By Erin Chuah, NUS
I grew up living a life that was chained by my fears. I was afraid of not being good enough, of making mistakes; afraid of being unloved, rejected & abandoned. Thus, in whatever I did these fears would always be at the back of my mind and I honestly don’t think that I knew what freedom was.
However, this changed when I encountered the Lord when attending the OYP school of witness in 2019. I came to know Jesus as my savior, my healer, my lover & my king. It was the first time that I felt freedom from the chains that bound me but also free to accept the love and joy that Jesus wanted to give me. In loving Jesus, I experienced my heart undergoing a great change which translated into quite a different way of living my life – from the way I talked to others to the way I acted around them. I used to be someone who would do whatever it took to fit in. I would swear, gossip, even though I was not comfortable with it so that I could be accepted by those around me.
As the love of God freed me from fear of rejection, I was able to let go of my need for acceptance from others and began to live more authentically as who I was made to be.
After the School of witness, I had completely cut out swearing and gossiping. When sharing about life, I would share about Jesus and the work that I was doing for Him at the time. I remember my friends were quite shocked by the change in me, they would often make comments like “wow you’re so holy now” or “how can you be so holy when you used to do xxx in the past?” I struggled to be myself around these friends as my past was being shoved into my face which led me to question whether I was allowed to live a new life knowing who I had been before. As I committed to community, prayer and growing in trust of Jesus, He always assured me that I was not too broken for him, that He sees my past but He does not condemn me for it.
He has made me new and given me the freedom to live my life for Him without the fear of what others may think of me. In living a life for Jesus, not all my friends have been able to understand or accept the role that Jesus has in my life now. Many have expressed to me that they don’t like seeing my reflections on Instagram or don’t appreciate how I’ve changed and how they wish they had the “old me” back. The temptation to be accepted and go back to the way things were before, especially by those who you care about, was very real. While painful, I was able to let go of how much I used to care about what they thought of me, knowing that the freedom that the Lord gives me is real and worth fighting for. I am free to be who He made me to be – someone who loves Him, and is not afraid to show it.
Claiming my freedom in Jesus is not a one & done thing. In this past year, my wounds and the wounds I have caused from the past began to resurface and all I wanted to do was separate myself from them as much as I could. It became harder to claim the truth that I was a new creation. I felt, again, chained by fears and feeling as if the Lord had forgotten about me and my healing. While I knew in my head that the Lord was with me, my heart felt a great sense of abandonment from Him.
Through the School of Christian Leadership earlier this year, the Lord told me that to restore me to wholeness, He would need all of me, not just my present, but also the past that I had been so desperate to run away from. I was invited to face my broken past with Him, knowing that the past could not hurt because there is no place nor time where He was ever absent from my life. He invited me to see how my past marked the road that has ultimately led me to Him. This truth set me free to come out of hiding from myself and step into His healing light.
The Lord continues to fill my heart in the way that He promises He would, with His truth, love & freedom. Today I want to proclaim once again that I am not the sum of my past & my mistakes but the sum of the love of my Heavenly Father who says that I am good, that I am free to live a life without carrying my guilt & shame because Jesus has freed me from all of it. I claim that I am a new creation and I am free to live a life that reflects this. Freedom is a gift that the Lord freely offers us, brothers & sisters. Dare to open your hands and heart to accept it!