Malcolm Bisset: Breaking Chains
40 years. It makes me feel so old to name a handbag Bay. I decided to do an Ali Rothwell and bring you an illustration for my talk, and it's for the Masons. Only the best will do for you guys. What have we got in here? I've got the Bible. First of all, that's pretty important, right? Just need to see if I can find my notes in it.
Yep.
What else? Specs. Very important. Otherwise, it can't be notes. Right. Oh, look at that big chain. We're going to be talking about breaking chains today. This was the biggest one I could find. My son. Yeah. And uses this to chain up his bike to lampposts so people don't. Nicky, I think probably the chain is more valuable than his bike.
I used to kind of imagine thieves coming along and chopping the bike up so they could take the chain. But there's that. We've lost the lock for it, unfortunately, because it'd be rather fun to get a volunteer. I think we could volunteer Dave Craig, couldn't we get a volunteer and we could chain him to a lamp post outside.
We could come back next week and see if he'd managed to get away. But can't find a lot. All right, What else? Another little chain here. I'm not going to try and break this one because it belongs to my wife. She'd be annoyed. That's just a tiny one. But, you know, if instead of chaining you to the lamp post with I was to get your little fingers and I was to wrap this round and round and round, I think you'd probably be quite stuck.
Sometimes it's the little things that entangle us, isn't it? They don't seem very important at the time. We think God hardly noticed that one. But the next time it comes along and you slip up again and then you slip up again. And that little thing is wrapping itself around you. Yeah. You hardly know to say it until you really listen to God.
And he says, Let go of that. And you realize that you've got a problem. That little thing has got hold of you. It might be something like something that you just see on the Internet and you just see it for a minute. You let your eyes wander and stay there with it where it shouldn't be. And it's just a little thing and it goes.
But you do it again and again. And before you know it, it's got you. And it's something that's really hard to get free of. So we're going to be looking at breaking chains today. I want to say, first of all, as we talk about breaking chains, it would be easy to make this morning so that we all come away feeling terrible and bound.
Yes. Jesus Christ came and said, but there is there is no condemnation. I did not come to condemn the world, but to save the world. Paul says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So when that lady who was caught in adultery was was in front of Jesus and they were going to stone her, Jesus let her go, doesn't he was the only person there who really had the authority to to punish her.
But there's no condemnation in him. There's no punishment. But he does as she's walking away, as he says, go sin no more, doesn't he. Yeah. So this morning, as we're looking at this thing, we we're before a God who loves us and understands us and is incredibly patient with us. And and as we look at these things that entangle us, we don't want to come away with condemnation because whatever we're like, whatever stage we're at in life, he loves us totally and passionately, doesn't he?
Yeah, he's 100% committed to working with you through life, solving the issues with you that you have and helping you break free so we don't come with any condemnation. We know that he's a God who is able to save us and deliver us. And and another thing we have to say right at the outset is that I have been through this, so I'm not just lecturing you from here.
I have had times in my life when I let that little thing tangle me up terribly. And because I was in a bad place and I was tied up, I made some decisions about things that meant that I got even deeper into mire and muck and stuff that sucked me down and there came a point where I made a decision to break free of those things with God's help, and I had to make some big changes in my life.
But I made them and God rescued me out of all that stuff and put me on a firm footing in him. There is salvation in this rescue in Jesus Christ, and it's a great message. And to be honest, to start with, I think it's important that we just focus on freedom in Christ, because that's really what the message is, isn't it?
It's not about breaking saying this, we're free and Jesus, all this stuff does not hold us tight anymore. We can be who God's called us to be in his strength. And that's incredibly exciting. The enemy comes and He likes to remind us about the chains. He comes to you and says, You're weak, you have sinned again. If messed up again, you're never going to make it.
He says. He says you're a bit of a hypocrite, aren't you? I think you should probably not go to church today because you're going to sit there looking like you are pretending to be something which you're not because you messed up again. That's the voice of the enemy. We're not going to hear that this morning, are we? We're going to hear the voice of God that says, I chose you because I loved you like nobody knows.
