Sunday Go To Meeting Bun!

Sunday Bun
by
L. A. Marzulli
John 8: 36 If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.

A new year is approaching and I want to take some time and talk about the stuff we carry around.  My first mentor, Wayne Kendall who passed away last year, used to tell me, human beings are garbage dumps!  Wayne was right, as we have a proclivity to collect “negative” events which happen to us, in our memory banks and hold on to them, sometimes for years, which then turn into decades.

I’ll give you an example.  I’ve once knew a woman, who was very old when I was a teenager.  She was a friend of my parents and she had lost her husband in WWII.  Her name was Doris and I used to cut her lawn and do odd chores for her when I was a kid.  One day when I was in my twenties, my mother said she wanted to tell me something.  She told me through her tears that Doris had told her a secret a few days earlier.  At this point Doris was in her 90′s, and living in a rest home and was close to death.  I sat and waited for her to spill the beans wondering what this kindly old woman could possible be hiding all these years..  My mother told me that Doris had told her she had been molested by an uncle numerous times when she was a young girl and had never told anyone until she told my mother.

In other words, Doris had carried this garbage around with her most of her life and it must have weighed on her and finally when she was at her life’s end she told my mother.  Can we imagine the burden of living with that all of those years?

What are we holding on to today?  What secret sins are there that we hold on to tightly and never confess, pretending to ourselves that God doesn’t see them?  What hurts do we let fester in us and never forgive those who have hurt us?

The good news though, is this!

There is a scripture found in John 8: 36 If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.  When we go to Him and tell Him what is going on in our lives, when we’re honest with Him and are not trying to hide, He has the power to free us from the bocage that we are in.   He can set us free from every hurt, pain, bad word said against us, abuse, wrongs and everything else we can think of.  He has the power to do this and it happens supernaturally, as we can not do this by ourselves.

The point I’m try ing to make is this.  What holds us back and keeps us from being the men and women we want to be?  Is there bitterness in our life?  Do we harbor resentment toward someone?  Do we lust after the possessions our neighbor has?  Do we hate the people we work for?  Do we despise a sibling…. The list is endless but the cure for all of this is the same. JESUS!

I will be speaking New Years Eve, at Calvary Chapel, Oceanside,CA and one thing I want to do is have the folks write down on a piece of paper the “thing,” that is holding them back.  Then take the paper and come up to the front and lay it by the cross or communion table and let it go.  Let’s take this garbage—for that is what it is— to the one who is able to set us free and ask Him to do what we can not do.

Why go in to the New Year with the same old garbage?