Beat your past

Philippians 3:12 and 13. The Apostle Paul is speaking precisely about setting our eyes on what is ahead. How many know that the Lord has a glorious future for you? That God has good things for your life, that God wants to give you the blessings that you long for, and wants to get you out of the mourning of the past and enter a time of love, celebration, and joy. That is what God has for us.

Paul is talking about his struggle to grasp what God has for him and that it is necessary to let go of something in order to grasp something else. So, he's talking about his search for the blessing, to grab hold of Christ, to become the man that God wants him to be. And he says, “Not that I've got it yet,” in other words, there's an acknowledgment that the Christian life is a progressive journey. We go from one place to another, from one state to another. We are learning things. We are experiencing the treatment of the Lord, the call of the Lord, new experiences, new heights, new levels of depth in the knowledge of the Lord. We never arrived.

Do you know how far we've come? When we die But meanwhile he says, "Not that I've already reached it, nor that I'm already perfect, but I'm going on." That is the Christian life, a continuation, a going forward, "...to see if I can grasp, grasp, that for which I was also grasped by Christ."

The word is that to seize. Grasping is a fine word and it is not just any word, it means how to hold on to something, grab it tightly. “Brothers,” – he reemphasizes, “myself,” the Apostle Paul was pulling, the moral, scriptural giant, Paul. All the people who are reading his Scripture think of him as a super man in spirit.

He says, "Brothers, I myself do not claim to have already reached it, but one thing I do, certainly forgetting what is behind, and reaching out to what is ahead, I press on to the goal..." That word again, I press on, I persevere, I persist, I continue, I continue to the goal. “…to the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

The Lord bless his word. If you examine Philippians chapter 3, you will see that Paul talks a lot in that chapter about his goal. In the earlier verses beginning with verse 7, for example, he talks about wanting to get to know Christ. I spoke about it last Wednesday, you want to come to know Christ in the power of his resurrection, he says, in his sufferings, and become equal to Him in his death as well. Paul's desire was to reach the fullness to which God had called him of experience in Christ, of compenetration with the spirit of Jesus. He wanted to become that man that God wanted him to become. And notice that we are talking about the great Apostle Paul. But he also had a way to go.

And in that chapter 3, Paul talks about the need to adopt a new way of looking at things, a new perspective and let go of the old perspective. You know brothers that many times we have to let go to grab. And here Paul invites us not to live in the past, not to live in the past, certainly forgetting what is left behind, neither dwelling too much on memories nor on the achievements of the past.

And hence that verse from the Psalm, “Behold, I do new things.” I do new things. We cannot dwell too much on memories of things past. Rather, Paul calls us to strip ourselves of anything that might prevent us from embracing our new life in Christ and living efficiently, successfully, the glorious present and the glorious future He has for us.

Sometimes when we enter new and different situations, the memory of the past prevents us from embracing the new conditions that God has for us. Sometimes it causes us confusion because we are in one thing and in the other. Every time I preach at 12:00 I have to get rid of the memory of what I preached at 9:00, or rather, the style because sometimes I want to reproduce what I preached at 9:00 but many times God has something different. So part of my goal is, I have to forget about what I preached at 9:00 and focus on what God has now, because if I'm not between two worlds and being between two worlds is not good.

And so it is with the Christian life. When God calls us to inhabit a new situation, a new place, we have to forget about the past because otherwise we are going to be in two worlds. And a warrior cannot be indecisive when he is in the middle of battle because otherwise, they will knock him down, they will defeat him. You have to go forward. You have to let go to embrace.

And Pablo was a man who knew about letting go and forgetting about the past. Before knowing Christ he was a great persecutor of the church. He helped in the death of Esteban, and that was a great pain that he had, a psychological wound that he had, because he persecuted the church, he put Christians in jail. He hated Christ. He hated his followers. And all of that was there when he was serving the Lord, he remembered that record that he had and he said that he was the least of all the Apostles, because he persecuted Jesus Christ.