Yeah. And he's committed to you. 100% to make you a success in this life and in the next. And he's going to walk beside you through it like an incredible supernatural helper to make you be the kind of person that God wants you to be. Yeah. Great. So I'm splitting into three kind of things. We got to look, first of all, at the past, at the power of sin, and how in the past it's totally defeated through what Christ did.
Yeah. Could you turn with me to Ephesians chapter two, verse one, Ephesians two, verse one. Okay, here we go. Paul says, All of us also lived amongst the disobedience at one time. He's talking to us, right? All of us. We used to live amongst the people of disobedience. Once and were like them, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts like the rest.
We were by nature deserving of a wrath of God's anger. And the I've got a wonderful. But then, yeah, we were all dead. It's really important to realize that before you came to Christ, you were totally dead. You were worthless, you were useless. You had nothing in you that pleased God, even if you were quite a good person, you were just the Bible's version of the Bible's description of you is dead.
And then they say, But comes. But because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy, Hallelujah. There isn't a day goes by that I don't thank God for his mercy. Yet God, who is rich in mercy, made us a life with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. Yeah. It's not you that decided to sort of follow him.
He. He came and grabbed you, and you were totally lost. Yeah. I made you alive with Christ when you were dead in transgression sins. Just to make it clear, he says it is by grace, by God's undeserved favor that you have been saved. And there's more. Because God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages it just gets better and better.
This in order to the in the coming ages. He might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us. Isn't that a fantastic passage? I love that you just read it again and again and it just if your spirits linking into it, it can blow your mind that it really can. It's it's amazing. If we were American congregation, I'd be saying, can I have an amen?
Amen. Yeah. Can I have a hallelujah? Yeah. It's amazing, this truth. Yeah. He raised us up a sea to us far above all things. You're facing some chains, perhaps, but he seated you far above all things in him. Hallelujah. Charles Wesley, many years ago put this. Put it like this in his head. In a hymn long, my imprisoned spirit lay forth bound in sin and nature's night Zion I diffused the quickening ray I woke the dungeon, flamed with light My chains fell off My heart was free.
I rose, went forth and followed the fantastic. That's our past. Yeah. We came into a living dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ and everything changes at that moment. He brings us into this fantastic freedom in him. It's that it's just stopping to sing. The hymn could be brilliant. God is so good. It's a blood bought freedom, no condemnation. He goes on now I dread Jesus and all in him is mine.
So we're not bound by sin. We left it behind. It's lost its power over us. Yeah. Without him, sin just grabs its scaly little hands around you and drags you down into the mess. There was no escape except in Jesus Christ. And out of his grace, He chose you and hold you right out of all that stuff and seated you right up with Jesus Christ, like his mate, like his friend in heavenly places with him.
You're the child of a king now. Yeah. Everything has changed. And you have because you've got the Holy Spirit in you and in me. We've got an instinct to do the right thing now. Yes, before they got in those supermarket trolleys. But one of the wheels is skew. Yeah. And no matter how straight you try and drive the thing, it's always sort of pulling to one side without Christ.
We're like that. No matter what we do, we're always pulled into doing the wrong thing. We've got a bad nature. But when he came changed you completely recreate it. You. You become somebody that's got this indwelling spirit that prompts you to do what's right. You know. You know what's right to do in situations once, because this dynamic supernatural power is inside you.
Yeah. Hallelujah. And if only it was so simple at this point in the present that we would find ourselves unable to sin anymore. Wouldn't that be lovely If you could have no more bad thoughts? Nothing. You're just sort of perfect. And the battle was kind of over. But it's not really that simple, is it? Because we've got a battle to face in living out the truth of what God has done and in the past.
We've got a battle in our mind because we're used to the old ways of thinking. And you become a Christian, you can have some your mind doesn't instantly change your thinking, doesn't completely convert. Yeah, you've got some things to unlearn from the past. Yeah. And it takes time. You're flesh. It's talked about before in the verse that we read in Ephesians, before we used to live amongst people who we were the same in that we're just used to gratifying the desires of our flesh.
