I had a dream last night that woke me up with a startling call to join the ranks of the Lord's Army.
In the dream I saw a very large black man (think John Coffee in the Green Mile). In my spirit I knew he was a slave. It was the middle of the night and the middle of a severe storm. The runaway slave ran with all of his might. Cold rain beat down on him. Lightening pierced the sky to light his way, and the thunder seemed almost constant. As he ran he got hit in the face by branches, his arms and legs became bloody from the cuts they received, and the unstable mud caused him to fall several times. The burden to pick himself back up was so great that I often wondered if he would be able to rise again, but the fight to freedom within him grew with every fall, and he continued.
He ran in this condition for what I understood to be 100 miles before he finally reached a land of freedom. When he finally stopped he was beyond exhausted, wet, and weak, but he was free... and he had carried his two children with him to freedom.
"For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first."
2 Peter 2:19b-20
As Christians I think we often accept that Jesus willingly took our punishment for us, and then we become passive with a belief that the battle has already been won, so there is no longer any fighting that needs to be done. God loves us so much that he died for us and now he fights our fights for us. Our only job is to show up in Heaven and receive our reward...
Our reward for WHAT??
After we accept The Way that Jesus provides for us to be saved, it is then up to us to fight the good fight and run the race set before us. In my dream, the race was to freedom, and the race was against time. The enslavement was the sin and bondage of our old life. The captors were the rulers, authorities, cosmic powers and spiritual forces of evil who desire to keep us in our sin. They were represented by all of the elements (darkness, rain, trees, thorns, mud, etc) trying to stop the slave from reaching freedom. (Ephesians 6:12).
There are many evil things in this world who are on mission to kill, steal, and destroy the freedom that we have in Christ. They desire to place us back in the bondage of our sin so that our new state of defeated Christian will be worse than our original state of mere sinner.
We must persevere through the spiritual war. As Satan and his followers beat us down to get us discouraged, and whisper condemning lies into our ear we must use the full armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-20) to fight our way back to freedom, (and in order to use the full armor of God, it is implied that we have already put it on...)
In the dream I was not able to perceive that the man running carried two children (one boy and one girl).. He seemed to be running his race to freedom alone. It was only after he reached freedom that the freedom of his children was also revealed.
And this is our promise from the Lord. If we do accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, and if we do fight to free ourselves from our sinful nature and choose to allow the Spirit to guide and change us, then our children will inherit freedom with us.
"They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity, for they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the Lord, and their descendants with them."
Isaiah 65:23
