Come, Thou Rod of Jesse ...

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan's tyranny
From depths of Hell Thy people save
And give them victory o'er the grave
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel

We are right in the heat of the advent season now and as I wait for the Lord's coming I frequently find myself boggled by how utterly lost and in bondage we are to sin. This precious carol describes it so well as it describes our condition under "Satan's tyranny" and mournfully sings about our need to be saved from the very "depths of Hell".

Have you ever felt as if you were bound in an existence full of errors? Struggling under a load of sins piled so high that there is no way that you could climb out from underneath the crushing weight? Have you reached the point that these deadly patterns are so ingrained that you begin to wonder if there is anything left of you outside of what should be discarded.

Welcome to the life of the struggling drug addict. Satan has used substance addiction as an especially powerful way to deaden people's minds to the gospel and bind them with despair and hopelessness. If you know someone who is addicted to a substance, you know that addiction can take a person's "normal" bent for sinful self gratification and magnify it a thousand times. Every dollar of their income quickly becomes absorbed in to perpetuating their habit. Every relationship in their lives becomes a means to an end. Desperately lost, addicts will alienate most of the people who would normally care for them and will instead surround themselves by dealers who benefit from their progress down the path of death.

Drug addiction and substance abuse seems to have an especially tight hold over a higher than normal percentage of people in the Altoona area. Medium sized cities like Altoona tend to attract drug dealers because of their modestly large populations and relatively small police forces. Reliable sources say that approximately 365,000,000 dollars worth of heroin was sold in Blair County alone in 2005.

So, here's the point, addiction is powerful, we should know we all are addicted to sin as fallen beings. BUT addiction is NOT more powerful than the Spirit of the Living God! Consider the following biblical passage ...

"For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." Romans 6:5-11

The only one who can save us from Satan's tyranny is Christ himself. Let's appeal to the "Rod of Jesse" that he might free those who are slaves under the powerful bondage of substance abuse.

Today:

• Pray that Jesus would give men & women the power to reject their sinful addictions and turn to Christ.
• Pray for people who are not addicted that they might be filled with compassion for those who are slaves to this sin.
• Pray that we are all able to see our wrong and our sin as clearly as a drug addict sees his.