So, when he talks about letting go of the past, forgetting what is behind, he understands that he had to let go of many things, he had to let go of his self-righteous identity, he had to forget the great achievements that he had achieved when he was younger. He was a respected man among his community, a man who knew who he was, what he belonged to, what culture, everything and everything he had to abandon and leave behind. Everything that was precious to him, he had to leave that completely and enter a new life. Paul knew what it was like to die to the past and rise to a new life.

We live in a culture, brothers, that demands flexible people, like never before in history. We live in an extremely dynamic world. Before people lived in an agricultural life, stuck in a field, today, we live in cities where everything changes continuously. Everything is in a state of flux, of flowing. Look how this pandemic has forced us to develop new habits. Who would have thought that we would be wearing masks like the Chinese, which we used to see years ago. Whenever I saw someone wearing a mask in Boston, I was like, “Wow! How strange, it is a person with a mask.” Look, nowadays, we all use them.

It is a very dynamic world. People move from one city to another. Sometimes she marries a person from another culture and has to learn to eat chiles and tortillas or rice with beans, or whatever, because it is a very dynamic culture and flexible people are required, people who can flow, people who can adapt. . And the Lord wants us to learn to adapt to new situations, to new calls that He has for us.

That is why it is so important that we learn to let go of things in order to enter into the new things that God has for us. The Christian life demands a lot of dying, a lot of letting go of things that are sometimes very dear to us.

The Christian life demands an abandonment of old identities and an assuming of new identities. God calls us, for example, as Christians to adopt new ways of thinking. Many people enter the Gospel but they don't change their way of thinking, they don't change their mind. And so they live with one foot in the world and the other foot in the Gospel. And you know what? The Gospel does not process life as the world processes it.

So many Christians walk into church and don't understand that God is calling them to reprogram their brain, reprogram their mind. Many Christians consider themselves to be biblical, conservative, orthodox Christians, but sometimes other kinds of thoughts that do not belong in the Bible have infiltrated our minds. They are secular thoughts.

Look, for example, today's understanding of social justice is very different from the understanding that the Bible has. What is social justice really? How to do social justice that is biblical? I'm not rejecting the sense of social justice, but God has a very different meaning than the world has. But many Christians come into the Gospel and have not made the transition to how the Bible thinks in terms of politics, culture, social issues, even moral and ethical issues.

There are many people who have a sense of what is fair, let's say regarding sexuality, sexual fluidity, God's grace, and they incorporate into their minds thoughts that come from the secular world and are not able to separate from a thing or the other. And the Bible calls us to be transformed through the renewal of our understanding. There are things that we are going to have to leave. There are thoughts and ways of computing life that the Bible tells us, "Now you are entering a new era, a new way of thinking."

There are times when we have had experiences in the past that have hurt us, experiences that have marked us, that have hurt us and then we need to forget those past wounds in order to enter into the blessing that God has for us. When we were children, perhaps we were abused or sexually abused, or we had a home where we were physically abused, or throughout life we have experienced certain childhood traumas, certain things that have hurt us, have marked us. And all those things are there in our neurology, they are in our memories and the Lord says, “Now, you have to learn to think in a different way. You have entered a safe place.”

Think of a little boy who has been taken from his home because of abuse or whatever, because of the loss of his parents, and now he goes to a home where it is a safe place, where there are parents who love him, or people who want to take care of him. of them and protect them. It is going to be difficult for that child to make a transition to be able to believe that now, they are not going to abuse him, they are not going to hit him, they are not going to harm him in any way. And so are we. Sometimes we enter the Gospel and now we have entered a place of refuge and our Father is supremely good, generous. But we find it hard to believe that it is possible for this Father to forgive us and love us.

And then, we are like the prodigal son who offended his father, went to a faraway place, wasted all his father's money, offended him greatly, and now, when he returns home beaten, defeated, humiliated, he is the only thing he can believe. It only makes him think that his father is going to receive him and make him one more salaryman, who will never forgive him. And yet, when he gets home, his father sees him from afar and runs after him to receive him and fully integrate him into his sonship.

