Hi, and welcome to the Five Word Prayers Daily, a five day a week, daily devotional where we share the word, prayers, in our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

Happy Monday, or whenever you're listening to this show, I want to talk to you today about something I posted not long ago that got a lot of attention, and I actually

had requests to dive into it a bit here. I love this venue for that reason, so we can do that.

But basically, it was a quote I put up by my pastor for one of his sermons that said this,

A lifelong battle is not the same as a lifelong bondage. Think about that for a minute,

and I'll talk for a few minutes

about exactly what I think that means.

When my pastor said these words not long ago, a lifelong battle is not the same as a lifelong

bondage, it really struck a chord with me because I'm not sure I'd ever made

a distinction between something that held me and something I struggled with throughout my life.

But that's where I believe the distinction there lies. And let me just give this quick disclaimer.

The quote is my pastors, but everything I talk about on the show today is my opinion and assessment

of that quote, not his because he didn't really talk through this quote any further on this

particular day. But to me, bondage suggests something owns you, right? A battle suggests an ongoing

struggle. You or I may battle with something our whole life, but that doesn't mean we are

in bondage to it. And I do believe there's a difference and that it's possible to battle something

but not be in bondage to it. So take, for instance, food. Food is honestly something that I

battle with, and I have since the time I was young. Sometimes

my relationship with food has been healthy, which, by the way, does not mean I have been

thin or on a diet because some of the diet times in my life have been the most unhealthy

in my relationship with food because they have involved nourishment deprivation or skewed thinking in some way.

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