The Pangea Blog
Below is an article written by my good friend, Joey LeTourneau. I’ve known his family for about 5 years now and am always amazed at the stories of how God is at work in their ministry. He recently published his first major book: Revolutionary Freedom – Anointed to Set the Captives Free. Just to give you another reason to check out this book, here is an endorsement worth listening to:
“This is a book about a God who is liberating the captives. Some of us are being liberated from the ghettoes of poverty and others of us from the ghettoes of wealth. Some of us are being freed from the slums and others from the cul-de-sacs. Joey knows a God who is close to the poor and the suffering, and dares us to follow the Spirit to the margins, to get our hands dirty, and to find Jesus in His many disguises.”
– Shane Claiborne, Author, Activist, and recovering sinner, www.thesimpleway.org
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Imagine yourself, you wake up one day not too far from now and find yourself in the most inhospitable of environments. Tall, dark, towering walls surround you. Thick, steely bars line up before you. There are painful chains strapped across some of the most painful parts of your life. And to top it off, you have your very own guard standing outside your very own cell.
Where are you? How did you get here? When did you come? What is this horrid place? How will you get out? And as if the present reality is not bad enough, you come to find out, that actually, you have been here for years without ever knowing the limits that surrounded you.
The Warden is terrible. The other prisoners are unmerciful, and the pain from each of their lives is unmistakable. New chains are passed from one prisoner to another with mere words and opinion, while the walls behind you grow like an inescapable, shadowy reminder of the past. The more pain your chains cause, the greater the walls grow, the less you believe, then the bars only get wider. You are trapped in a prison of self.
Is it possible? All this time, have you been holding yourself captive from the fullness of life and purpose God created you for? Jesus set you free, the Warden can’t hold you, only deceive you to imprison yourself. Have you been living, unknowingly, a limited kind of freedom? Limited freedom? It doesn’t even sound right? It can’t be right. It isn’t right.
God has created us for more! Jesus came to set us free, that we might go out and set others free! When Jesus began His ministry, He began with the declaration of Isaiah 61. In Luke chapter 4:18-19, Jesus reached over, grabbed the book of Isaiah and declared this revolutionary kind of freedom, the freedom of a revolutionary.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
At creation, Adam and Eve began with purpose. They were to take dominion over the earth, over every living thing. They were to be fruitful, and multiply. They were naked, but so free that they did not even know. We often look at their disobedience, but do we remember what that disobedience caused them to partake of? They ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As soon as they took that bite, everything changed. Now, they were so aware and self-conscious of their nakedness that they had to hide from the One who created them naked, from the One who gave them purpose.
They were held captive now, within self, within the insecurities and judgments that come from partaking of a knowledge they were not equipped to handle. Now, their hearts, lives, focus and their purpose became divided. No longer could they focus only on the mandate God had given them to give life, but now they felt compelled to protect their own life. They lost the freedom to be who God had made them to be. They were held back from the purposes God created them for. They saw themselves and one another differently. They judged themselves and one another differently.
Jesus came to restore the vision Adam and Eve lost. He came to set us free from this prison that we hold self and one another within. He came to take away the oppression of our past, so that we could walk forward and carry the life of Jesus to the poor. He set us free so that we could impart that same healing to the brokenhearted. Jesus came to give life, and to give it more abundantly. He came to restore the simplicity, the power, and the purpose of the tree of life in our lives.
Why is it that we still hold ourselves captive from God’s best? Why do we so often eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and use the tree of life just for shade? Yes, we can argue that its roots are underneath. Yes, its branches extend out over us. And we even lean up against its strong trunk. But are we still living by the knowledge that we are unequipped to use instead of the life we are purposed and called to pass on? Are we still holding ourselves captive, and agreeing with the deceptions of the enemy who cannot stop God’s children, who can only hope to contain them?
The enemy wants us to imprison ourselves. Like a giant game of freeze tag, there is one who is “it” and freezing everyone in reach. All the other players have a choice, protect self or live freely to set others free. One life is lived by defense, fear and insecurity. The other is lived out loud on offense, freely living, freely giving, and seeing the revolutionary freedom of Jesus come to life.
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Joey LeTourneau works with Heavenly Hope Ministries to coordinate MARK 10:14, a movement focused on gathering the poor, broken, and empty children of Ethiopia and beyond into the Father’s arms. He travels worldwide empowering the Body of Christ to draw near to their First Love. He lives in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with his wife and their four daughters. You can purchase his book, Revolutionary Freedom (FB page) on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
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