I imagine that boy could not believe that this was possible. But no, the father called, "Put a new dress on him, put the family ring on him, kill the fattened calf, let's celebrate because my son had died and is now alive." That is the love of the father. And we find it hard to believe that it is possible for God to love us that way.

And Paul is saying, “When you enter the Kingdom you have to forget many things and change your way of thinking in order to enter into the joy, the enjoyment of your Lord.” The Christian life is a continuous getting rid of old things, ways of thinking. The world thinks in a certain way, the world treats us in a certain way, but the children of God can participate in the generosity of the Father.

The Christian life, brothers, in order to live it correctly, demands a lot to let go of the old program and enter a different program. If you are going to live the Christian life effectively, you have to believe that God has wonderful things for you, that new things are coming into your life.

And one of the things that we sometimes have to forget is the offenses that we have committed against God in the past. Paul had to forget everything he had done in his old life. He thought that God would never fully forgive him, but God had other plans for him. She not only wanted to forgive him but she wanted to use him.

And many times, however, when we enter the ways of the Lord, the memories of the past, of the offenses of the past, torment us and prevent us from entering into enjoyment, into the joy of the Lord. And the Lord is telling us, “Let go of those offenses that you have committed. I have forgiven you." If you have truly repented, if you have recognized your sin, even if your sins are red like scarlet, they will become white like wool.

And the enemy, however, is always ready to torment us, accuse us, and want to remind us of past offenses. And we have to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to believe that God has better things for us.

The enemy accuses... Satan sometimes uses our relatives, uses our loved ones, uses our natural environment, and sometimes we ourselves tend to condemn ourselves and the Lord says, "No, I already have another program, I have another purpose for your life. Drop the burdens of the past and enter into the call that I have for you in this new stage of your life."

We have to cooperate with that. God wants, for example, that we... right now the church of Jesus Christ needs to believe that God has something new, different and beautiful for us after two years and a peak of the pandemic. I believe that many people in the Kingdom of God are still battered by the trauma of what has happened in these last two years. It has been something so unprecedented that for many of us a time of healing is required. I rejoice when I see my brothers, a day like today, just as sometimes it hurts me when I see people lose their habit of coming to the House of the Lord, and this is not a condemnatory word, because I believe that God has for us a different way of reacting to the traumas of life.

I believe that there are many people in the church right now, not only here, but throughout the United States and in other parts of the world, Christians are going to have to recover the habits of the past. This has been a traumatic time and unless we do not receive by faith God's blessing, divine healing, we are going to be beaten up and we are going to think, "There is no going back now."

I believe, however, that God wants to fill this house again, fill it with people worshiping like we did today. How beautiful to be in the House of the Lord. Brothers, I call you, my brothers also who are on the internet, to go against the current. Sometimes, in order to enter into the glory that God has for us, we have to go through a period of barrenness and drought, and then we have to stand firm, continue towards the goal.

I call the León de Judá Congregation to come out completely from this time of pandemic stronger than ever, more powerful than ever. And I call my brothers, because many times my brothers, before entering the blessing that God has for us, we have to move by faith.

I know that many of you perhaps this morning when you saw that temperature of 9 degrees, or 10 degrees, you thought twice. And there is no shame in that. But you decided to come to the House of the Lord. And that's why I've always believed that the church has to always keep the lamp burning. Even if no one else comes, there may be a little church mouse running around on the floors, even if it is the pastor who is present to worship the Lord, and raise the banner of the Gospel.

In this time the church of Jesus Christ has to arm itself with new forces, we have to make a decision because if not, we remain shrunken, we remain small. I was sharing with the English ministry last Sunday, a story about… And there are two lessons for me that I've learned.

Years ago, and I'm talking about how you have to do things many times that cost us to reach a new measure of freedom. Years, many years ago, I injured myself – here's a… it's called the rotator cuff, it's a combination of various muscles that attach the arm to a hole that grips the arm so that when you're throwing a ball, whatever, don't lose your arm. They are muscles and there are tendons that support this arm to the shoulder. And many times it's very easy to hurt that part of the body when you're playing tennis, for example, or whatever.

