Perhaps it’s because I’m an over thinker and an INFJ, but I am constantly looking to grow, to change my thinking, and to become more of who I was made to be. In this continual process, God keeps bringing to my attention the rights that I carry because of the power I posses through Him. He’s shown me that like many Christians, this is something I need to grasp better-my right to walk in the power of God. I was recently lamenting to God about some things in my life that weren’t fair, and He asked me, “Sarah, what do you want for your life?” My answer was, “FREEDOM!” I want to be free to do many of the things I desire, I want to be free to pay my bills AND take my kids to the movies, I want to be free to be the person I was MADE to be! I will be 40 years old in a couple of weeks and I am ready for a new change in my life because there MUST be something else to life than “this”! He then asked me the question, “What is going on in your life that’s keeping you from experiencing this freedom?” Then, He sent me on a journey. He started giving me single words to find the definitions to, He started changing the way I view some things, He started putting ideas and prophecies in my path to confirm what He was telling me, and He began opening doors a little bit here and there to remind me I’m not completely stuck with where I’m at in life, even if it feels that way right now. He started to give me hope.

Since freedom is the thing that I desire, He had me to start looking at the word “freedom”. Freedom means “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint”. This led me to look up “hindrance” and “restraint”. God used this to start painting a much bigger picture with more visuals and words putting it all together. Yesterday, He gave me a word for someone and He showed me bindweed. Bindweed is one of the arch nemesis of my darling husband as it grows wild out in the fields and is costly to get rid of. It shows up in a little patch, then it spreads and it grows quickly killing everything around it. You go back over the field and you plow it up because it doesn’t do any good to plant winter wheat in a field full of bindweed. The parasitic plant will just choke out and kill all your wheat and you’ve wasted a lot of time. You can kill it by spraying it, but that comes with a huge cost and it’s so redundant to keep plowing and spraying, plowing and spraying, hoping you will finally get rid of the bindweed. Bindweed wants to steal, kill, and destroy everything in the field around it. When you have a field that covers several hundred acres, it isn’t feasible to go out with a shovel and dig it up. It takes a lot of work to get rid of it! To me, Bindweed is a great visual for a hindrance or a restraint. It hinders what you want to grow from growing by restraining it until it kills it. Freedom is the power to act, speak, or think however you want to without anything keeping it from happening. The things of God are freedom and life, but the things of your enemy are hindrance and death. If you feel like you aren’t experiencing freedom in your life, then pray and ask God to show you what you need to be obedient in to get rid of what is restraining you.

When I started thinking about bindweed, God reminded me that “whatever I bind on earth will be bound in heaven” so I started to focus on the word “bind”. To bind something means to constrain it, to tie it together, to cause to cohere in a single mass.

To constrain means to limit or restrict,stiffness of manner and inhibition in relations.

To cohere means to be united, form a whole, cohere with other beliefs and to be logically consistent.

This shows me that Satan uses defeat (captivity or the opposite of freedom) in our lives as a way to bind us. He wants to keep you bound up, constrained, limited, restricted, stiff, by making you united with HIS ways, HIS thinking, HIS will, HIS voice, HIS choices, HIS power. Satan is like a bind weed who wants to choke out the freedom that you can experience through God by keeping you bound to your sin and foolish thinking. Our world is full of vulgarity and folly and it’s easy for your household to become enamored with the culture around it. However, don’t expect to experience Kingdom freedom when you do.

What do you have being hurled at you that restricts your freedom? In the next blog I’ll talk about a few ways that we can break loose of the enemy’s constraints and stop being limited in our lives so we may experience the true freedom that God can give.