The Worst of Imprisonment

Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

We were made by God and for God. Therefore, our souls are slaves if we live for anything other than Him. The degree to which our souls are centered around and driven by anything other than our Maker is the degree to which we are imprisoned—barred from fulfilling our destiny and delight.

And this is exactly what’s wrong with us. The Bible says that our souls have been sold into bondage to sin (Romans 7). Because of the universal power of sin, our desires are out of order. You could say this is the very definition of sin. Our hearts are driven by anything other than God. Thus, our desires have become tyrannical prison guards confining our souls deep in the dungeon of “self”, far from the sunshine of God’s goodness and beauty. And so, our souls become prison cells of misery and ultimate loneliness.

John Milton in his famous “Paradise Lost” put it this way:
“thou art become, O worst imprisonment, the dungeon of thyself.”

This raises the question, who can possibly set us free from a dungeon of our own making? Who could ever set us free from our own self-obsession? Who could possibly deliver us from the twin tyrannical prison guards of self-love and self-loathing? The Bible gives us but one answer: God’s great love toward us in Christ! Only the love of God can break our love of sin, and this is exactly what God has done for us in the person of Jesus Christ. He loved us even while we were sinners.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.”
~ Romans 7:18-25 (ESV)