Breaking Free

Psalm 129

Verse 4 But the Lord is righteous; He has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.

The psalmist now turns his message from the ones attacking to the One who saves us from our enemies.

His first point about the Lord is that He is righteous. Righteous. Free of sin and free from the bondage of sin. He doesn’t just forgive our sins, He breaks the very cords of the enemy that try to keep us in the power of our sin. The enemy has the goal of keeping us floundering in our sin, but the Lord has willed that we are to be free from the sin.

One of the struggles we have in life is that we don’t always like to be free from our sins. We tend to be comfortable with our sins and don’t want to give them up. They likely give us pleasure and satisfy our fleshly desires. There are things that sometimes we seek out knowing we shouldn’t. That magnet-like pull is the way the enemy continues to hold our attention. As long as we don’t care about our sin we remain in his magnetic pull.

But the Lord is righteous. We may take His righteousness for granted and not think about it as much as we should. The truth about righteousness is that it can’t coexist with sin and so when we allow sin to continue in our life we are either not acknowledging His righteousness or are saying He doesn’t matter to us.

Maybe we need to ask ourselves why our sin is so precious to us. Do we really think that our sin is so wonderful that we would rather give up our relationship with God than to break-up with our sin? We wouldn’t want to admit it, but that is more truth than fiction. When we are so attached to our sin that we even have to question whether we are going to give into it, we are saying that it rules us more than it should, that it has taken more of our heart than we should have given it.

But the Lord is righteous. And we should desire to be revealing His righteousness to all those we come into contact with.

Making It Personal

How much of a hold does sin have on your life? Are you willing to give up your sin for a closer relationship with God? What are you going to do today to break up with the sin that controls you?

Making It Personal Kids

Do you have a sin that seems to control you? Would Jesus like that you like this sin? What would Jesus want you to do about this sin?

Closing Prayer

Father, thank You for loving us and breaking the hold sin has on us. Give us wisdom to see our sin for what it really is and how it to leave it behind. In Jesus’ name, amen.