In the Bible. Flesh means basically anything that's not spirit. We're used to just thinking, What do I want to do? I feel like doing this and we do it. And it was gratifying to our own feelings, our own thoughts, our own desires all the time. We've got to unlearn that and get used to listening to the Spirit's voice.
Okay? And we've got to get rid sometimes of past issues, things people can have, for instance, a terrible childhood that they become Christians and they've still got a load of hang ups about the terrible things that have happened to them. Yeah, we come with a lot of baggage sometimes into the Kingdom of God, but we mustn't think. I mean, it does for some people the moment they go through the water of baptism, perhaps it's instant.
It's a complete instant change in people, but not for everybody. Some people have got some real hang ups that we have to deal with though. So. So that's the battle. We live in a full world around us. There's so much that is not of God in the media and so constantly pressing in on us. It's a constant battle to remember who we are, isn't it?
And to live right for him. And and also we've got an enemy following us around, sticking his foot out all the time to try and get us to trip. So we need to be constantly on the alert to make sure. Yeah, he comes along. You're sort of tripping along nicely to church Sunday morning full of praise and a demonic foot comes out and you go flying.
Somebody said something to you as you came in and and you've got a battle. So it is a battle, but it's a battle that we are going to win in here, man. Yeah, we are. We're not going to let the enemy get away with stuff. We're going to change. We're going to align ourselves up. We're going to be transformed by the renewing of our mind to bring ourselves into the freedom that he bought for us on the cross.
There's a great verse in Galatians. This is Galatians five one, and Paul says it was for freedom that Christ set us free because he had found in Galatia some people who had been set free, but they were letting themselves get tangled up in stuff again. He comes and says it was for freedom that Christ set you free. His plan, his destiny for every one of us, is an amazing life of freedom.
Some versions muddle this up and they've got different words in there by liberty and so on. But in the Greek it just says For freedom Christ to set you free. So don't get tangled up again like a slave. And the word really means somebody that's been set free from the chains of slavery, and they're now living free. And that's God's destiny.
His plan for us, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and don't let yourself be burdened again by a yoke of slavery this morning. God wants you to be free. Let's just think about some things that we can be free from. God wants you to be free from guilt. I'm sure every one of us can look back over some particularly nasty bits of your life that you'd rather forget.
Some things he said, Some things he did. But those things need to be buried in the past. They need to be forgotten. Isn't it amazing that God forgets? He forgets our sin? He doesn't remember it anymore. He leaves it in the past completely. And we need to do the same. We are called to be free from guilt. We are free from the fear of God's wrath, God's anger.
We know that God can't stand sin. So if we were to come as sinful people into His presence, we'd just disintegrate because his bright light on our little bit of darkness would just melt us. We just can't exist in that. And some people live in tremendous fear of of God's judgment, God's sort of condemnation on them. You can still be tied up with that fear.
God wants to set you free from that. Hallelujah. We're free from the power of the enemy. The enemy will come and try and trip us up. But he's got no power over us. It's all trickery. He makes you think you have to sin. You've just got to say that aggressive thing to somebody to get it off your chest.
Yeah, You've just got to. Whatever he's calling, whatever you hear that voice prompting you to do, it's got no power over you. Jesus Christ came to bring you freedom from that. I like that. He's come to give us freedom from futility. I look at non-Christian people and the energy they put into making their lives go round and round in circles, getting nowhere.
So the pointlessness of so much of it, how awesome that you and I are, we're free from that. We've got a purpose and a plan. It's a great testimony, you know, to tell people that people that haven't got any purpose or reason, they think that a beautiful sunset is a pure coincidence of nature. Yeah, but we can say, Lord, you did that.
I look at things in my work when it's all going pear shaped and and I just see the Lord sort of bringing this and making that person talk to me. And I see so many things there that daily make me think, Oh, thank you God, that happens. Yeah. All the futility has gone from our life. We are free in a wonderful way because everything has purpose and meaning, isn't it?
