As Scott, Alisa, and I were walking through the Bagot community this past Friday to invite kids to the movie night and bar-b-q we were having for them, we came to a group of about 15 Aboriginal people to ask if they had kids that we could gather for the evening. We didn’t find any children at this particular house, but we did find people starving for prayer. Every time we turned around it was: “please lay hands on my baby and pray for him” “pray for those two over there who need freedom from drinking” “pray for that lady who has an evil spirit in her” “pray for me, pray for me”! After praying for these people, learning names, and trying to have conversations with them whom were all under the influence of alcohol, I stood back and just saw myself as I saw them in their moment of struggle.
We all have our “struggles” that naturally defines who we are in our heads if we allow it. To be honest, since we have arrived in Australia my heart has been overwhelmed with past struggles and I have felt such a heaviness within me. I have prayed for freedom countless times and still find myself in moments of defeat. So here I am looking at this man who is asking for prayer to be freed from the spirit of addiction, who is in a stupor of drunkenness, and yet clearly has no determination to change. And in a sense I felt as though it was a visual of myself stuck in my struggle, asking for freedom, and yet avoiding the path that leads to freedom. Whatever struggle we have whether alcoholism, pornography, gambling, eating disorders, etc. they are all the same because they are an attack on the central part of who we are… our heart.
1 Corinthians 10:13 says that “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.”
Its our choice to choose the pathway that God provides out. And note…HE is faithful. Even in those moments of defeat God’s grace covers all. We have to choose the path of life! In Daniel 1:8, Daniel “resolved in his heart not to defile himself”. Should we settle for anything less?
