Freedom – the Blood of Jesus.
WE HAVE come to the end of our Freedom series. The series is about walking free from those things that hold us back from achieving God’s desire for our lives. There are agents of darkness, namely, the devil and his demons working against your future. When we identify the enemy, then we can take up the weapons of our warfare and destroy their impact on our lives.
God has given us authority to do this. He says, “I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.” Luke 10:19 (NIV) We need to take God at His word and stand in our authority.
The word of God is one of the most powerful weapons we have at our disposal. To win the war, we must memorise scriptures and use the word of God as a spiritual weapon. Scripture is far more powerful than we can fully understand. As we fight to fulfil God’s plan for our lives, we must put into practice the Bible verses we memorise and make them into weapons.
Today, we will talk about another weapon of our warfare – the blood of Jesus. We need to plead the blood of Jesus against the works of darkness to experience the victory Jesus died to secure for us. Pleading the blood simply means applying the Blood of Jesus to our life and circumstances just like the Israelites applied it to their doorposts and were protected from the destroyer in Exodus 12.
How do we apply the blood of Jesus?
THE PASSOVER
Most of us are familiar with the story of Israel’s deliverance from the last plague of Egypt, in which the firstborn of every
family was doomed to die. The Israelites were instructed by God to sacrifice a spotless lamb and to apply the blood on their doorposts so that the plague of His judgement would ‘pass over’
their houses. “The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt. “This is a day you are to commemorate;
for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord – a lasting ordinance.” Exodus 12:13-14 (NIV).
For the blood of Jesus Christ is the means to address human sin, need, failure, and bondage. In
Leviticus 17:11 (NIV) it says, “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for
one’s life.” As a sacrifice, Jesus’ blood contained the life of God in it. The blood of Jesus is more powerful than anything in Heaven or on Earth or under the Earth.
Many of us were raised in an environment where we heard words like, “Father God, we come under the Blood of Jesus” or “Lord, we cover this matter with the Blood of Jesus.” Even before we understood it, we believed in the power of the Blood, because we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross broke the power of sin, death and hell over our lives.
Pleading the Blood is a right we have when we have a relationship with Jesus. This declaration releases, delivers, and neutralises enterprises of hell and the weaknesses of the flesh.
We use our testimony or our confession of the power of the blood to apply it to our lives. Revelation 12:11 (NIV): “... They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”
Pleading the Blood of Jesus is a legal term. The devil is your accuser and a destroyer, bringing charges and attacks against you. Knowing and speaking about the power of the blood into the situation activates the power of the cross into the situation we face. Jesus, as our intercessor in Heaven, stands on our behalf before God who judges all things and He reminds the Judge that He died and shed His blood for us. It is through relying on the shed Blood of the Lamb of God, that we will win our case before God.
Join me next week for Part 2 of ‘Freedom – the Blood of Jesus’.