The Freedom Journey [New Book]
Like an expectant father in days of old, pacing the floor of the maternity waiting room, I’m excitedly anticipating the birth of my latest book, The Freedom Journey: Discovering Grace through the Wilderness.
The format is such that most chapters can be read in the time it would take you to drink a hot cuppa!
The back-page blurb sums it up:
“You’re free!” Releasing words, indeed. Through The Freedom Journey, you’ll be taken on a venture from whatever enslaves you, into a life of freedom and opportunity, all via the wilderness.
In this place of restoration, not desolation, you’ll identify the renewed mindsets the Holy Spirit will grow in you.
Restored, and propelled forward, you’ll discover that freedom is not so much a place, as a way of being and relating, living in the absolute security that you’re incredibly loved. Loved and loving, you get to soar and lead others into freedom as well.
I loved the short chapters, full of anecdotes and illustrations, depth and wisdom. I read the whole book in a couple of sittings, but my husband and I are now going to read a section every day. It’s perfect for either.”
The Freedom Journey is available for order now via my website. Click here, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “Contact Peter”.
Please feel free to forward this to others who may be interested, especially those in your faith communities. You will be blessed reading it on your own, but The Freedom Journey is perfect to read as a couple or for a small group or congregation to read at the same time.
Below you’ll find some one-liners from selected chapters of the book.
In freedom, and on a journey with you,
Peter
A Few Snippets from The Freedom Journey
What God desires for his people is freedom. For the Israelites back then, and for you today, freedom is the goal—freedom from everything backward-looking, depleting, and condemning. If it’s not from God, he wants you free from it. For your sake, as well as others.
God lovingly and gently, deliberately and purposefully, with restorative resolve on his heart, leads you into the wilderness.
Your Father God loves you so much. He longs to deliver you out of whatever ‘Egyptian’ mindset or system has you enslaved and shackled.
Egypt may be strong, but God is stronger. You may feel trapped, but God is in the liberation business.
The freedom journey—via the wilderness—is all about making a stand. It’s declaring, “I’m not going to live the best possible life in Egypt … but remain a slave.
The wilderness, at its richest and most basic, is a journey into the heavenly Father’s heart. It is a transition from aloofness to intimacy, fear to love, anxiety to peace, insecurity to identity, religion to relationship, abandonment to belonging, and all this entails.
Elijah was left with post-adrenal fatigue. God’s remedy? Wilderness time Elijah. There he slept, ate, slept some more, exercised, and had a deep interaction with the God of restoration.
Your wilderness is a time of relearning, reimagining, rethinking, and reprioritising.
You don’t become his son or daughter in the wilderness. You’ve always been that. It’s not a place where you receive your identity. Instead, it’s a place where that identity is revealed afresh, restored, and you are revitalised as the Beloved he’s unfailingly seen you as.
Your growth doesn’t happen because you flee everything assailing you. It comes through an awareness and appreciation of Father’s presence in the middle of events that are both out of your control and beyond your understanding.
Removed from your agendas—the hustle and bustle, noise, pressure, expectations—you learn to hear him for who he is.
Perhaps going through the cross is the primary purpose of the wilderness journey. At the cross, Jesus delivers you from slavery. Through the cross, he ushers you into that land of freedom and opportunity.
You grow by going deeper into the love that’s already yours. You mature by living in the land of freedom and opportunity, where the Holy Spirit endows you with a trust to live from rather than task-list to fulfil.
Fundamentally though, you can’t right the downward spiral from within the same tailspin that caused it. It requires an outside look, through a different lens, from the perspective of promises released rather than problems faced.
A mindset shift is where you engage a new way of thinking, coming from your heart, that affects your whole being.
The freedom journey from the heart is a childlike one. Ideally, that means it is trusting, playful, adventurous, and responsive.
The key to freedom from sin is not more performing or doing. It’s not more rigidly resisting, far from it. It’s discovering how to grow in a relationship with Father that is more pleasurable and emotionally satisfying than sin.
We’re not a superstitious people, but a supernatural people.
Have you noticed that Jesus rarely calls people out, but he always calls them up? He doesn’t call them out on their behaviour, but he calls them up to become the new person he already sees them as.
The Freedom Journey is available for order now. Click here, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “Contact Peter”.