That's wonderful, isn't it? It's awesome. And freedom from selfishness and self-centeredness. Good to be free. And that is freed us to live for other people. And isn't it? It's an absolute joy that, isn't it, to serve other people because the Holy Spirit is prompting us to do that. And we come into a great freedom when we're doing things well and we're blessing other people.
It's what we were called to do. And really the point of this verse, if we look at the context, is to free us from a kind of legalism that says you have to obey these rules in order to please God, you have to follow these steps by the Jehovah's Witnesses. You have to go out and witness or, you know, it's a big black mark against your life.
We've come into freedom, we've come into grace. Yeah, that's an awesome thing. Don't let yourself be tangled up again into thinking that. That you have to take this box and take that box. You have to go to church. We come to church because we come to gather together, because we love him that way. We love to worship the moment.
You think I really ought to go, Well, actually, you should come whether you ought to go or not, because you'll find the Holy Spirit will meet you here. And you. The number of times I have not felt like going to a meeting and it's just the enemy saying you're tired, too tired, you know, But you come and find life.
Hallelujah. We are freed, though, from legalism. We're into a wonderful new thing where we have a relationship with a living God who wants to get involved in our life and walk through our life with us. Yeah. And bring us freedom from things. Hallelujah. How are we doing for time? I'm going to skip a really exciting bit so that if you just look back on a few verses in the previous chapter, Chapter four of Galatians, you'll find a bit where we're described as children of promise, and that just bless my socks off.
Yeah, the socks, you know, still on and we children of promise not just promising children not just that God's got some hope that we might survive and yet yeah we are children of promise and God shows us with so much lined up to bless us with hallelujah. But we can't spend too much time on that. We going to press on just quickly to see the future of walking without sin.
All right. Let's just say, first of all, what does the chain look like in your life? And I think the answer to that is, is this. Do you remember in the wedding Kaner of Galilee and and Jesus, His mother comes to him and said to Jesus and says, for an ounce of wine, Jesus. And he kind of is a bit with say, rude, although he was never abrupt and he just said, Woman, it's it's not my time to do any miracles yet.
Just, you know, it's not my problem. And Mary just wonderfully, totally ignores that doesn't you know, she's just used to dealing with Jesus and she just says whatever he says to you, do it all right. Now, a chain, whether it's a biggie or whether it's a small one, is anything in your life that makes you not do well.
That voice is telling you to do. Yeah, of course. We all get it wrong sometimes, don't we? We miss that opportunity when we hear a voice and we do our own thing instead. But we're really talking about something that just constantly blocks the Holy Spirit from being able to use you in the way He wants to. And I think if we have a look in our own lives, we might find some stuff that we need to deal with.
We sing a lot about breaking chains in our songs, and in fact, back at the beginning of the year, that's what started me thinking about it, because we sang a couple of songs. I think it was the prayer meeting on the first prayer meeting that we had in January about breaking every chain. And so on. And I thought, looking around the room, I wonder what testimonies there are of people who have had chains that broke.
Yeah. And I also thought I had to examine myself. I hope I'm not just singing about breaking chains. La la la. When actually the Holy Spirit is looking at my chains thinking, You ain't broke that yet, mate. We don't lie to the Holy Spirit. We know in a pretend something, sing a pretty song, but it's not real. I have been through times in my life when I've had to stop singing because it mentioned the launch of Christ and he was.
And I couldn't. Yeah, but how terrible to sing about breaking chains if we've still got chains holding us. But hallelujah in him we can be completely free because he does break every chain. All men indeed. All right. There are some chains. It may not apply to you. Some of them are begging obvious ones, and some of them are those little ones that hold your little pinky fingers together, tangle you up, and you mustn't be condemned.
They're just things that you have to deal with. Yeah. So the obvious ones are things like overuse of alcohol or drugs we hardly have to say, or gambling or smoking all those things. They don't keep you out of heaven. And there are some great Christians who are still weak in those areas. But you don't want to get yourself into a situation with some mind altering substance or liquid.
