I know someone who became a Christian from a background in alcoholism, and his coming to faith in Christ was instrumental in him breaking the power of addiction over his life. I know someone else who came into the church having relentlessly pursued the accumulation of money and found that it just didn’t satisfy him, it left him empty. I know someone else who came in and found Christian faith because he was burdened with a guilty conscience, labouring under a sense of his own sinfulness, and he found release in Christ.
Recently I was at a baptism service when I heard someone talking about the way that she had pursued all sorts of religious practises of various kinds, desperate to find meaning and truth and an encounter with something ultimate. She had now become a Christian, saying that – for all those years – she hadn’t realised that what she’d really been looking for was Jesus. I could look around my church and tell you story after story after story of people who have found liberation in Jesus Christ.
It is important that we keep telling those stories because sometimes our evangelistic fervour drops because we have lost sight of the fact that Jesus is the liberator. Jesus sets us free from the power of sin and death and evil, and gives us new life and the impetus for real change.
The Bible says that anyone who is in Christ “is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come”, (2 Cor 5:17) and we see the truth of that all around us in our own lives and in other people’s stories. And that spurs us on in evangelism because the people live for things – in fact are ‘worshipping‘ things – that cannot bear the weight of their worship. Humans are instinctively worshipping creatures, and if we’re not worshipping God some idol will take his place. Idolatry means basing our lives on something created, rather than on the creator. Anything ‘created’ we worship functions as an idol and those idols are fallen, they’re broken, they let us down, they disappoint and ultimately will condemn us.
The gospel is the good news that liberates us from the worship of false idols which cannot bear the weight of our lives, which cannot bear the weight of our worship because they are not worthy of it. But Christ is – and we have the message that liberates.
Prayer: Thank you Lord that you came to liberate captives. Thank you that your truth sets people free and gives new life. I long to see more people set free by your word and your Spirit through the gospel. There are some people on my heart today Lord who need your liberation. Help me to point them to you.
