By Rae Lynn DeAngelis
For the past several years, our family has celebrated two significant holidays side-by-side—Passover and Easter. Together, these holidays complete God’s redemption story, bringing it full-circle, matching the physical to the spiritual.
When God called upon Moses to set His people free from their life of slavery in Egypt, their trip to the Promised Land should have taken less than two weeks. So why on earth did it take them 40 years? It seems that while removing the Israelites from Egypt took only a few days, removing “Egypt” from the Israelites took many years.
Like it was for the Israelites, your journey to freedom from struggles with food and body-image takes time. That’s because there’s more than one dimension to your prison cell. Slavery is not just physical. It’s also spiritual, emotional, mental, and relational. The journey to freedom often involves peeling back the many layers of toxic thoughts and buried emotions.
Festering wounds which have been ignored or neglected must be exposed and then re-dressed properly by the Great Physician (Jesus Christ). Deep healing allows you to enter your personal promised land without all the extra baggage.
Perhaps you have a desire to:
- Break free from the number on the scale.
- Stop binging and or purging.
- End your addiction to exercise.
- See yourself through God’s eyes.
- Feel comfortable in your own skin.
The desire to change is the first step, but it’s not the only step in the process. In order to break from that which you feel powerless to overcome it’s important to address all sides of the freedom equation.
Anyone can open your prison door and then proclaim you are free. But until you truly believe you are free you will continue to cower in the corner of your barred enclosure. Liberated people must come into agreement of their freedom before they can truly seize it.
There are several critical steps to experiencing freedom. An easy way to remember them is through the acronym ASKS:
- A – Acknowledge you have a problem, consider how you would like to see things change, get proper help.
- Psalm 32:5
- S – Surrender it over to Jesus, let go of control, trust God’s higher ways.
- Philippians 3:13
- K – Know the truth, believe what God says, weed out the lies.
- John 8:31-32
- S – Submit to the Lord, apply His teaching, walk in truth and freedom.
- James 4:7
Jesus said, “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36 NIV). Knowing the truth is one thing. Believing the truth is another. I’ve heard it said that the greatest distance mankind will ever travel is the seventeen inches from his head to his heart. Yes, it can be a long and arduous journey, but it will be worth your effort in the end.
Do you know why the enemy tries so hard to keep you in bondage. He knows the truth: If you started living in the fullness of the freedom Christ offers, you would be unstoppable!
Passover—physical freedom.
Easter—spiritual freedom.
Acknowledge and celebrate them both, my friend, and you will be free indeed.
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