Trapped

No. 15 - 20th November 2016

Two thoughts from this week. Entirely different, but both of them making a similar point. We’ve got a store room in our house, and the door is so warped that you can’t close it any more. The cats love it because it’s a place where they can hide and I can’t get at them. Well, this week I decided to make a clever device out of a coat hanger that would hold the door closed enough to keep the cats out. There was a lot of complicated bending to do and when I had finished attaching it to the inside of the door, I couldn’t get out because the release was on the outside. I had to call my wife on the phone to come and rescue me.

The other thought I had was while watching a DVD with one of our Church community groups. It was about a Christian drug rehabilitation centre in London. They have an astonishing success rate of 70-80% of men who are still drug free, three years after completing the course. That’s compared to just 10 – 15% with most secular programmes. The lads at the centre were describing how they had been completely trapped, not by a clever coat hanger, as I was, but by the most awful addictions to alcohol and drugs. What they described was complete bondage, and they were powerless to break out from it. Yet here, in this Christian rehab’ centre they were breaking free. They called it the God factor.

There’s a passage in the Old Testament that Jesus claimed for himself. It goes like this. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to set free those who are oppressed”. And that’s exactly what was happening at this rehab centre. These men were being released from the prison of addiction and finding a completely new life in a genuine relationship with Jesus the Son of God. God was setting them free as he promised, and the result was life changing. Do I believe what was being said on the DVD? Well yes, actually I do, because I made that video myself about 12 years ago. I was there and I saw the evidence with my own eyes. As it says in the Bible, “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed”.