It’s amazing what lodges in the deep fabric of your life as you live out what is called the, “the senior years.”  When I listen to some of my oldies music, I can tell exactly where I was and what I was doing when each song became popular.  I also remember so clearly throwing to third base for an error instead of first in a little league game, which would have been the third out of the inning.  I remember being passionately in love with Benona Brown in junior high school in Little Rock, but paralyzed to do anything but gawk.  And yes, her name was Benona.

One of my horrifying moments as a nine year old was during a Sunday school skit when all I had to say was, “My name is Butch, I’m really a louse; I scatter my clothes and books all over the house.”  I ended up saying something like, “My name is clothes all over the house.” It was an ultra moment of embarrassment for me, which is why it’s still lodged in my memory.   Even so, I can enjoy the good memories today, and laugh at many of the awkward, embarrassing, wanting to hide-in-a closet memories of the past.  My Sunday school memory is simply a good story today.

But some memories impacting our lives today rob us of a joyful, productive, victorious salvation.  I’ve indicated more than once how shame governed much, if not most of my adult life.  Hating my alcoholic mom, hating my parents getting a divorce when I was seven, hating being tossed back and forth between families in which to live, hating each time I had to start over in a new school, hating being poor throughout my high school years, allowed shame to easily embed itself within me.

When Jesus was so powerfully revealed to me in 1967 much of that shame was leveled.  I literally felt I was a new person and my life took on a whole new realm of freedom I had never experienced since my earliest memories.  I instantly had a love for my mom instead of having loathed her.  Months later after that momentous encounter, I received more inner healing by a gifted woman at a Christian camp in Georgia.  Shame has been reckoned with, though each day brings new tests and challenges.  Singing, “Oh Victory in Jesus,” is not just a nice little chorus---it’s the reality of breakthrough for any believer!

Today, there is help available for anyone who is willing to open up his life for the Holy Spirit’s precision work.  God’s Spirit will respond to a desperate heart’s cry, and often uses someone within the Body of Christ to minister a deliverance of freedom.  The key is a desire to be free no matter what!  Men are particularly stubborn when it comes to opening their lives to the Spirit’s work.  This is foolish and reveals how pride is the wall of separation from either genuine healing or continued self-inflicted misery.  One of the core values at WellSpring is freedom for each follower of Jesus.  Put another way, “Bondage Sucks!” 

Paul gives us a big clue when he says, “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.”  Grasping the reality of this goes a long way in our becoming the freest people on the face of the earth.