Freedom!

After 10 months of writing this blog, called free2follow.com, God is still rewiring my understanding of freedom, and he has had to deliver me of at least one demon to do it, actually several along the way!

As a child, I used to sometimes, reluctantly, accompany Mum, relatively new in her faith, to the village church where a maximum of 8 of us including the vicar would gather for what felt like an endurance test each week. My childhood experiences of sitting in the vestry, huddled round a pathetic electric fire that did not penetrate the coldness more than a radius of 12 inches contributed to my heart attitudes towards church. The rest of the church building was too cold to occupy even in summer, and the frozen atmosphere extended past the physical. There was definitely no life, no joy and no freedom and I went because Mum wanted me to. It did not help me develop a love for church and I never met Jesus there. Becoming part of a church family where Holy Spirit is allowed to release his life and joy transforms the picture, and it is still being transformed as God moves me from ‘glory to glory’! Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 3:17

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

In his quest to leave no stone unturned in my life, Holy Spirit has worked hard in this area. Throughout the last couple of years, one oft-repeated message from him has been:

Let me lead!

A few weeks ago, in our Friday evening worship, he challenged me with a question. I have been so aware of a need to work with the scripture in John 4:23

Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks.

I want to be a “true worshipper”, whatever that looks like, because that is what Father wants. Why would I want to be anything else? So, I have been pondering what “in Spirit and in truth” looks like. He reminded me of his “Let me lead” instruction and asked me:

Who or what is leading right now?

Contemplating this question has made me more aware of my distracted thoughts; of the things or people that entice my thoughts to wander. It has also led to some other challenging questions. Am I expecting the worship leader to ‘get me somewhere’ or am I coming ready to worship without the need to be ‘warmed up’? It has made me particularly aware of what dictates how I behave during the church meeting (and in other places as the question about who or what is leading applies in every circumstance). Am I responding to expectations people have of me, for example that I will be ‘lively’ in my worship? Am I responding to the atmosphere in the room so that when everyone else is shouting and clapping, I just join in with the crowd? Am I copying the person in front of me without being engaged mentally, emotionally, physically, or spiritually? Is it the Spirit or my emotion, or some other motivation, like wanting to look good externally, that is responding? Romans 8:8 warns us

Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.

Paul goes on to say that we have the Spirit of Christ living in us so we are no longer in the kingdom of darkness. However, we can still be influenced by the flesh. I know that I sometimes operate according to my emotions which can get carried away in a crowd, or according to my wrong thinking that needs to be transformed, and renewed, so that I believe that I need to act a certain way in order to receive approval. My deceitful heart really wants that approval so that, rather than pleasing the Father being the kind of worshipper he wants, I will just do what everyone else is doing ~ as long as it doesn’t make me feel too uncomfortable.

Which brings me to the next issue and the subject of the deliverance. The religious spirit it transpires was alive and well, hiding within me. Sigh. I had thought that I had dealt with that. I did not think that religion was something that dwelled only in churches like the one I used to visit with my mum.

For me, the religious spirit has been what makes me want to just stick to the safe, repeated patterns of behaviour that are not always wrong but are just habits, rather than coming out of relationship. I always sat in the same place, followed the same pattern for my devotional time. I know the religious spirit is something that has tried to lock me up into formulaic Christianity, relying on learning, on what worked last time, rather than the adventure and the risk of relationship with the Spirit. ‘Do not lean on your own understanding’, the author of Proverbs 3:5 tells us. However it goes further than that.

Attending an event a couple of weeks ago, I heard someone unpack some more of how the religious spirit keeps us bound:

• It doesn’t like movement – attending conferences, events, services yes, but no forward movement. I have been a bit of a conference junky. I have pages of notes from sermons, courses, and conferences but there is still confinement as the religious spirit keeps me locked in a cycle of learning without activation, acquiring information without demonstration. I have have hoarded information and resources, for ‘one day’ when I feel qualified enough to do … something! I have done course after course but not always put them into practice, acquiring understanding, developing theory but no action. James tells us that faith without action is dead. Religion is dead works.
• The religious spirit likes pronouncements and prophecies without blueprints – many of us have heard great sounding, albeit sometimes nebulous, prophecies that do not translate into anything tangible. I have pages of prophecy that I have not translated into action, just collected in a book on the shelf, with no strategy for the outworking of them.
• The religious spirit likes us to fall back into what worked in the past, man-made structures, idolising what God did back then and assuming he wants to do ‘do it again’.

For me this links with the sense of confinement, of smallness, that has kept me, and many others I know, trapped in cycles of ‘one day, sometime, never’ because of fear, a lack of confidence and because of the whispered lies that keep me in my own personal wilderness, in the same small box, going round the same mountains and never actually moving forward, risk averse and stuck.

So, I repented for partnering with the religious spirit, and with confinement, and as I engaged with the prayers of deliverance, I know something shifted. I felt it! So now what. Well, back to Holy Spirit. I heard him say:

Freedom looks like yielding; freedom looks like being led.

The reality is, we might think we are independent but we are either being led by the Spirit or the opposite. There are only two kingdoms. One is led by the Spirit and the other is led by Satan – we think there is a third option where we are in charge but that is the enemy’s kingdom. He is the one who leads us into the world of self, of me, myself and I on the throne. He lets us think we are in control but he is the one pulling the strings.

So the question is ‘who is leading in our lives’? The question is ‘who is ruling in our lives?’ Romans 8:6 paints the options very starkly:

The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. ‭‬‬

Back to the worship evenings and I am trying, in this and other contexts, to learn to say, “Holy Spirit lead me” so that when he says ‘stand’, I stand, when he says ‘dance’, I dance and when he says ‘get on the floor, on your face’, I hit the deck, regardless of what everyone else is doing. Now obviously there is sensitivity in this – I am learning but if I felt he was asking me to roar loudly, and the rest of the congregation was in a sober moment of repentance, I might just be asking, ‘Is that really you, Holy Spirit?’! I am also allowing him to continue to liberate me from that huge chain that affects so many of us, ‘What will people think?’

In my quiet times, which have felt weird and discombobulated for a while because the old formulaic pattern was not working any more, I am learning to ask, ‘Holy Spirit, what do you want to do this morning?’

If I’m honest, it feels uncomfortable but I am breaking out of ruts of behaviour that I have been in for a long time and I am not sure what the new track looks like so it feels awkward and unfamiliar but I trust his capacity to lead me when I submit to him. This is the way to maturity, the way of yielded submission, allowing myself to be led, as Paul tells us in Romans 8:14 (TPT; ESV)

The mature children of God are those who are moved by the impulses of the Holy Spirit.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

Will I always get it right. Nope! But it will be a lot more life-giving, adventurous, exciting, and free than being stuck in those “dead works”! Let’s choose life!