Friday, March 30, 2012

The Fishbowl Means Freedom

Our pastor used one of my favorite illustrations last Sunday. He was talking about how boundaries and laws set us free, and used a goldfish to explain that seeming contradiction. Suppose you have a goldfish in a fishbowl, and one day you decide that you want to liberate the goldfish from its water and glass prison and free it to experience the real world all around it. You scoop it out of the fishbowl and put it on the kitchen table. You may have "freed" the fish in your mind, but you actually just killed it! This is because the goldfish can only survive and thrive when it is within boundaries that allow it to function the way it was designed: pulling water in through its gills to gather oxygen for its body and using its fins to move around in the water. For the goldfish, total freedom from all restrictions means death.

The same is true of us. When we ignore God's restrictions and boundaries for our lives, we engage in destructive behaviors that often lead to physical death and even more often, spiritual death. Only when we operate within the confines of God's rule will we be able to function as He designed us. God's rules for Godly living set us free to be all that He made us to be.

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