PROXIMITY- Be Resolute- THURSDAY
Be Resolute
by
Rocky Fleming
Thursday -
ACTION:
Resolve to change your
habits
I have been greatly blessed by the Influencers in our prison ministry. Many times I have been comforted and encouraged by get well letters and notes that uplift me from these men incarcerated because of crimes they have committed. I love these men and their hearts for Jesus that I hear is growing in them. They are my brothers. They made mistakes and they are doing their time because of it. Hopefully when they get out, they will enter a new life, and life will be better for them. However, to grasp this new life they must not return to their old habits or they will return to their prison cells. We have seen a tremendous improvement in the recidivism rate of those men who enter prison, find Christ and learn to walk with Him. Unfortunately for all the others, about 70% of released prisoners return to prison after being released. The greatest reason? It is because they go back to their old friends, their old ways, and their old habits.
If you want to leave your old life behind and find the new life Jesus wants to give you, it will require that you release the grasp of your old destructive habits. Too many times I have seen those men less committed to change in their life, try to bring those old ways into their new life. They find out quickly that the old ways suck them back into its grasp and they do not change. Influencers emphasizes that personal abandonment of our life to Christ is required to become the man He wants to make of us. This can be seen as a release of those old ways that keep you from finding the new life He wants to give you. So let it go and grasp the good life He wants to give you by giving up your destructive habits.
"But that is not the way you learned Christ!- assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." (Ephesians 4: 20-24 ESV)