Restored at the RootExemplo

DAY THREE: Deliverance is a Process, Not an Event

Imagine eating vanilla ice cream all your life. Then when you become an adult, you are told that instead of eating vanilla ice cream you should eat chocolate. You put down vanilla and pick up chocolate. You develop a taste for chocolate and tell all your friends that you are done with vanilla. This goes on for a few weeks, but one night something interesting happens. You start craving vanilla.

You know you shouldn’t eat it, but you can’t shake the desire. To remedy your craving, you eat swirl. You now have mixed some vanilla with your chocolate.

This is what most Christians experience along the process of deliverance. I call it the swirl stage. That’s when your failures are blending with your successes.

But as you mature in the process, there should be less and less vanilla in your chocolate.

Maybe you are reading this and you’ve been down on yourself because you continue to experience failures in your attempt to be free of your inner struggles. Let me be the first to tell you that you are not in this by yourself. We’ve all tried and come up short. You don’t have to live in condemnation (Rom. 8:1).

The blessing is that we live another day to try again.