Locked

[19] On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
(John 20:19, ESV)

I have a ‘smart’ watch that sends data to my ‘smart’ phone. Recently, I felt like I needed to get a smart watch to help monitor my heart and sleep cycles. I’m not in poor health, but the doctor said it would be helpful to collect some of this data to feedback to him.

For weeks everything has been going very well. When I go for my daily walks, it records how I’m doing physically. When I sleep at night, it records how I’m doing physically.

But something unusual happened either last night or this morning. When I woke up, I looked at my phone to see how well I had slept the previous night. I was very disappointed because my smart phone did not seem to be very smart, or my smart watch was not as smart as I thought it was.

I asked the Lord to help me understand if I had done something wrong. After I recharged my smart watch, I realized that I had to enter the code to unlock the watch. After I unlocked the watch, I went back and looked at the data in my smart phone. Within about a minute, all of the data that I thought I had lost while I was sleeping was sent to my smart phone.

The Lord was saying to me this morning, “I have something that you can learn from this experience.“

There are many things that can put us in a position of feeling like we are in bondage, that is, locked up. One of the greatest enemies of our soul is ‘fear’. I’m talking about the kind of fear that removes you from believing the truth and puts you in a position where you start to think you are smart.

The reason why I made a special emphasis on the word ‘smart’ when I was talking about my phone and my watch, was because we often put too much emphasis and trust in things that men have made. In this case, there was absolutely nothing wrong with my watch and nothing wrong with my phone. I had overlooked something that was critical to their proper functioning. I thought I was smart.

The thing that I overlooked was the fact that the watch was programmed to be locked by default. That is a security measure that the people who created it decided was important to the customers. There is a direct correlation between the things that we do in the flesh and the things that happen in the spirit realm, the default for our flesh is to be locked in sin.

Some people may disagree with me on this theological position. I believe that we still live in our sinful bodies. Our bodies have a default to want to sin. However, we have been regenerated when we accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior. Our default now is NOT to live by our flesh, but to live by our spirit (which is submitted to God’s Holy Spirit). However, if we do not crucify our flesh every day, we start to allow it to control our lives again. This is NOT who we are. It is just something that we allow that we don’t need to allow.

The enemy (the world, the flesh, and the devil) are continuously trying to tell us that we are very smart. When we buy into this lie, we are allowing ourselves to fall back into the status of being locked. I say, status, because we are not truly locked. We have been freed by the blood of the Lamb (Jesus Christ). But if we do not attend to this carefully by renewing our minds daily, we are in great danger of staying too long in our no longer natural locked mode.

The good news is that even when we are in this unnatural state of being locked in, Jesus comes to visit us to give us His peace. I ran into a situation yesterday where I felt like I was starting to feel locked in. I asked Jesus to give me His peace. I asked some of my prayer partners to pray with me for that peace. When the peace arrived, I knew exactly what the Lord wanted me to do now, even though I wasn’t sure how everything was going to play out over the next couple months.