Are you free in Christ?

So, let us get straight to it.

Are you free in Christ?

Take some time to sit quietly; I want you to ask yourself if you feel free.

Are you experiencing love, joy, and pain or rejection, sadness, low self-worth, and pain?

You might feel safe but you might not be free in mind and heart.

Let us start with the postulate from Harry.

‘Urgency comes easy when the consequences are immediate, as in work or in an emergency. But the truly important jobs of self-improvement and living well, and of cultivating good relationships, seem content to wait for us because they have no clear deadline and are never finished. One of the great steps in creating a meaningful life is in recognizing, on a deep and instinctive level, the daily urgency of these tasks.’

What does this mean?

In our daily lives, we tend to focus on urgency rather than what is actually important.

I spoke previously in my article Are You Controlled By Lies about how our thoughts can take us captive.

Regret, defensiveness, loneliness...all negative thoughts; they prevent us from being free.

Do you feel captive?

I don’t know how old I was, but I remember being upstairs in my house as a child.

I remember feeling this beautiful warm sunshine on my face and I started following the light through the house, outdoors, and down the road. One second later my mother grabbed me from behind and took me back into the house, panicked that I might have gotten hurt.

That memory is a memory of joy and freedom.

What is freedom? It means not being captive. It is the ability to go where we want when we want.

Freedom relates to all things- home, marriage, work, leisure time.

All of this comes down to freedom vs captivity.

I’ve talked before about the reactivation of memories. Everything we experience is downloaded into our hardwiring and remembered by our hearts and minds.  

Reactivation happens when our brain goes to previous memories and experiences in response to an event; as a result, our body brings up emotions to deal with.

When a negative emotion or experience resurfaces, we can either stay captive and become ruled by it or we can change the channel and free ourselves.

The way to do this is to bring our negative emotions to consciousness and become aware of them. If we can trace a negative emotion back to its source, we are in a far better position to heal and rewire it with positivity.

You might be wondering what this has to do with God and religion.

I feel that many people are captive in their relationship to their God and religion, getting stuck in negative emotions and stress as a result.

But this is not the design that God had for us.

What do you believe about you, the church, what God wants from you, your meaning- everything?

I believe we need to move away from pain and towards and pleasure!

We have gotten so stuck in the rules and old ways of thinking that we have forgotten what is important rather than what we have been taught is urgent.

Let’s focus on the perceived “have-to’s” of religion.

We’ve been taught that going to church is a heaven vs hell issue. But did you know that scripture never tells us, at any time, to go to church?

We have also been told not to drink, but the scripture never tells us this either!

Tithes aren’t even mentioned in the New Testament, but it’s a rule we’ve always followed.

So what does scripture tell us that God truly wants?

Scripture says to love- above all else; the new living version says this 898 times and this is how we are judged.

Justice, love, kindness, and walking with God, rather than focusing on church attendance, tithes, or whether we should be drinking.

Community comes in many forms; it doesn’t need to be found within a church.

These outdated views are why religion doesn’t gain much credibility in today’s world!

Our way of living should follow any form that makes sense to us and makes us feel free but should be out of love and acceptance.  

In the world today, so many people grow up feeling pressure to live in a certain way and end up feeling trapped. If you are living in negative emotions, you’re not living free in Christ.

Living in restraints puts unnecessary stress on our body when our positive thoughts can be that warm glowing sunshine on our faces.

The path to freedom, love, joy, peace, and pain can be broken into four parts:

1. I am right with God
2. My intentions are only for good
3. I will do my absolute best in everything I do
4. I will Invest in relationships

This is what is urgent and important. The rest should not matter.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Alex Loyd