Galatians 5:1 tells us:
"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery" (NIV) 

Or as The Message puts it:
"Christ has set us free to live a free life.  So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you."

This Sunday we celebrated Easter.  We celebrated the fact that Jesus' death and resurrection means that we are offered the gift of complete freedom.  We celebrated that because of Jesus, God's love for us is not based on anything we do (or don't do).  "...For in Christ, neither our most concious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything.  What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love." Galatians 5:4-6 (Msg)

Often, even though our eternal futures are secure when we accept this gift, most of us still have areas in our present life that keep us from really living in freedom.  For anyone who didn't get to be with us Sunday, we basically took some time to think about how much we are loved by God regardless of any of these things and spent time in solitude with God talking to Him about these specific areas in our life. 

So what do we do about these things - how do we break free from the issues that are still holding us captive?  2 Corinthians 10:4-5 says: "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."  (v5) "The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.  On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds."  The Message phrases it: "The tools of our trade aren't for marketing or manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt culture.  We use our powerful God -tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ." 

In class, when we put all our "stuff" on a pinata and smashed it - it was hopefully the beginning of forming a new intention.  Each of us each looking honestly at our life, examining it together with God, and identifying those areas that are keeping us from fully realizing how much He loves us and from fully experiencing His freedom.  The challenge cards inside were not quick fixes, not something we had to do redeem ourselves, and not something we had to do to meet a certain standard to be loved by God (or even something we had to do to be more loved by God or for Him to be happier with us in general).

The purpose of the challenge cards was to help us focus on training to use some of our "spiritual weapons" that we can use to demolish these "strongholds".  They are the "spiritual disciplines" we've been talking about during our study of The Life You've Always Wanted.  In practicing them, we are not trying to make ourselves "better people" but rather to open ourselves up God - communicating with Him through prayer, reading His word and applying it to our lives, learning how to accept being loved by God based on nothing we do to earn it.  As we get to know God better, the goal is for Him to completely change us from the inside out - to shift our focus from the lies we've been basing our faulty ideas and sense of worth on and replace them with God's truth.  Our freedom won't happen overnight - we'll have setbacks and times we keep falling into the same habits and same fears.   As we grow, it will probably be frustrating that we're not exactly where we want to be - but hopefully week by week as we grow with God and are encouraged by each other, we can see that we're farther than where we were.

"Christ has set us free to live a free life.  So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you."