of the promises of God over your life. Feed upon the Scriptures that lay out the covenants and blessings that belong to a man who will believe God. Do violence to your unbelief, to your sense of insecurity that says you have to carry around some kind of security blanket. Get out of that level. Throw it off! You can rise up and do the will of God.
Oh, we need to constrain men to pray and to pursue the prayer that Christ set before us: “Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Don’t be content with defeat, with restrictions. Don’t be content to say, “Well, the pressure isn’t so bad now.” Don’t be passive about it. Don’t settle for anything less than the perfect freedom and the perfect will of God. These are the things that God is moving upon our hearts to accept.
I think that the word “submission” has often been a tool of the devil most of the time that it has been preached to the people: “Be submissive, be submissive.” How many wives have been beaten down until they did not have any faith left because they were told, “Be submissive to your husband.” Out of that comes a submission to passivity, a submission to past conditionings. Submission does not mean that you necessarily agree with or have to be submissive in your spirit to anything that is wrong. And anything that is short of the perfect will of God in your life, and walking with God with all of your heart, is wrong.
You can be submissive to passivity. You can be submissive to past responses and conditionings until you find yourself reacting the same way you did in the past. People get into that rut. I have seen people who say, “I don’t like So-and-So.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just knew somebody once who looked like him or somebody who had that name. I didn’t like that person, so I don’t like anybody who looks like him or anybody who has the same name.”
How foolish, to be so conditioned in your mind and in your spirit that you are not open for God to lead you; you are not open for the revelation that God can bring to your spirit in a situation. How can people be led by the Spirit of God as sons of God when they react according to past conditionings and bondages? You will never get into mature sonship that way. Sonship is in those who are led by the Spirit of God (Romans 8:14)—not motivated in their decisions and their reactions by their past experiences and circumstances. Come on, jailbird, you are free! Stand up tall as a citizen of the Kingdom. Get out of the thing that you were in, once and for all time. The greatest deliverance we are going to have is not a deliverance from devils, but a deliverance from our own passive thinking until we reach in with faith to do the will of God.
Now what should we be submissive to? Be submissive to the directives of the Word of God. If God says, “Jump over the moon,” then try to do it. Get out there and jump every day. Do it. If God says, “Take the Kingdom,” then be submissive to take the Kingdom. You see, the best soldier is a man who is submissive to the authority over him. But that submission is not a passivity. He is not passive. A soldier gets his orders from headquarters, “Take that hill.” He says, “But I love these men, and half of them will die if I take the hill.” But he does it; at any cost, he has to do it.
Oh, blessed are the spiritual leaders who will see that to be submissive to the Lord many times means to be without a conditioning of self-preservation, without the attitude, “I’ll get by through compromise, by a little conciliation on this point, a little strategy. I don’t have to be aggressive. I don’t have to be what God wants me to be. I can be something less, and I can be quite content with it.” The Lord rebuke that thought! You cannot have that thinking. It is not at all what God wants you to have. You cannot accept that state of defeat.
Do you say, “I can rattle around in these chains and people will know that I had a hard time”? What do you want, sympathy?
The search for sympathy can often parade itself as submission to the Lord. You are not being submissive to the Lord if you just bow down and let everybody kick you and walk over you, when God has said, “Lead these people.” Lead them! Stand up and lead the people. Be the man of God. I am sick of this thing of rolling over and playing dead because you get kicked less that way. Fight the good fight of faith.
Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. I Timothy 6:12.
Let’s go after it. We are going to be submissive to the prophecies and the directives that God laid on our life. We are not caged and we are not going to pace around conditioned, just as though we were in a cage.
The whole principle of this goes back to Isaiah, which is so fantastic in the prophecies about the Lord Jesus Christ. What was He to come and do? The Father said, “I have put My Spirit upon Him; He will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry out or raise His voice, nor make His voice heard in the street. A bruised reed” (a reed is what they used for a pen with ink) “He will not break, and a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not be disheartened or crushed, until He has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands will wait expectantly for His law.” Isaiah 42:1b–4.
