Bound To Jesus

"If the Lord delights in us, then He will bring us into this land and give it to us. —Numbers 14:8

Eugene Cussons rescues chimpanzees. Orphaned by those in the business of bush-meat trade and taken from the jungle as infants, many have lived their entire lives confined in a space smaller than a prison cell. When Cussons arrives to take them to the game reserve he calls “Chimp Eden,” he often finds them hostile and untrusting.

“These chimps don’t realize that I am one of the good guys,” Cussons says. When he tries to put them into a smaller crate for the trip to their new home, they put up quite a fight. “They don’t know that I’m going to take them back to Chimp Eden and give them a life so much better.”

On a much grander scale, God’s offer to liberate us from the slavery of sin is often met with resistance. When He rescued the children of Israel from Egypt, God took them through difficult places that caused them to doubt His good intentions. “Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt?” they cried (Num. 14:3)."

On our journey of faith, there are times when the “freedom” of sin that we left behind is more appealing than the restrictions of faith that lie ahead.

We must trust the protective boundaries found in God’s Word as the only way to get to the place of ultimate freedom.

~Julie Ackerman

Sin’s lure may look like freedom

But in its grip we’re bound;

It’s when we’re bound to Jesus

Real freedom will be found.

~ D. De Haan

Obedience to God is the key to freedom.

~ Adapted from Our Daily Bread, "Chimp Eden", June 25 2009

This devotion in many ways remind me of the great temptation of going back to my old sinful nature, where there seems to be much more freedom, less accountability. There are times when those pleasures are just so alluring and seductive that I fell. We know that this fight of faith is definitely not easy but not impossible. We succumb to sin not out of our inability to choose, but rather the loss of sight on where our real freedom is, only to find that we are gripped and bound to the wages of sin. We incur debts to that grip that keeps making us pay our deposits. Only being bound to Jesus that these debts are cancelled and ransomed. Obedience thus results in real freedom in the truth.