And that happened to me 25 years ago, imagine, even more I believe. Playing tennis it seems that I made a force and forced that shoulder and it hurt me. And literally for 25 years I got used to gradually losing the total mobility that I had before in this arm. It wasn't a terrible thing, but I couldn't do this anymore, do this back. And I, with the passage of time, got used to the limitations that this damage had imposed on me. And since it was something quite tolerable, it didn't prevent me from carrying things, moving, etc., I gradually left it and what happened, however, was that over the years the movement became a little less each time.

And lately, in the last year and a half, the pain had been increasing and it was already affecting my sleep. And when I put my arm in a certain way, after a while I felt the pain that woke me up. And I realized that little by little, that limitation that was previously very tolerable, was becoming more and more serious. Later I read and it is exactly what happens with that type of damage. When the pain got bad enough that I said, “Okay, now I have to do something,” then I decided to change. And there is a lesson there, many times brothers, God allows the pain of our experience, our practices, our habits, whatever, to become so strong that then we say, “I have to change. I have to leave the old and put on the new.”

Many times in the Christian life one has to reach that point of crisis so that there can be a change in us. But what matters most to me is this, that the path towards mobility again, towards the recovery of the mobility of my arm, has been a path of about a year and a half, where I have had to force my body, read about of it. I have not been to a therapist but I have had to gradually learn to use stretching and strengthening techniques for that part of the muscle, which I had already become accustomed to. And it's been expensive, it's been a bit painful as well, because I've had to gradually push all those muscles. I have lost perhaps 15, 20% of the mobility of that arm. And it costs pain.

If I just stick to what I can do, I would possibly be crippled over time. But the road to recovery and healing requires effort on our part, it requires us to go through a painful time as well, it requires persistence. And that is what God wants from us.

For example, in this time of pandemic and this is the case with all other things in life, there is a stage in our life when God is calling us to greater mobility, stretching, greater flexibility, there will be a time of struggle and effort on our part, there will be pain even. But to enter into the freedom that Christ wants for us, we have to know that it is going to take time and that there is going to be an effort on our part and that it is going to cost us pain at times, and that we are going to have to let go of things. that we love so that we can ascend and enter into all the blessing that God wants.

And I believe that God is calling us. Many of us have pain, we have trauma, and you know what? That we have become accustomed to them even. For many, even, their pain is kind of tasty to a certain extent. There are people who love their pain. There are people who love to feel like victims. It is a crutch, a crutch that we use to feel important, for how tasty it is to feel offended, abused, lick our wounds. And that sometimes we have to let go. And sometimes we even have to do things that are not going to come naturally to us. We have to make movements that are going to stretch us and cause us a little pain in order to get into what God wants for us. We're going to have to let go of certain things.

So this is not a sermon about a return to church, but I have wanted to talk about it for a long time. But one of the aspects of leaving the past behind in this sermon is precisely that, we have to stretch because we've been home a long time. We have been in the tasty of the heat of the house, the conservative, the safe. Forget, there is no security. In this world there is no security. Wherever we go there will always be something waiting.

But we have gotten used to that and we have lost the habit of coming to the House of the Lord on a rainy day, or on a cold or cloudy day. And that is going to require an effort, to break the comfort, to break the weakness. Many of you, of us, well, I tell you, I feel, thank the Lord, in that aspect I feel very good, but many have shrunk their muscles from coming to the house of the Lord.

And I believe that God wants to be honored and worshiped in his sanctuary. And for many, it's going to require you to get out of the comfort of home and on a Wednesday night when you want to stay home watching a movie, or making a special meal, saying, "No, I'm going to worship the Lord." in your sanctuary,” and that you make an effort.

