Christian Women’s Fellowship
The call to be delivered from bondage to sin
The Gospels of Matthew and Mark each record Christ’s grief over Jerusalem; how He desired to gather her to Himself, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But she would not be gathered. Rather, she rejected the call of God, stoned the prophets and killed the messengers whom God sent to her. She would not receive the word of the messenger, choosing her own self-righteousness over the righteousness which is from God, by faith.
Christ wept over Jerusalem, saying that, because of her unwillingness to be gathered, her house was left to her ‘desolate’. The apostle Paul taught that natural Jerusalem has now become the symbol of all those who live by their own law, or self-righteousness, and described their way of life as a covenant which gives birth to ‘bondage’.
Those who live in bondage under the law live according to the mechanism of their own flesh. The apostle Paul called this ‘the evil present within us’. While we desire to do ‘good’ and to delight in the Law of God, there is another law in our members which wars against the law of our mind, and brings us into bondage to the law of sin which is in our bodies. Rom 7:23. When we are in this wretched state of bondage, we have no capacity to keep the Law of God. This is because we are in bondage under our own law. In this state, we are carnally minded and, further to this, our carnal mind is enmity against God. Rom 8:7-8.
In this season, the Lord is brooding over us, calling us to join Him in a fellowship of His offering and sufferings, so that we may be set free from the bondage that continually brings us into enmity with God and with one another. He wants to set us free. Jesus wept over those who would not be gathered, because He did not want their house to become ‘desolate’. Testifying of Himself, He said that He did not come to destroy people’s lives, but to save them. Luk 9:56. Jesus Christ came to bring life and peace to all those who would believe and receive Him.