Daily Journal: 18 May

Walk in Freedom

I had a dream last night about imprisonment. Ordinary people were imprisoned by self-appointed people in power, people with money, and Influencers. It wasn’t a criminal prison. It was known as a training camp, teaching people how they were expected to live. Most people didn’t call it a prison but in order to get out of the camp, people had to go through programs to do things the way they were told. There was a lot of pressure to participate in the programs. People could ‘choose’ from a list of personally designed programs to complete, according to their weaknesses. They weren’t forced to do the programs but they couldn’t get out unless they did. If they tried to escape, force was used to make them stay.

It was a horrible dream. It reminds me of the infamous Eagles song and album of the same name, Hotel California, released in 1976. It depicted enslavement but the people there didn’t realise they were being enslaved.

2 Timothy 4:3 (NCV)

because the time will come when people will not listen to the true teaching but will find many more teachers who please them by saying the things they want to hear.

I woke up with the words, “Don’t listen to the things of man. Listen to The Spirit.”

The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:4-5 (NCV)

My teaching and preaching were not with words of human wisdom that persuade people but with proof of the power that the Spirit gives. This was so that your faith would be in God’s power and not in human wisdom.

1 Corinthians 2:12-13 (NCV)

Now we did not receive the spirit of the world, but we received the Spirit that is from God so that we can know all that God has given us. And we speak about these things, not with words taught us by human wisdom but with words taught us by the Spirit. And so we explain spiritual truths to spiritual people.

We can be imprisoned in our own thoughts and habits without realising it, following norms for ourselves based on the norms of the world around us. If we do realise it, we don’t always want to change. We minimise the impact of these norms in our lives at the cost of God's glory in our lives.

We don’t truly know what it is to be free and live in the glory God created for us. That’s what God wants for us but we have to seek it, look for it, search for it with all of our hearts, knowing it’s the best thing and not choosing anything else. It’s only the Spirit of God that can transform us in this way and help us to walk in freedom.

We need to continually seek His truth and want to live by His truth. There are so many small ways we don’t do that but that’s where it begins. In the small things. God can do big things but we’re usually changed incrementally by the small things we make choices about every day.

I pray we follow God’s truths in all the small significant ways and be changed by them in big ways.