This time requires a proactive stance for many of us. It requires an effortful and courageous posture to reach that other level. I believe that many teachers, for example, have shrunk and our children are suffering for it. I see here in the city of Boston so many cowering teachers, the teachers' unions – this is not a diatribe against it either, but the truth is that our children have suffered a terrible trauma in this time: having to stay at home, in in front of a computer, often by ourselves because we don't speak the language, we're not used to a computer. And those kids feel dysfunctional right now and they feel sad.

And many teachers don't want to teach in schools again and our children are paying the price. Those teachers also have to force themselves, believe that God is with them, that God keeps them, and do it. Because if we don't, we are going to lose a generation of Latinos and blacks who are going to suffer the trauma of being in their homes. And unless we are not proactive and believe in the Lord and break that inertia, we are going to create a dysfunctional generation, a lost generation.

And so it is with so many things in life. Brothers, if we are going to get to the future that God has for us, there are many things that we have to leave behind. They can be friendships that don't suit us, because not everything we have to leave from the past is bad, sometimes there are good things that we have to leave in order to enter into the fullness of what God wants for us.

Look, Pablo was an extremely well-behaved, respectable, prestigious man, and he had to take all that stuff and say, "That thing is rubbish to me." Everything that was profit for me, now I have as garbage to reach the supreme calling, to know Christ Jesus.

And there are many things in our life, there are friendships that right now can be a burden, a burden that prevents us from entering into what God wants for us. It may be a romantic relationship that is not good for you because it prevents you from entering into what God has for your life. And you are going to have to cut that like a dry branch that is rotting the rest of the tree is cut with a machete and you are going to have to break that.

The Lord says that “if your eye causes you to fall, cut it out. If your hand causes you to fall, cut it off," because your goal is to enter the Kingdom of God. Your goal is to come to know Christ. Your goal is to walk freely. And of course, the Lord was speaking, it was hyperbole, an exaggeration, but the idea is, brothers, that we... When God calls you, you have to understand that God is calling you to a total and radical surrender. It is a death. That's why the Bible talks so much in terms of death, dying to self, dying to the old man, putting on Christ.

The Christian life is a radical life and you have to forget in a sense, you have to sacrifice many things. I believe that in the Gospel, in the Christian world there are many Christians who want, in English they say, "to have your cake and eat it too." They want to eat the cake and also keep it in their hand. You can't eat a cake and have it whole again in your hand. Either eat it or keep it. But there are Christians who want the privilege of being Christians but also the privilege of being worldly. And the Bible says, no, you have to choose between one thing and the other. You have to drop things.

I was sharing with the ministry in English this morning about that when years ago, when I left the university in Princeton, when I was in my bachelor's years, I had many very good friendships in the university. There were faculty that I knew, deans of the university, very distinguished people, and I was a student. And when God grabbed me among the several times that He has grabbed me to take me to another level, I realized that many of those good, noble, illustrious people, who were a great professional and intellectual influence on my life, were not suitable for me. what God was calling me.

And I had to get rid of all those friendships because they were not suitable for what God was calling me to. I needed to be fully committed. And finally, I graduated, I'll tell you, from Princeton University 34 or 44 years ago. Look, 44 years. And I tell you this for this reason, that I have practically gone back to that university only once to visit it, although I love it very much, but it's like God took that past from me. It was not convenient for my life. And I just put that behind me. I had to quit because I wanted more of God and God was going to call me into the ministry.

So something very good, not necessarily bad, God took it from me. It also ripped me off when I went to Andover before that, when I went to Harvard, anyway. I pass by like a ghost that is visiting a place where it lived. I have already left that world behind. I see my university books there in my office on a shelf, many of which I haven't even opened, literature and other things. It's like that's already...

I had to leave that to get into the practice of serving the Lord, of shepherding and dedicating myself to only one thing. And so it happens many times in our lives. There are things, there are friendships that God tells you, "Look, you have to leave her." There are courtships, there are romantic relationships, there are professions that you have to leave behind to seize what God has for you. There are jobs that prevent you from serving the Lord, having time with your children, going to church, having time with your wife, resting. They are killing you, they are sucking your life, your energy. What you are doing is getting into debt to buy a big house, to have this, to have that, and yet, it is preventing you from being the man or woman that God wants you to be in Him. Be truly happy.