That's going to mean that you're incapable of glorifying and blessing God for that hour or so or whatever, however long it lasts. I've never been drunk, unfortunately, I can't tell you, but a you to want to be there. You don't want to be in a situation where you wake up in the morning and think, What in the world did I do last night?
Because the Holy Spirit remembers, Yeah, you don't want to ever get yourself into a situation. It's hard enough listening to the Holy Spirit and getting it right when you're sober. You don't want to be putting stuff into your head that's going to make it harder to do the right thing to you. Just don't. Just before you can drink a glass.
Fine, fine. But just don't, don't, don't. And it's a little bigger thing, isn't it? Because you drink one glass and you're finding another one, and before you know it, you're in a situation where you can't settle of an evening without several glasses of wine. And it's got you to be careful smoking. Why put a load of gunk into your body?
That's the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps you feel you have to. Geoff's got a wonderful testimony of just instantly getting free from that. And today, if that's holding you, you can be instantly free from that. You just don't want to apart from the money that you're spending on that. But here's some more sort of insidious and quiet little tiny things.
Being shy can be a real chain, can't it? I know this because I am, and the number of times the Holy Spirit said to me, Go and talk to that complete stranger and do it now. And I've said, But I'm shy, so I'll get me to talk to them instead because she's not. But I'm missing out sometimes God gives you a great big gift.
You're like a little kid, and he comes to this great big Here's a gift for mummy. Yeah, go and give it to mummy and the little kid unwrapped it straight away because they want it for themselves. Yeah. Little kids do that. God comes along and he says, Here's something I want you to share with that person and you're a bit shy.
So you do. You just keep the gift to yourself and God's thinking, not again, Get over it. Be broken free. God didn't create you a shy person. He created you quite extraordinary. Overconfident. Yet just just go and be that person. Just break through the chains of shyness because God will use you then. In fact, I think God tends to pick the shy people because he wants to deal with those things.
Yeah. And and he will get up the front. If God gives you something to share, don't miss the opportunity because each time you don't go up there, it's going to be hard for the next time, isn't it? Yeah. Get up there. Break those chains. Guilt. God really wants to break the chain of guilt. If you feel guilty and bad constantly before God, it's probably the Holy Spirit speaking to you, saying Get rid of that in your life.
But if it's stuff that you've done loads a long time ago, don't let it hold you. Now You can think I'm a worthless Christian. This. This isn't work. I can't do it. I'm really messed up. God will never use me because of that chaos that I caused back there. Those people that I hurt, I made some really, really bad mistakes in my life.
That hurt a lot of people. But it's God's problem now. I have repented. Yeah, and it's all in the past. Those chains don't hold me anymore. Hallelujah. That's what he's calling us to freedom from that addictive behavior. Like, I think this happens a lot when when we've gone through tough stuff in our life, when we haven't perhaps been loved enough at some stage in our life, we can end up compensating for that, can't we?
By by just loving ourselves, by eating too much or spending money in a particular way when there's no money to be spent. Perhaps we end up doing some of those things, loving ourselves sexually. Perhaps, you know, you end up loving yourself in this area to compensate for the justifiable sort of terrible things that people have done to you.
But then when God fixes the terrible things and rescues you and brings you into the kingdom and so on, you can still think you've got that sort of built in. You're hard wired then to think, I need to eat something when you don't. Yeah, you you can be free of that kind of addiction. Now God wants you to start again so that so that you're listening to him all the time too.
I really need to spend this. We went round the pet shop yesterday, found a very nice bed, and nearly spent £1,000 buying a new bed and. But we didn't need a new bed. It we did. And so we were able to just walk out, not buy the new bed that many pounds saved. Hallelujah. And watch out for the pleasure.
It is to spend. Sometimes when the Holy Spirit is not in it and you can't quite afford it, don't get yourself tangled up in that kind of thing. Okay? Oh, selfishness can be a real bind on us sometimes, because God's called us into fellowship together. We are not an individual. We are church together, aren't we? We are the community church God puts you.
