Would you rather be Satan's prisoner or God's slave? House of Refuge Sunnyslope

"Father, [...], not my will, but yours, be done" is what Christian's worldwide have been repeating for centuries. This is from Luke 22:42 right before Jesus, the Son of God who is God in the flesh, was about to be crucified and He prayed this prayer to God his Father in heaven. When we hear the words, "not my will, but yours, be done," does that sound like a man who's free to do whatever he wants? Or does it sound like a man who has surrendered all decision-making to God? Completely submissive and not fighting back even though what he was about to do would end his life. It sounds like a slave.

But what was life worth to Jesus if He was spared only to be separated from his Father in heaven for all eternity and everyone that he loved—meaning all of humanity—would be damned to hell? So Jesus made the only reasonable decision. He died for all of us so that we wouldn't be eternally damned. He did this because he loved us. Why is this a good thing?

!!!Read out loud Romans 6:16-23 (nothing says it better than the Bible). God's words from the Bible hit the point home 😁🙌

God wants us to surrender to His will. Satan doesn't care. Satan will take us whether we want to go or not—and he'll trick us to think we made the choice ourselves. But you know what's really going on? We've been imprisoned to our worldly, fleshly addictions and we say we are happy with our decision to stay there. It's like we're in jail but on work furlough. We get to go out and enjoy the world and work and get paid for it and come back to a tiny little jail cell.

Our world is burning all around us like a big dumpster fire, and we have a lawn chair and a beer in our hand sitting down and telling everyone who will listen how beautiful it is—as if it were the 4th of July.

Our own selfish desires need to die. The things we wanted like drugs and sex and cool cars and clothes are destroying our lives. The lies that we told ourselves that we love living on the streets because it gives us freedom—no bills to pay and no one to tell us what to do. All of the street cred we got when we were rolling with our boys got us nowhere. Where're the boys now? We were the main character in our own story. I'm talking about the MAIN CHARACTER! The STAR of your own show. The master of your own destiny. But one bad decision after another causes your life to go a different direction than what you imagined—and all the great dreams you had for yourself start fading in the background while you pretend that you are happy with how life turned out.

This is what I say: We need a new master. One that truly gives a damn about us because He loves us.

Are we willfully serving the enemy when we spend our lives chasing our own selfish desires? Or are we caught up in the smoke and mirrors and tricked? Have we been deceived like Eve was deceived in the Garden of Eden?

At what point did our will stop being our own will and it became Satan's will?

Or if things take a different turn in our lives, at what point did our will not become our own will and it became God's will?

We want to hide our shame and we want to hide from each other. We want to hide from God and anyone else who knows us. We don't want anyone to gaze upon our broken sinful state. When Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit and ate it, they lit-up a dumpster fire for the rest of humanity. Then, because they thought they were being sneaky, they thought they would just wrap themselves in fig leaves and nobody would notice. I have a fig tree at my home, and the leaves are very uncomfortable and they bleed a white substance that looks like Elmer's glue that burns your skin like acid. That's a painful way to live just to hide from your past.

Our guilt and our shame deeply affect our decision making abilities. We've all done things that we aren't proud of. But if we let shame hold us back—if we let the memory of WHO WE WERE push us down and keep us from succeeding greatly—then we are not embracing the BETTER LIFE God has planned for us.

God is not the God of barely squeezing by and barely making it. God is the God of abundance and greatness because he is the ruler of all Creation and he wants you to succeed BIG, and if you just trust in HIM, you will see why people call Him the God of restoration. He will restore you better than you have ever been. But it will be on his time and his terms.

For myself, I have to stop caring so much about what other people might think about me. They might think they know me. Maybe my reputation made it to their ears, but you know what? I care only about pleasing my Father in heaven.

The things I did in the past don't get erased because I became a Christian. The things I did in the past still have consequences that follow me. My Father in heaven has forgiven me for the sinful things I did in the past and it doesn't matter if the world doesn't see it that way. I no longer serve the things of this world. I serve God in heaven. I have to stop worrying about what other people think about me. I have to stop being my own worst enemy and judging myself before I even try to make better choices in my life.

I have to trust that if my plans don't work out these days, that's okay, because everything is in God's control and he's a good God with a good plan. If things don't work out according to my plan, that's amazing! I would rather that my life go exactly the way God wants it to go, because I trust him with my life. I don't need to worry about the future because I can't control the future. Only God does, and I'm not God.

