Freedom: The condition of not being in prison or held captive by anything.
Thinking of writing a blog on freedom at first seemed so overwhelming to me. Freedom seems like such a large and complicated subject. There are many different forms of freedom. Some freedoms aren’t so much in our control. But the freedom I want to attempt to talk about is the kind of freedom we have by choice.
I have found that this freedom is as simple as letting go. Letting go of pride. Letting go of insecurity. Letting go of imperfection.
The Lord has been teaching me a lot about what it looks like to walk in complete freedom. There are so many times in my life when I chose to walk in captivity. I’ve chosen to let negative comments consume my mind and seep into my perception of my worth. I’ve chosen to look for affirmation in relationships that were never meant to construct my identity. I’ve chosen to hold onto bitterness when I felt wronged. I’ve chosen to hold a perfectionist mentality leaving myself striving for unattainable goals. I’ve chosen to take comfort in self-pity. I’ve chosen to compare myself to others to learn what my strengths and weaknesses were. Every time I made these choices, I was choosing to be in captivity.
We have all had many different experiences in life. We have all been hurt, mistreated, judged, and rejected at some point in our lives. A lot of the times, these experiences are what I have used to justify and enable my choice to live in captivity. Someone speaks negatively against us and therefore we have a right to not like them. As a result, our mind is consumed with frustration. This frustration then dictates our thoughts and emotions for hours, days, months, years. We allow this frustration to shift our mood and the atmosphere we are in. This frustration even sometimes takes control of our tongue which then has the power to manipulate other people’s mood and perception. And for what? What goes on in our mind often only affects ourselves and has little to no effect on changing our circumstances.
Sometimes it seems easier to exist in the complacency of captivity than it does to actually conquer our flesh for the sake of freedom. One of the biggest things that keep us from living in freedom is our comfort with being in captivity. To conquer something means you have to confront it, and to confront something means conflict, and conflict means discomfort.
Frustration is just one example. Through all of the different forms of captivity in my life, one of the common factors that seems to hold it all together is pride. It’s this idea of how we believe we should be perceived, portrayed, spoken to, looked at, and treated by others. However, the Lord has shown me that when we let go of our pride and no longer need anyone to give us information on who we are and what we are worth, we lose our ability to become offended because the opinion of anyone other than God no longer holds any weight.
Another form of captivity I have found in my life are insecurities and imperfections. They have a way of keeping us from walking in the freedom of our identity in Christ. It is so easy to have this mentality that we need to have our lives together and everything figured out before we are able to go to the Lord or be close to Him. We fix our gaze on where we feel we aren’t good enough and falling short that we no longer see where God is present in our lives. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not He is present with us, but with our ability to see Him because of where we are looking. God isn’t scared, surprised, or overwhelmed by our imperfection, so why should we be? It’s a prison that we were never sent to, but choose to walk into. There is no lock on the cell, but we choose to sit there.
I have been the most free in the times where I have let go of my insecurities and accepted my imperfection with the realization that God loves me without conditions. His love is constant and His words are truth. He is the one who carefully constructed every part of my identity with intentionality and the only one who can speak that over me. NOTHING else matters. I am loved, I am beautiful, I am wise, I am accepted, I am understood, I am seen, I am worthy, I am worth dying for, I am redeemed, I am holy, and I am significant SIMPLY because He says I am. Nothing can take that away.
I could go on forever about all of the things in this life that, if we give them the power, can hold us in a constant state of captivity. But the beauty of our identity being in Christ is that we aren’t responsible for proving our worth to anyone or convincing anyone of our value. We simply just have to fix our eyes on the author of truth, the one who knows exactly who He created us to be, and let go of everything else. That is freedom and it has never felt so good.
