Pound Puppies

Have you ever adopted a pet from an animal shelter? My brother, Joe, has a Rottweiler named Boxcar that he rescued from the shelter. (He was quite literally on the cusp of being euthanized.) After spending time in a cage at the shelter, Boxcar loved the wide open spaces. He got to Joe's house and never looked back!  In fact, while he readily got into the car for the ride home from the shelter, it was a very long time before Joe could convince him to get into a vehicle again. It was like he said, "Hey, I've found my way home and I'm not ever going away again... especially if it means going back to where I've come from!" Do you think that Boxcar still focuses on where he came from, or that he lives each day happy for where he is? He may have thought about and worried about where he had been for a long time, afraid he'd have to go back there. Eventually, he surely decided to just enjoy where he had arrived. He had come home!

What about you? Do you look back on life and think: "Man, I was really living in the pound!" Perhaps that's not true in the sense of a physical place, but maybe it is true of the place you found yourself spiritually and emotionally. Your life wasn't exactly what you'd hope it would turn out to be. You found yourself "caged in" ...held captive to your sin. Then, one day, you were set free. Jesus came and rescued you from the pound. He brought you out into a spacious place. So my question to you is this: Are you focusing on the place you have been rescued from? Or are you enjoying the place you have you have been brought home to? Are you looking back at the ones who held you captive, or are you looking forward towards the one who set you free? As Beth Moore has said: "Without Jesus in our lives, we identify with what we have been delivered from rather than who we have been deliver to." Are you living a life of freedom, or fear?

 ¹⁶ He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
   he drew me out of deep waters.
¹⁷ He rescued me from my powerful enemy,
   from my foes, who were too strong for me.
¹⁸ They confronted me in the day of my disaster,
   but the LORD was my support.
¹⁹ He brought me out into a spacious place;
   he rescued me because he delighted in me.

                                                                   ~Psalm 19