already through Jesus. Tell Him that from this moment on you accept that you are free from condemnation because of Jesus. Say that you will no longer accept condemnation as truth, because it is not. Then, claim what the truth is about you.
In case you need some help to get going, Neil Anderson has written an amazing list of who we are in Christ that I have included for you in appendix B, with permission. But I also want you to ask God what His truth about you is and write it in your journal as well. Ask Him, and then sit quietly and listen as His Holy Spirit whispers to you. He will answer you, because He wants nothing more than intimacy with you and longs for you to know Him and for you to be known by Him. He would love for you to understand how He sees you. Start with “I am not condemned for my mistakes, and I am not defined by them,” and see how He reveals the truth about what He thinks of you from there.
If you ask Him to speak to you, and you don’t think He does or all you hear are condemning thoughts, do not think this means that God doesn’t have anything other than condemnation to offer you. What it actually means is that the enemy of our souls is working really hard to keep you stuck in condemnation. Which means to me, Satan knows that you will be really impactful for the kingdom of God when you are not rendered stuck by condemnation. Neil Anderson says Satan knows he can’t change who we are in Christ so he tries to change our perception of it instead. That thought, I think, pairs very nicely with one from Priscilla Shirer in A Jewel in His Crown, which states that Satan knows that if he can get us focused enough on our weaknesses, we will never get around to using our strengths for the kingdom of God.
Think about that for a second. If you weren’t so consumed by the things you think are failures, the things you feel make you not good enough, what would you be consumed with? We’ll talk a lot more about these ideas later on. But for now, I point this out so that you don’t get discouraged, and so you realize that you don’t have to stay stuck. I suggest that you reach out to God (again) about this. It may mean that He will lead you to speak to a trusted Christian friend, counsellor or pastor to help you address this “stuckness” you are feeling. Or it may mean that in your quietness with Him, He will open your eyes to how you have been lured to accept beliefs that are not truth about you, which will be enough to help you break through this attack on your view of yourself so you can feel His love.
Whatever you do, don’t give up. Keep listening. He will speak to you. Maybe it won’t be today. Maybe it will be as you are driving to the store. Maybe it will be as you are falling asleep one night. Maybe you will hear a song and you will feel like He is singing the words directly to you. Don’t forget, the Bible says, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8), so you might think He is not answering you, but He will. And don’t worry—I don’t think He’ll make you wait one thousand years! Ephesians 3:16–18 says,
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. (emphasis added)
Did you catch what that passage is saying to you? That His love for you is wide, long, high and deep. How will you understand that? By being rooted in His love. Rooted. When we root, or anchor, ourselves in the truth—what the Bible says about His love for us, which means no condemnation—we will finally be able to understand just how wide, how long, how high and how deep His love for us truly is. Even a glimpse of that reality has the capacity to overwhelm us…in a good way. In a way that makes a difference. That is life-changing.
I’ll end this chapter by telling you about a woman I met whom I will call Sue. Sue was at a woman’s retreat where I had the privilege of speaking. The topic was on hearing God’s voice. Throughout the weekend, there were several opportunities for the women to break off alone and reflect on their personal reaction to what was being discussed and to listen to what God was saying to them.
Sue asked to speak alone with me at the end of the retreat to share what had happened to her with God on the weekend. Sue said she had ended Saturday evening very angry and upset. Her journaling had been filled with reflections of these strong emotions, largely through self-condemning thoughts and feelings. On the Sunday morning, part of the topic included a discussion about how Satan tries to stop us from hearing God, using some pretty “common” negative feelings about ourselves to do so. Sue said that as I listed some of the accusations Satan commonly uses, she found herself being able to relate to every one of them, and more than that—they were the things she had been writing in her journal in anger the night before.
When she went off on her own on Sunday to listen to God and hear what messages of love He had for her, she found herself flooded with good, warm, loving thoughts about herself that felt completely foreign to the negative self-condemnation that had become the norm for her. She was blown away that once she realized those negative things were lies and that she didn’t have to listen to them, she was able to hear the truth.
Sue was a little skeptical of the good stuff at first, saying, “I don’t know if that was the Holy Spirit or not,” because she was not used to hearing Him love her in that way. But it didn’t take too long before God affirmed for Sue that of course it was Him. That those words were His truth for her, words He wanted her to accept. And her openness to labelling Satan’s lies as what they were enabled her to hear the love message from God that had been truth all along in her life, if only she’d not been so consumed with condemnation. Sue asked God to tell her the truth about how He felt about her, and He did…because God so loves Sue. Just like He so loves you.
Chapter Three: Love Means Freedom
The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.
Isaiah 61:1
I can still remember a time when I was a little girl and I’d been sent to my room for doing something wrong. I can’t remember what I had done, but I do remember my mom coming into my room afterwards to talk with me about my misbehaviour. I grew up in a Christian home, in a family that attended church a minimum of four different times in a week (three on Sunday and at least once during the week for Bible study), so I was very aware of how important my parents’ faith was to them. In my childish wisdom, I thought perhaps if I spiritualized the situation, my mom might take pity on me and see me as somewhat of a helpless victim of Satan (instead of disobedient) and hopefully lessen my punishment. So when she came into my room to talk with me and asked why I did “it” (whatever “it” was), I looked up at her with my biggest, saddest little girl eyes and said, “Mommy, the devil made me do it!” To which she very sternly responded, “The devil, my foot!”
I think my understanding of the reality of and theology behind spiritual warfare has grown since then, and that’s what I’ll focus on for the next little while. I realize there are a lot of views on this topic and the degree to which it plays a part in our day-to-day functioning. Ideas that range from complete denial of any spiritual battle going on at all to living in fear of Satan and his schemes. Far be it from me to attempt to suggest that you need to switch to my way of thinking. After all, this is between you and God.
My worldview on this topic is this: the Bible is very clear—there is a spiritual battle going on, and it is for our freedom. As a result, I will outline what the Bible says about this topic and how I think it impacts us on a day-to-day basis. I will then address how this topic relates to how much we are loved.
What the Bible Says
Ephesians 6:12 says, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood,