That patience and long-suffering of Christ is never to be confused with His relentless pursuit after those objectives. He was going to set men free. He was going to be patient with them. He was not going to crush them if they did not come through. He was not going to put out the fire or flame of the lamp. If the wick just needed a little trimming, He was going to bless it and make it bring forth its light.
The Scripture goes on to say what God was going to do with Him: “And I will appoint you as a covenant to the people, as a light to the nations, to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, and those who dwell in darkness from the prison. I am the Lord, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another, nor My praise to graven images. Behold, the former things have come to pass, now I declare new things; before they spring forth I proclaim them to you.” Isaiah 42:6b–9.
Do you see what that freedom is all about? You are never going to know new things; you are never going to know any good life; you are never going to see God declare good things, new things, things that you did not know anything about before—until you get out of the old. You will go around that mountain for another forty years unless you say, “I am going to be delivered!”
And it came about in the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, that Moses spoke to the children of Israel, according to all that the Lord had commanded him to give to them. “The Lord our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain.’ ” Deuteronomy 1:3, 6.
You must say, “There is a life to be lived in the will of God, and I am going to live that life. I am going to be what God called me to be. Nothing will keep me from walking in the will of God.”
This is exactly what Christ came to do for you. He is more than a Redeemer who just brings you up to zero. He wants to make you more than a conqueror (Romans 8:37). He wants to get you out of your bondage and dungeon, but that is not the end of it. He brought Joseph out of prison, and within twenty-four hours he was sitting on the throne of Egypt. How about that! Pharaoh said, “I have set you over all the land of Egypt. Only I will be greater than you” (Genesis 41:40–41). Joseph saved the entire land of Egypt from famine.
Joseph was the man who could rule because God had prepared his heart. And when he came out of that prison, he really came out of it, because his spirit was never in the prison! His spirit wasn’t in the prison! He did not come out as a convict who had had a reprieve and said, “Now I’ve got to make good.” He was free before they ever released him from the prison. Everybody else forgot him, but God did not forget him and he did not forget God. And when he came out of the prison, he came out as a prophet who could interpret the dreams of Pharaoh, of anyone. He was wise in the gifts that God had given him. Those gifts functioned because he was functioning as a free man in his spirit.
Oh, that God bring us into the liberty. For freedom hath Christ set us free. Only be not entangled again with a yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1). Don’t let this thing happen to you, that you are content for a few things to begin to work out in your life. Why did they work out? So that you can take some active, aggressive steps toward a greater life in God than was ever possible before. Until you have walked in the greater works (John 14:12), you have never seen the great deliverance in your life, for that is the purpose of them. We are being set free with a penetrating, probing revelation and discernment, and impartation has come. Why? So that you won’t get discouraged anymore? No! It is not so that you won’t get discouraged; it is so that you will be encouraged to possess the perfect will of God.
Do you awaken in the night and the dreams are still fearful? Do you find yourself still pacing as though you were in a cage? Do you still feel that insecurity? Listen—the Lord came to open blind eyes and to bring prisoners out of the dungeon (Luke 4:18). But that is not the end. He is saying, “Behold, the former things have come to pass, now I declare new things; before they spring forth I proclaim them to you.” Isaiah 42:9.
There is a similar passage to this in Isaiah 61, and that is what was quoted by Jesus in Luke 4. Isaiah 61:1: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives, and freedom to prisoners.
That sounds really good. But go a little bit further. What is He going to give you? Verse 3a says: To grant those who mourn in Zion, giving them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting.
A garland was for what purpose? It was for a conqueror, for the person who won the race. They put it on the winner’s head. Christ did not set you free so that you could say, “Well, I shake off the ashes.” He is going to give you a winner’s crown instead of ashes, and the oil of gladness instead of mourning. “Well,” you say, “I don’t feel as weighed down as I used to.” Yes, but are you bubbling over with the joy? Are you as happy and free as you ought to be? “Well, I thank God that I got healed.” Did you really get healed? “Oh yes, I feel a lot better.” I don’t want you merely to feel better. I want you to do more than that. I want you to reach into the glory of the Lord.
If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above. Colossians 3:1a, KJV. Break through. Break through!
