Chains: the first image that pops into my head when I hear that word are prisoners. Dictionary.com defines "chained" as confined or restrained. I don't know anybody that likes the feeling of being confined or restrained, whether by your parents, boss, friends, circumstances, or anything else. Yet, we allow ourselves to be chained down daily. We allow ourselves to be imprisoned by sin in our lives. We all have history with sin in our lives, as no man or woman has ever lived a life without sin except for Jesus. I believe most all people have things in their past of which they are ashamed, and some things they may feel only God himself can forgive. Paul writes in Romans 8 about the sin in his life and the feelings he has towards it:
"For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate. For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this dying body?" (Romans 7:15, 18–19, 24 HCSB)
Now had Paul ended the letter there, it would be a depressing future for all of us. Thankfully there is more to this verse, giving us hope within the dreadful life of sin. Paul goes on to say "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" Wow! Paul's excitement is overflowing in this statement, as it should be! There is only one person who can save us from the death that sin brings!
To conclude this article, I'd like to share a story I read from Glen Woods about an elephant who is chained up. There is an elephant in a room that is chained at a young age. Since it was young and small, the elephant could not break free from the chain holding it. It learned that it was pointless to attempt to break free. The elephant came into tacit agreement with the chain’s power to bind it, but the elephant grew. The elephant grew to a size far more powerful than the chain’s ability to restrain its movement. Yet, the chain still restrained it. By that time in the elephant's life, it learned that the chain was far too powerful to break, so it remained bound. It could have walked away at any time, albeit with a significant struggle to release itself from its captor, but instead it remained in docile agreement with the chain’s power over it.
We're all like this elephant in some point in our lives. I don't know what your specific chain may be, and I don't have to know, but I do know we all have/had at least one. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord that we have the ability to break free from these chains of sin. Just like the elephant, we have the ability to escape the chains, it is our choice as to whether or not we trust in Jesus Christ. He died for our sins so we could be set free. The power to break free from the chains of sin, the power that God has already provided, is already available to us, right now.
