Fight for Their HeartsSample

Battling Our Baggage

A relationship with Christ does not automatically remove our harmful baggage. Sometimes God will deliver someone from an addiction or personal struggle at the moment of salvation, but such testimonies are rare.

The emotional and spiritual issues, along with past pain, choices, and wrong ideas we have been taught, shown, or have come to believe about God, travel with us as we cross from spiritual death to spiritual life. But as we begin our journey with Jesus, He will start to address them.

While some people were blessed to be raised in loving homes where the gospel was demonstrated, others were abused in some form and have a very skewed concept of God. We each begin our walks with Jesus from different places. 

But no matter where we start, we are all going to the same destination. Once we enter into a relationship with Christ, we are in the same process—sanctification. This will look somewhat different in each of us, but God will, over time, make very real changes in our minds, wills, and emotions by the presence of His Spirit. Our transformation into the image of Jesus will continue until we enter heaven’s gates, where we are made complete once and for all.

The paradox of Christianity is that we will always deal with sinful behavior, though God now views us as holy. He considers us to be justified and redeemed, even though we still struggle and fail. But the incredibly good news is that God has made us right with Him through the finished work of His Son.

So let’s get personal: Have you lived with the lie, like I once did, that if you can just get your act together and clean up your life, you’ll be good in God’s eyes? Or how about this one: “Once I take care of some of these issues, then I can approach God”?

That makes as much sense as absolutely totaling your car and yet telling yourself you’ll have it drivable again soon if you work on it in your garage on weekends. You remove as many dents as possible by yourself before giving up and taking it to the body shop. That is exactly what so many people decide about their baggage: they attempt to “fix it” before giving it to God. 

After we come to Christ, we can take all our nastiness and just lay it before Him. He already knows what is there, even better than we do, and knows exactly what to do with it.

Another lie I often hear is that someone thinks he is right with God just because he is morally better than someone else. That is a very dangerous false gospel. The thought that we can somehow become disciplined people who get good at checking all the boxes and being morally superior compared to others is biblically wrong. 

Unfortunately, in the church we have placed a premium on the appearance of morality and have not emphasized the posture of the heart. Plenty of men truly love Jesus, but when pressure is applied to their lives, they reach for some form of escape.

One of my friends has cigar burns on his back from when his alcoholic father would “discipline” him. A friend exposed him to drugs when he was around twelve, and he realized that his fear and anxiety went away when he got high. And now as an adult, that is his greatest battle when things get tough. He wants so badly to reach for chemical relief.

I know other men who would never touch alcohol or drugs, but they are in crushing debt because they desperately need to buy “nice things” so people will perceive them as successful. 

All of these responses to life are evidence of baggage. God is always working to free His children from those chains of bondage. We are right with God because of Jesus, not because we have everything together. And not because we look like we have everything together.

Taking in all we have talked about, we can confidently say that if our kids belong to Christ then we can know where their true identities lie. We can know because of the Holy Spirit’s presence in them as His “temple” that there will be a desire to be obedient to God. In fact, God’s Spirit in them is always 100 percent obedient to God. But their flesh is always 100 percent rebellious toward God.

If your children belong to God through a relationship with Christ, they can choose to walk in the Spirit or walk in the flesh. You and I can do the same. But no matter what, the presence of God’s Spirit in us makes us perfect, even as we struggle in our flesh with sin.

Parents are the primary disciple makers in their children’s lives. As fathers, we want to make sure we are teaching them to acknowledge their own flesh patterns and surrender them to God.

“So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves” (Gal. 5:16).