How great is our freedom

We had a fantastic sermon today in church. One of our pastors, Pastor Dave, spoke about freedom. He made an excellent point in saying that for us to truly appreciate our freedom we need to know the depth of our potential bondage. His main focus was about our freedom in Christ and used Paul's words in Romans 7:24 to illustrate the magnitude of sin. In Romans 7 Paul writes about the inner turmoil that takes place with his sinful nature. He writes, "Why do I do the things that I do not want to do, but yet do not do the things I know that I should." In verse 24 he writes, "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?"

All of the many times that I have read this verse I honestly had no idea what body of death meant. After conducting some research on this term this is what pastor Dave concluded. At the time that Paul was writing many different empires had very creative ways of execution. All of them are gory in nature and I won't gross you out by mentioning them, but one way was called Body of Death. (Let me warn you about this next part. It is a little stomach turning.) I forget who used this form of execution, but this is how it went. If a person was sentenced to death, they would take a very long rope and a corpse and place the corpse directly in front of the condemned so that they were face to face. They would then wrap the rope around the two many times so that it was tight. The condemned would be forced to live this way 24/7. After many weeks the condemned would finally die. It was a horrible, painful and gruesome way to die.

So let's go back to Paul's writing, "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" Paul was in such turmoil about his fleshly nature -sin nature- that he compared it to the body of death. In meditating on this for awhile I think he was right on the mark. Sin is the corpse that will enslave, and without the freedom of Christ, be the cause of our spiritual death. But then , and this is my favorite part, Paul writes in 25, "Thanks be to God-through Jesus Christ our LORD." Just writing this makes me cry. Can I get an AMEN!

Although I didn't know it at the time, I was suffocating from the weight of living for myself and allowing my desires rule over me. God saw me in my pit and when I finally called out to Him, he rescued me. He cut the ropes that bound me to my death sentence so that I could be free. If Christ has set you free you are free indeed.