Fighting for Our Freedom

Today's Daily Reading is from Stasi's new book The Ladder of Love, available now — order your copy today!

Take a moment and check in with your own heart. What are you feeling? What are you believing? About yourself? About your life? About God? What have you been wounded into believing?

Take note of what you are believing. Are your thoughts based on the Word of God? Dear reader, we need to recognize if our thoughts align with the truth of what God says. In order to do that, we need to know what the Word says. Time spent in the Scriptures is a necessity, one we cannot do without. 

To stand firm, we need to repent of, turn away from, and reject where our thoughts are not consistent with the Scriptures and where we have instead come into alignment with our enemy. We repent of the ways we have not been living as we know the Holy Spirit has been inviting us to. We repent of unforgiveness of others— we choose to forgive, and we even forgive ourselves. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

We name the agreements we have been making with the enemy, and we break them. We break all the agreements we have been making with Satan against ourselves, against others, against our lives, and against our God. Children of God, valiant ones, you cannot resist hatred, death, ambivalence, despair, or anything else sourced against you by the evil one if you are actively agreeing with those powers. Even the feeling of being overwhelmed or exhausted, validated by your schedule, is made worse by the presence of darkness. Break agreements with it.

By faith, not by our feelings or our circumstances, we make agreement with what the God of all hope says.

And we invite Jesus to come and heal us where we have been wounded into believing lies. We ask Him to come for us in the places where harm has made us vulnerable.

This is the first way that we stand firm: We resist the devil, and that makes him flee. We take our thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ. We grow in being quick to recognize when our hearts are spiraling down, and when they are, we check in with our thought life. If it doesn’t align with what God says, then we reject it as a lie from the pit of hell.

There are other ways to stand firm, of course. The choices in what we think about is a beginning point, but we also want to guard our hearts— the wellspring of life within us (Proverbs 4:23)— by being careful about what we take in, what we read, what we watch, how we spend our time, how we speak, how we live in the day- to- day, and what we entertain in our imaginations. We need to fight for our freedom by choosing Jesus. And friends, you are. You are. You must. If we don’t battle for our own hearts, then we won’t be able to battle for others and love them into the Kingdom of God and deeper freedom in Christ.

There is freedom to be had. There is life to be enjoyed. There is love to be saturated with.

Want more? Order your copy of The Ladder of Love today