About a week ago I read through emails from my colleagues at work highlighting the history of Juneteenth. As I read through these notes, I was yet again enlightened about the victory and progress the black community has achieved so far as regards physical liberation. I have seen 12 Years a Slave and read a couple of articles about slavery, and all I can do is try to imagine the height of anguish these men and women must have felt. Mere looking at the pictures of them chained to their necks leaves me extremely sad, talk more of living in their reality!
As my mind tried to put my body in the bodies of those slaves just to imagine their plights and ordeal back then on this fateful day, the Holy Spirit highlighted to me how sadly this state of enslavement is the reality of so many people in the world today. Enslavement to the power of sin and the devil. The enemy has so many people under spirtitual necks, legs, hands, and body chains. The saddest part may just be the fact that so many of these people do not know about the slavery that they may be.
Let us take a quick dive into the bible to see ways the enemy had some people chained down. Dr. Luke shares in Luke 13:10-17 the account of a woman who was crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. And immediately Jesus saw her, He called her forward, laid His hands upon her, and said to her, “Woman thou art loosed from your infirmity”. This sentence is a huge pointer to the fact that this woman was held bound to this infirmity by the enemy and the Lord Jesus set her free completely from this bondage forever. With a close look through scripture, we would be able to see the ways the enemy tried to put God’s children in a perpetual state of slavery spanning from God’s children in Egypt, to locking Paul and Silas to deter them from worshipping the Lord. Another glaring form of bondage that we see in the bible is that of the mad Gadarene man. Dr. Luke also shared the testimony of this man in Luke 8:26-39, he shared with us how this man was mad because he was under the oppression of hundreds of demons. Not only did these demons torment this man but they had him bound in chains and shackles for so long. This is just the height of wickedness in high places. But thank God for Jesus Christ who set him free and cast out all of the demons from this man.
The last healing I would like to share on this blog post is the healing of the paralyzed man who was brought to Jesus Christ through the roof by His friends- Luke 5:18. The first thing Jesus Christ did was forgive the sins of this man after He saw the faith of this man and his friends- Luke 5:20. Then right after this healing came the man’s deliverance from paralysis. Three salient factors that were captured in this account are the faith of this man, the forgiveness of his sins, and finally his healing and deliverance.
For as many as may be living in sin is more or less living in bondage, living in sin is more or less giving consent to the enemy to keep one in bondage and slavery as cited in the above scenarios. I would also like to point out that this slavery and bondage takes different forms, from depression to mental illness, to poor health, to poverty, to low self-esteem, to pride, to constant feelings of shame, to pornography, to being enslaved to sex, and so on. Nonetheless, whatever form of bondage you may find yourself in, I have good news for you, Jesus Christ is able to set you free just like He did in the past. What you need to do is to first come to Him baring it all to Him, confess and repent of all forms of sin that give the enemy access to you, accept Him as your best friend and savior, And finally ask Him for deliverance, insist on your deliverance till you see it and live in it.