He's built you in here. You're a brick in the building. You're not a brick lying on the building sites that are outside on your own. We're all part of this. We're all together. We are one. And he wants us not to consider our own life any more, but to live for others and live for him. Yeah. So watch out for that.
Listen to what the Holy Spirit tells you to do. Anger is another thing that can just tangle us up, can't it? Some people, they just don't do anger. But other people, it's very easy. I've got one area of weakness. I don't usually get angry with anything except computers, but computers can bring out to me language that shouldn't be there.
And that's something I've got to deal with because anger is a real bad one. And think Christian things is terrible in a marriage where somebody is prone to having that binding on them. But when somebody says one thing, you instantly retort with something that's a bit angrier and a bit meaner. Yeah, that's a terrible chain to be thrashing around at people with.
So watch out for that. Be angry, but do not sin. Keep it under control. Yeah. Okay. So all these chains can actually feel a bit like freedom in disguise because it kind of gives you a good feeling when you sort of let the chain hold you tight, but you can be free of it. I'm going to give you a very quickly because a time has gone things you need to do number one see is confess.
You must confess before God that you're a sinner. If something's holding you tight, you must confess. You must drop it. Yeah, but it's really good to confess to other people too. Don't wear a big pretend mask that you're okay in an area. It's much better. Just pick somebody intelligently. Somebody who's a close friend. Somebody else is been through it.
Just tell them and you will find that in the sharing of it. There's a breaking of that chain. Yeah. I've got two eyes. You can choose which one you want to keep. Yeah. So we've got a C, we've got Na, the R is a repent. Obviously you must say sorry, but not just say sorry, but repent, which means turn round, go in a different.
I'm not going to let this thing hold me anymore. Yeah. Make that decision. Make it before God and resist the enemy and he will flee from you. That's Scripture. It's real. You can just say you can just resist the enemy. You can say that has no longer got any power over me. I'm a child of the king. Resist him and he will flee.
Use the Lord's name in its power. All right. Oh, is others. You're not going to be able to fight on your own many chains. You're going to need to have somebody standing with you and helping you. All right. So, yeah, choose somebody wisely. But get somebody to stand with you if you mean business with getting rid of things.
All right? S for spirit, there is power in the spirit of God. Praying in tongues and worshiping will really make it a lot easier for you to break a chain. Yeah. Put a Jacqui polisher in her work in Hong Kong with drug addicts. And she got when they became Christians, these drug addicts, she get them to pray in tongues constantly and there was a breaking in it.
So when you feel the urge to do something what you didn't know what to do, begin praying in tongues and begin worshiping. And when you get yourself into that position, you'll find that it's a lot easier to break free. There's another mass, and that's surrender. He's Lord. He is Lord. So that above everything, I just lay my life down and say, Your Lord, you call the shots in my life and I'm not going to do this any more.
Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength for you waiting on the Lord. If you surrender to Him, it will be easier for you. There's a way back to God from the dark paths of sin I used to sing in Sunday school. There's a door that is open and you may go in. At Calvary's cross is where you go in when you come as a sinner to Jesus.
Those letters that I've given you see our process. It's about the cross. It's about dying to yourself and living for him. And I'm just going to close with a couple of Bible readings, which are just wonderful. So Romans 611 says this. ROMANS 611 in the same way. Count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Don't let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Don't offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death and life, and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. There's an idea for a quiet time, isn't there?
Just go through. Offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master because you are not under the law, but under grace. Hallelujah. All right, Finishing. I've missed the bit, which has got five steps. But if you're struggling with something, come and talk to me and I will give you five steps as well for getting free of things.
But let's just finish with this Psalm 107, verse ten and then 13 to 16, Psalm 107. Some sat in darkness, in utter darkness, prisoners suffering in iron chains, verse 13. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death and burst their bones apart.
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for His wondrous works to the children of man, for he shatters the doors of bronze and cuts into the iron bars. Hallelujah! What a great God. We said, Let us line our lives up with everything he wants to do in us. Yes. And not be bound or held back by anything.