You might think that people don't like you, and you could be right. But who cares? If we go around seeking approval from people who obviously don't like us, we'll be stuck in neutral not moving anywhere. I work everyday with people who I suspect don't like me. I interact everyday with people I'm sure would rather I just go away. But if I let that effect my decision to do what is righteous in God's eyes, if I let my suspicions of someone else's opinions shape my next decision and control my next move, then I never truly unshackled myself from the chains of this world.

AND WHAT IF I WAS WRONG? What if I just THOUGHT that people were treating me differently because my brain starts telling me that they don't like me without any evidence? Let that sink in.

Your perception of reality becomes reality for you—even if it's wrong. That is something that effects our decision making in our daily lives. This is major!
If you believe people treat you as a drug addict or differently because of the color of your skin or differently because of the quality of the clothes you wear, you will find things or assume things that affirm your suspicions and ultimately, you will make different decisions.

What if the way we saw the world was not the way of the world was? What if things happened to us that we couldn't explain so we made things up to explain it?
For example,
WHAT IF YOU DIDN'T GET THE JOB AND DIDN'T KNOW WHY?

Would you think it's because of the tats on your face? Would you think it's because of your criminal background? Would you think it's because they've judged you as being a gangbanger or maybe a thug? What if all of your assumptions were wrong? What if they just had a better applicant but you still ranked in the top two—but they only went with the other guy because he had reliable transportation? But because you thought the worst, maybe you got angry or maybe you got sad and you thought it was time to have a drink now or it was time to get some drugs to feel better. Or maybe you're going to yell at your buddy because you feel like the world is so unfair.

You see what happened there? You think you know why something happened, but you don't. You really have no idea. Your brain tries to come up with an explanation, and it comes up with a worst case scenario that paints you as a victim. Then you react in anger or sadness and make a bad decision. Those bad decisions are based off of wrong or unproven assumptions. We need to catch ourselves when we think we have answers, but we really just made it up stuff in our head.

We must make righteous decisions. Decisions that are based on the truth. Jesus is called the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Maybe we can look towards Jesus to figure out what real truth is in this world.

We need to start making decisions that are not focused on just helping ourselves to a better or more successful place in life—which doesn't really sound all that bad—but maybe we can start making decisions that are based on doing what is right in the eyes of God himself. Jesus has given us FREEDOM to become slaves to God! We don't need to step over other people to get ahead. We can come alongside the people around us and bring them with us so we can all get ahead.

We were prisoners with shakles of pornography and fentanyl and meth and anger and jealousy and bad decision-making. All of those things that imprisoned us didn't give a damn if we lived or died—what matters to our JAILER called SATAN is that we become numb to our Creator, that we deny that we have a Creator, the God of the universe, and our God loves us and pursues us and wants us to be free to serve Him and love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength.

We should be slaves to God the same way a married man is FREE to focus only on his wife and family—a man who loves Jesus and joins the church is FREE from the shakles of this world and the heavy chains that burdened him with so much guilt and shame that he thought he was living the HIGH-LIFE just avoiding people who knew of his past.

A FREE MAN can hold his head high while serving a God who loves him and is willing to die for him and proved it on the cross for all the world to see.

Everyone loves a hero. When we watch a movie and the good guys save the world, it makes us happy the good guys won. Jesus was the original hero. He saved the whole world like a superhero. He sacrificed himself for me and you. We don't serve Him because we have to. He didn't make us do that. We serve Him because we love Him the way he loves us. Serving Him doesn't get us a special backstage pass to heaven. Once surrender Jesus and and accept his free gift of grace, we're in. We've got club membership to heaven that no one can take away.

We're a family. Devoted and loyal and dependable and committed to loving him and to loving one another. Not just a warm fuzzy feeling. But doing things that show our love—helping one another when they need clothes or food. Not just looking at them and saying, "I'll pray for you." Loving Jesus and loving one another means doing things to prove it. Jesus said he loved us and he died on the cross for us to prove it.

Let's toss aside the fake lies the world feeds us while Satan is trying to convince us that we are in control. Let's toss aside our drug addictions and our alcohol additions and our porn addictions and our addictions to anger AND EVEN our addictions to bad decision-making.

When we are addicted to God, we make decisions in our life that are based upon truth and based on serving a God who loves us.