Tuesday, April 07, 2015

Freedom for Captives

Celebrate Recovery a Way to Freedom for Captives

CAMA Services Center in Darhan, Mongolia offers Celebrate Recovery services.  Our center and services have a long history of visiting area prisons.

This month already our teams have visited two of the closes to Darhan.  A teaching on the 12 steps of recovery helps prisoners to face the choices and hurts in their life ended them up in jail.  Accepting their own wrongs can open them up to the idea of forgiveness and healing.  This is the same for all of us, whether we’ve been in prison or not.  Jesus said "everyone who sins is a slave to sin." (John 8:34)  Jesus came to set the captives free.  (Luke 4:18)

Many people in prisons are still too hardened to believe in Jesus immediately.  But we share our stories of finding healing and salvation from life’s problems.  Today we taught from the 12 steps which helps entitled "healthy mind".  After then lesson, in a small group surrounded by incarcerated men with shaven heads, we sat on the floor and opened up for sharing.  This is a place where even believers can benefit from sharing their own failures as scripture commands: “Confess your sins to one another, that you may be healed”.  If we’re asking non-believers to open up in this way, should we believers being doing so too?  

If not, be careful that sin doesn’t creep up to take you captive again.  Some prisons are spiritual and though they may not have bars and guards, they are just as real.  Scripture in teaches that those resistant to the gospel should be "gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.(2 Tim 2:26)

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