So, you have to drop those things, because the world computes life in terms of how many cars you have, the brand of car you have, the size of your house, the neighborhood where it is. We Christians live differently. We do not love the world or the things of the world. For us it is to seek the Kingdom of God first and know that other things will be added. You have to die to live.

When you enter the Gospel, you disappear, you have to disappear to many things. And those things are sometimes very tasty and very attractive, but the Christian life is a radical life that demands a total surrender of self.

You have heard of the Witness Protection Program. The Witness Protection Program is a program of the United States government for people, for example, who have testified against a criminal or against the mafia, who want to kill him. The government takes those people, it can be a family, and erases their identity. These people can never call a family member, they cannot return to the place where they lived. They are put in a state, in a tiny town where no one knows them, and they are told, “You can't reveal who you are. You have to live now as a totally new and different person.” It is a death. But the only way they can live is by disappearing from the map.

Know what? In order for us Christians to enter into what God wants, in the enjoyment of what God has, many times we have to leave many things behind. We have to die to many things. And we have to find pleasure in letting go of those things. And that is when we can truly enjoy the joy of the Lord. We are often missing out on the delight of being intimate with Christ because there are elements in our life that are saddening the Holy Spirit and do not allow us to enjoy that intimacy with God that He wants for us.

God is waiting for you to let go of many things that may be good but are not pleasing to Him. And there are also negative things, as I said, that we have to leave behind. There are, sometimes, wounds from the past, traumas that make us feel dirty, make us feel sinful that we do not deserve the grace of the Lord. And the enemy brings into our life over and over again the reminder, "You did that, you did that." Sometimes we live ungodly lives and now we see our children suffering the guilt of it and it hurts us. And every time we see a rebellious child because of things we did in the past, we say to ourselves, "I don't deserve God's blessing."

Sometimes we destroy our marriages and then we enter the way of the Lord. Or we are in the Lord's way and we didn't do what we were supposed to do and our marriages are destroyed and we find ourselves divorced or separated from our family and the devil is there saying, “You see, you don't deserve God's blessing.”

As I also say, pains that have dirty our souls from the inside and that make us feel like there is no life for us, there is no healing, there is no future. And all those things we have to break the accusation of the enemy. The devil will try to make you feel that your time has passed, that the bus left you and that there is no hope for you.

And that is where we have to recover against that inclination. You are going to have to do as I have done in terms of the healing of my shoulder, you are going to have to go into a battle to break those principalities and powers, those strongholds that are in your mind, telling you, "I can't get out." of that depression. I can't get out of this anxiety that is eating my life. I can't get out of that sense of victimization, of that low self-esteem that is haunting me, of that sense that something bad is going to happen to me.”

Fight for your life. Fight for your health. Do not accommodate yourself to the devil's intimations. You have to get up in the name of the Lord, you have to confess the good will of God in your life. When you feel inclined to lick your wounds, declare God's goodness in your life. Say as the psalmist says, "I will not die, but I will live to declare the goodness of God in my life."

Fight. Fight for your health. The state you are in is relative, it is not absolute. You can get out of there because God wants to get you out of there but he needs your cooperation. It is not going to come just because God touches you with a magic wand and you forget all things. No, you have to cooperate with the Lord by keeping your faith in Him, focusing your mind on the word of God, you have to consume a good Bible, you have to read good passages of Scripture, you have to have good conversations with believers who can encourage you. . You have to let go of the associations of the past. You have to memorize verses. You have to worship the Lord when you feel sad. You have to get ahead. You have to serve others when sometimes you feel that you need to be cared for and served.

But with those efforts, with those gestures of defiance against what is dragging you, little by little you are entering the fullness and healing that God wants for you. Remember only this, that God has good purposes for you. I know that I am speaking to many of my brothers and sisters. If you knew how much God loves you, you would be surprised.