What does it say about these people in Isaiah 61? You will be called the priests of the Lord; you will be spoken of as ministers of our God. You will eat the wealth of nations, and in their riches you will boast. Instead of your shame you will have a double portion, and instead of humiliation they will shout for joy over their portion. Isaiah 61:6–7a.
Are you shouting for joy over the portion that God has given you? I don’t see people shouting for joy, “Oh, God has done so much for me! Look what I’m walking in. Look what God is doing through me.” No, I don’t see that very often. But it says, Everlasting joy will be theirs. Isaiah 61:7b. No more moods. No more ups and downs. No more days of blessedness to be followed by days of conflict, but instead an everlasting joy. Oh, God bless us to see this! All of these verses from Isaiah 61 are so important. God bless this Word and make it so real to your heart that no conditioning will remain in your spirit.
May God get the chains and the shackles off your spirit and move you into the flow where you are going to live. And you are not going to live as long as you accept what you are in now. You say, “Well, I’m in this situation in the will of God.” Yes, Joseph was in the dungeon in the will of God, too. But he did not have to accept it as a way of life, that it was a total end in itself. Conflict and battle and struggle are only the temporary procedures into the victory where you are more than a conqueror. You cannot be more than a conqueror without going through the battle (Romans 8:35–37). You have to fight the good fight of faith (I Timothy 6:12).
The Word does not say what we are to do in the way of fighting except that one thing. A believer is not to fight flesh and blood. You do not have to fight. Our weapons are not carnal, but they are mighty through God (II Corinthians 10:4).
The battle is over the Word—believing the Word, having faith in the Word of God. That is the battle you face. And you do violence against your unbelief, against the passivity, against that thing within your own spirit which becomes a self-pity, an acceptance of that which is less than what God really wants you to walk in.
Christ came to proclaim liberty to us. For freedom hath Christ set you free. Only don’t be entangled again with a yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1). Don’t go around looking for something else to enslave you, because in your spirit you are free.
I once read that after the Civil War, there were blacks who did not know how to cope with freedom. So they went to their masters and said, “Don’t send us away. We’ll go on and continue to pick cotton. We will act just as though we were slaves because we don’t know what to do with our freedom.” Well, freedom poses a lot of problems. When God gives you a deliverance, He wants you to do something about it. After He heals you, He does not want you to continue lying there. He said to the paralytic, “Rise, take up your bed and walk” (Mark 2:3–11). Two blind men begging at the side of the road asked Him, “Can we receive our sight?” After Jesus healed them, we can almost hear Him saying, “Now throw your tin cup away. You’re not going to beg anymore. You’re all through with that life.”
“Well, I don’t know how to work. I don’t know what to do.”
You’ll find something. You’ll do it.
Freedom brings responsibility. There is nothing greater than to take the initiative of faith to do the will of God, the initiative of faith in your own heart to say, “I’m going to do the will of God. I’m going to perform it.” But you’ll never do it as long as the chains are still on your spirit. Get rid of them. Without that faith to walk in freedom, you will walk in fear. You will find something to be afraid of. There will be some shadow that looks too big. There will be a paper dragon that makes you tremble. But when you say, “I’m going to believe God,” then your faith will overcome.
For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. I John 5:4, KJV.
God bless this Word. You are going to move on it, aren’t you? You are going to do it. More important than our deliverance from circumstances is our deliverance from the bondage of spirit that our past circumstances and our past relationships have brought to us. We had begun to think like men of bondage, and therefore no change of circumstance will set us free until we look to God and we become free in our spirit.
For freedom did Christ set you free (Galatians 5:1). Lay hold of it! Walk in it! Be determined! If you don’t know all the areas where your conditionings are wrong, God will show you so that you can throw them off. Rise in the victory of the Lord. Ask those who are faithful counselors in the word of wisdom and the word of knowledge, “Do you see a bondage in my life? Can you discern something wrong? I am determined to be free. I refuse any form of bondage, especially in my spirit.” And then we can truly, by love, serve one another (Galatians 5:13).
True freedom is the release from bondage in our spirits.
If you feel insecure without your “cage,” you are not really free.
Free men are men of faith.
Circumstances are not a bondage to one whose spirit is free.