Excerpt from new Liberty Savard Mini Book 
"Keys to Understanding FREEDOM" 
(released January 2001, Bridge-Logos Publishing Co.)

In J. B. Phillips' introduction to Dr. Alfred Marshall's Interlinear New Testament, Phillips states he was quite pleased that Dr. Marshall had not missed the peculiar Greek construction of Matthew 16:19, where Jesus had said that He was giving the keys of the kingdom, binding and loosing, to His believers. Phillips said this verse was "not a celestial endorsement that God would bind and loose in heaven whatever we bound and loosed on earth." Rather, he concluded, these keys of the kingdom were our means of coming into agreement with already established heavenly purposes. 

As God's children, we can pray and bind our wills to the will of God, bind our minds to the mind of Christ, and bind ourselves to the fullness of the truth of His Word. One of the original Greek meanings of the word bind is to put oneself under obligation to someone (or some thing). This prayer will snug you up close and personal to God for perhaps the first clear look you have ever had regarding His will for your life. But, a one time prayer does not keep you there. As long as your soul is still unsurrendered to God in any area, it will continue to try to distract you from pursuing God's will. 

There is always a fight going on within you over the choices your self-will wants to make. When the binding and loosing keys bring God's power into the fight your soul is waging for control of your life, the process of its surrender has begun! 

The Kingdom key of loosing is a powerful prayer key for cutting the ties to the clutter your unsurrendered soul still clings to. This prayer key can rid you of present clutter and prevent reattachments of former clutter (old bondages, bad attitudes, etc.). It will clear out the old junk your mind loves to feed on and the grave clothes your soul tries to drape you with. 

Loosing prayers also wreak havoc with and cause spiritual terrorism on evil spirits, and loosing prayers destroy stronghold doors that the enemy accesses to harass you. That little nugget is worth the reading of this whole book! Think about this natural example. If you had intruders constantly coming into your house, what would you want most?

1. To be able to bind the intruders up and leave them laying around, bound, on the ground?
       
2. To be able to tear up and demolish (loose) whatever was holding the doors of your house open (strongholds in your soul) and permanently stop the intruders' means of entry?

This is sort of a "well, duh" question, isn't it? Yet just binding evil spirits is exactly what many in the Church have been trying to teach us to do for years. It may have served some purpose, but who in the Church today can say that it has had a permanent effect on keeping Satan out of our lives? 

Binding evil spirits is never effective if you don't deal with the doors of access in the soul. Besides, there are more evil spirits available to harass you than you have time to bind anyway. Trying to use that means of defense is like mopping up around an overflowing toilet without ever turning off the inflowing water! I'll deal with closing the open doors later.

Our minds have carefully filed our wrong mind-sets, unforgiveness, desires for revenge, and other ugly attitudes associated with our inability to understand why hard things happened to us. These memories, together with neglect and lack in our early lives, become the sources of the pain still throbbing in our souls today. 

The memories of these past issues are still so real to some of us that we often lose all perspective of the fact that they actually occurred years earlier.

The physical fact of an actual abuse may be long over, but the memories are securely locked in the vault of The First Federal Memory Bank of My Pain. There the unsurrendered soul carefully tends to them, creatively refining and retooling them to its advantage, while keeping them on artificial life support. If only we could grasp the fact that these memories are the only remaining power our former traumas have over us. Until we do, our unsurrendered souls will continue to cause us to live as if our worst times are still burning and scorching areas of our lives today!

The unsurrendered soul's control is based upon its power to both protect (through strongholds) and retrieve (through flashbacks) all of the fear, pain, and humiliation from our past experiences. With interactive graphics, living color, Dolby sound, and scratch-and-sniff patches included! Christians trapped in this mode of soulish bondage live uneasily under the threat of traumatic memories flashing to the surface of their minds at any moment.

The defense system our souls build and use are constructed of strongholds which are the:

1. arguments,
2. reasonings,
3. rationalizations,
4. justifications, and
5. denial 

that we use to explain and defend:

1. why we are still the way we are, 
2. why we can't love others, 
3. why we can't forgive others' mistakes, 
4. why we want to get even, and 
5. why we live so far beneath our heritage as children of God. 

The strongholds protect these lies through reasonings and rationalizations that:

1. we have been hurt too much to change,
2. we have been hurt too much to love,
3. we have been hurt too much to forgive,
4. we deserve to see others suffer for what they did to us, and
5. we are doing the best we can with the burden we have to bear. 

Then the biggest lie of all surfaces:

This may sound cruel to some, but living under these lies is much crueler. These self-deceptions must be destroyed, smashed, and shattered, or the Christian trapped in them will never break free! God knows exactly what we've been through and it has not exceeded what others have experienced. Paul tells us that, "No test that comes your way is beyond the course of what others have had to face" (1 Corinthians 10:13, The Message).

Only as our stronghold thinking is demolished through prayer can God move into the inner chambers of our souls. There He will meet our deepest needs, heal our oldest hurts, and resolve our worst fears. When we give Him voluntary access to do that, He will then fill the hidden chambers of our souls with light and grace and mercy and love! 

As believers in Christ, our spirits are born again and linked to the Spirit of our Creator, but our souls are fighting for control of our lives. This is the ongoing conflict within us. As I have prayed the binding and loosing prayers over my former muddled thinking, traumatic memories, and soulish defenses, I have recognized something. These prayers have been more effective in a relatively short period of time than all of the other prayers I have prayed since becoming a Christian in 1972! 

One benefit of receiving healing in your soul is that you realize you can look beyond yourself. You begin to recognize that you may have something very useful to share with other hurting people. These keys offer a powerful way of praying for others.

Some people struggle with praying to bind another person's will to the will of God, even calling it witchcraft. That is simple enough to refute by asking the question: what is the goal of witchcraft? It is always to gain power and benefit from controlling another person's will. If you pray and bind someone's will to the will of God, where is your gain of power or benefit? 

But however brief that snugged-up moment is, they may get their very first glimpse of the goodness and love inherent in God's will and plans for their lives. Especially as you continue to bind them to His will again and again.