A wonderful story from Gulliver’s Travels will give imagery to a point I want to make. On his first voyage, Gulliver wakes up to find that he’s been shipwrecked and is the prisoner of people only 6 inches tall that live in the neighboring and rival countries of Lilliput and Blefuscu. These little people have tied him to the beach while he was unconscious. They believe they’ve used the strongest ropes available and that he won’t be able to break free. As you can imagine, the strongest ropes that people who are merely 6 inches tall could possible have to use won’t hold down someone our size for very long. As he attempts to sit up, they attack him with their tiny arrows. But to no avail. (I won’t tell you the whole story, but at the end of this article I’ve provided a link to take you to it.)
When ‘shipwrecks’ occur in our lives, we’re sometimes ‘tied up’ and held captive - but only until we tear free of the tethers. Sometimes the tethers are stronger than we think they could possibly be and other times we pull free easily. Sometimes we need help and other times we’re deceived into thinking that we cannot get up at all.
We have a common enemy, whether we recognize him or not. The devil binds us up with his ‘unbreakable’ cords -or rather, the cords he wants us to think are unbreakable. He is the great deceiver and we humans fall for his lies far worse and more often than we can imagine. But, his cords most definitely can be broken. How easy or hard it is to break them is simply a matter of how much we want to be freed and whether or not we’re willing to allow God to free us of them.
I don’t mean to imply that we are imprisoned by cords that can be easily broken - because we want to be. But many of us are ‘tied up’ because we either 1) we don’t realize we are bound; 2) we don’t know we can be freed; or 3) because we are secure in those bindings. Any way you look at it, the enemy’s lies are behind the bondage. He’s told us his lies throughout our past and continues to lie to us now. He lies when we go through crisis as well as when things are going well for us.
If we don’t know where we are bound by his lies and offenses, we don’t know God’s Word. We haven’t read or studied what God has to say to us. Don’t fall for yet another lie, don’t let the enemy make you feel condemned for what you haven’t been doing. - There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, [Romans 8:1] Start reading and studying God’s Word right now. No excuses, those are of lies of the enemy, too.
If we don’t know that we can be free, again, we don’t know God’s Word and need to get down to basics. Contrary to what the enemy wants you to think, God does not want His will in our lives to be a mystery. He’s gone to great lengths to spell things out for us in black and white.
Looking at the third reason some of us ‘lay on the beach, bound up in the tiny ropes of the enemy’ - we’ve become secure there. We’re not at all comfortable, but we’ve allowed ourselves to become secure in what we know. Sadly, what we know is constructed of lies; the devil’s lies. The longer we lay there, the more ropes are tossed over us. But no matter how many ropes of lies are used against us, we can rip free.
In heartbreak and every imaginable ordeal we go through, we hear lies. Our common enemy being without honor, attempts to bind us up every time we fall, whether we fall through any fault of our own or not.
There are many resources available to us to show us the freedom God has for us and how to obtain it. Knowing God and the words He has given us will be our greatest help. Get into your Bible. Read it every day. By His Spirit, God can and will lead us in the right directions, but know that the devil and his lies will be out there to misdirect us as well. God brings people into our lives that have already been where we are now. By God’s own design and plans, they can help us. When we are in Christ, we are joined with the whole Body of Christ and have all the knowledge of heaven within reach. God loves us far too much to leave us stranded out there on that beach, all alone, to defend ourselves.
If you haven’t read it or watched the cartoons or movies of it, I’ll tell you the beginning of one of his adventures. This novel by Jonathon Swift, has never been out of print. Written in 1726, it was officially titled, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships. You can find the book or movie(s) at a local library or bookstore. If you want to read it right now, go to: www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/ where you can actually click on ‘the text’ at the top left and read the novel.
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