by Steven Gledhill for FREEdom from MEdom Project

What does it take to experience change and feel better—be better?

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:1-2

The truth is that freedom is achieved through a revolutionary event. ‘Revolutionary’ means a sudden, radical, or complete change; a fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something; a change in paradigm (belief, world view), meaning your standard for living. FFMP’s objective is to promote revolutionary recovery in how you live everyday—a new standard of thinking and living, with healthy hopeful expectations. God desires to transform your life into something new: from a caterpillar seemingly stuck in its tracks hardly able to move, into a butterfly full of life soaring to new heights in your life experience. The thing is you can know God, experiencing His impact on your life if by faith you will let go and trust Him to help you. Ever say to yourself, “It’s gonna take a miracle…”?

The following video is the revolutionary event that started it all for you and for me. Through Christ’s act of sacrifice at the cross, God extended His hand of mercy to each and every one of us no matter where we’ve been or what we’ve done. The miracle of resurrection and grace did not end there, it began there. Jesus, today, is inviting you to let go of the mess so that He can perform the miracle—the revolutionary event—of resurrection in your life. As you stare into the face of the miracle maker, you are gazing into the eyes of the One who will rearrange you into something new and beautiful.

The transforming work of God is that He rebuilds you and me into something new. C.S. Lewis wrote that, even though we might only want an aspirin to relieve the immediate pain of a tooth ache, God intends to permanently set right all of our teeth. It is not the plan or purpose of God that we merely survive, with mere moments of relief from the pain of shame and discontentment, but that we live a full life of freedom in the experience of His peace and joy. God wants to reshape us into something more beautiful than we can imagine. He wants to bless us with what we don’t even know to desire. He wants to take us to where we would never even think to go.

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on. You knew these jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage; but He is building a palace. He intends to come in and live in it Himself.” —C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Evidence that Demands a Verdict

FREEdom from MEdom Project is a venture in faith. Here’s a secret about faith: faith isn’t blind, nor is it ignorant. Faith is the realization of the truth one has longed to believe in. Faith is an experience rooted in the substance and evidence in something unseen. Have you ever seen gravity or oxygen? Like gravity and oxygen, you may not see the subject of your faith, but there is clear evidence that it is real by experience. You’ve never seen your brain, but you believe you have one. Have you ever seen a radio signal or a cell phone signal? Yet they are all around you all of the time. Someone said that if you could see all of the signals in downtown Chicago you would not be able to see your hand in front of your face. Have you ever actually seen hot or cold? Have you experienced the evidence of hot and cold? We experience what we don’t see all the time; therefore, we know it’s real. While we learn to trust in what we do not see, we put our faith in what we know by experience to be true. When we don’t trust God, it’s because we don’t really know God.

You know, we don’t see wind either but we see and experience evidence of it everyday. The howling of the wind that we hear is not actually the wind sounding off but the obstruction that is resistant to the wind. The howling noise is the sound of resistance. If we move in harmony with the wind, instead of holding us back, the powerful force of the wind propels us. God is like the wind wanting to impact our lives by experience—everyday. When we resist God we hear the howling of our resistance in our circumstances that prove so dissatisfying. When we’re moving with God, He propels us, and our troubles aren’t so loud. The more we know God the more we’ll trust Him, and the more confidence we’ll have when we communicate with Him—and the less we will resist His influence in our lives. When we come to believe and trust in the evidence, the verdict is that we will then experience the wonderful life benefits of our faith.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1 (NKJV)

To experience the blessing of being transformed into something new requires that we let go of what we cannot control anyway. We must engage into relationship with God, trusting Him to and empower us and to do in us what we cannot do for ourselves on our own. This means turning our will (desires and intentions) and our lives (what we do and everyone involved and affected by what we do) over to the care of the One with boundless power and control as we have come to believe in Him. This suggests then that, even though there exists doubt in what we cannot see, we put our faith in the possibility—the hope—that Jesus can and will do what He said He can and will do if we let Him; because we know Him, according to the evidence. In this we live in the perfect will of God, His best for you and for me.

A father brought his tormented son to Jesus and said,
“If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.” “If you can?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for one who believes.” Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” Mark 9:22-24

When you believe by faith in Jesus Christ, the known God who knows and understands you, and wants His best for you, it really becomes sensible that you would surrender and turn it all over to Him. Does it make sense to you to turn your will and life over to Him since you believe? Believe this: that God wants His best for you so much more than you can possibly want it. You might want out of some things; but getting out of something means getting into what? Hmm… God knows what you are missing and wants desperately to deliver it to you, both in this lifetime and in the next.

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us… For the creation eagerly waits with anticipation… creation itself will also be set free from bondage of corruption into glorious freedom… if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with patience. from Romans 8:18-25 (HCSB)

What if you could see yourself through another pair of eyes’

What if you could hear the truth instead of old familiar lies
And what if you could feel inside the power of the hand
That made the universe, you’d realize

He made the lame walk and the dumb talk
And He opened blinded eyes to see
That the sun rises on His time
Yet He knows our deepest desperate need

And the world waits while His heart aches
To realize the dream
I wonder what life would be like
If we let Jesus live through you and me*

* “What Life Would Be Like”, Big Daddy Weave