God loves you so much. God has such good purposes for you, that He is only waiting for you to take a step of faith forward and invite Him to own your life, to assert the principles and purposes that He has for you. But you have to do your part. You have to remove everything that prevents you and you have to go to that call that God has for you, that blessing, that healing.

I want us to bow our heads at this time. There is no shame in admitting that we are struggling with something. There is no shame in admitting that we need God's healing treatment in our lives. There is no shame in admitting that we feel fragile and that we are in need of God's grace.

That is why I want to invite you... we have had a wonderful time of intercession this morning, but if you want to enter into God's healing purpose, I invite you to raise your hand, or to stand up and we are going to say a prayer of rejection, of renunciation to anything the enemy wants to use to destroy us.

I invite you to open your soul to the Lord this afternoon, open your mind and heart. First, we are going to open ourselves to God's treatment. We are going to say, “Father, I want to be good soil, fertile soil, and I want you to break up that hardened soil and make it breathe again. And I open myself to your blessing and your treatment.

I know that many more, God has things that He wants to heal you in your life. There are purposes that God has for you and he only needs you to believe and put aside the voices of doubt, condemnation, fear, rejection, and the goodness of God. Believe that God has good things for you.

So open up, open up to Him now, open up and then positively confess that God is visiting you, God is healing your life right now, anything from the past, any offense, any sin, God is coming into your heart. The spirit of the Lord is visiting you right now.

Forget what's behind. Launch yourself into what God has ahead, the call to a positive life, to a powerful life. Receive grace. Confess the grace of the Lord. Name your giant. What is the thing with which you are struggling? Again, a loss, a tragedy, a sin, an offense, a tendency, a mental battle, a memory of something that was done to you in the past, a marital, financial failure, whatever. Give it to the Lord now. Open all heart. Let God touch that part of your land.

And confess, confess, say, “Lord, I receive your healing. Lord, I receive your restoration. Lord, I receive your life in me. I receive the treatment of your spirit in my life. I open my heart to you and confess healing. I confess deliverance. Father, I welcome your good purpose, your good call, your good intentions. Thanks for healing me. Thanks for restoring me. Thank you for giving me a new identity. Thank you for letting me into your place of protection and refuge. And I renounce all trauma from the past, all damage from the past, everything that drags me down, everything that chains me in the name of Jesus.”

Confess, “You have called me, Father, to freedom. You have not called me into slavery. You have called me to liberation, to joy, a new song, a new song, a new identity, a new future.

Receive it in the name of the Lord. Father, I declare in the name of Jesus that this town this afternoon receives a fresh anointing. We receive liberation from your spirit. We renounce everything that is not convenient in our life, Lord, whether it is good or apparently good or apparently bad, whatever it is, Father, we place it at your feet. We bring our burdens to your feet.

Your word says, "Come to me all you who are labored and loaded and I will give you rest."

Now I declare that you find rest, you find rest in the Lord. Your burden God takes it. See Jesus right now taking your wound, taking your trauma, taking your suffering whatever it is, He takes it on, He absorbs it into His capable hands and don't ever put on yourself the burden He has taken from you. When you walk out of here the enemy wants to say, "Look, that was emotional." Put it away, put it aside. Without much effort, that's not for me. God has already healed me, he has set me free.

Father, we absorb the healing anointing of your spirit into our lives. We put aside everything that is not yours. And Father, this congregation will worship you outside of Egypt. We will go to the place that you have for us to adore you. You will free us from captivity and you will enter us into that fullness, Lord, in which you have called us. We get rid of the past and move forward, towards the good things that you have for our life, the good thoughts that you have for us.

We thank you, Father. Thank you for this day. Thank you for new beginnings. Thank you for new paths that you open, Lord, this afternoon in my brothers and sisters. Thank you for the healing we receive from you, Lord. Thank you for your forgiveness, for your goodness and your mercy. We praise your name. We adore you. Thank you Jesus. Amen, amen and amen.