Tuesday, July 3, 2007
John 8:32 The truth will make you free . . .
FREE INDEED!
A mother wrote to her state senator complaining about laws that allow women as young as 18 to perform as dancers in bars. It appears that her own daughter had gotten caught up in this to make extra money while going to school. As things turned out, the money was so good that pursuing her education was soon forgotten. The state senator then wrote a letter to the editor encouraging the law to be changed to 21 years instead of 18. But soon a letter appeared challenging that idea. The writer claimed that an 18 year old should be free to make up her own mind, and not to be told what to do by the state legislature.
Such "freedom" is really no freedom at all. It is in fact the opposite: bondage. The undisciplined person's freedom is an illusion. Satan is the originator of the idea of license as freedom. He first tried it on Eve, when he suggested that she would be a lot better off doing something other than what God had commanded, pursuing "freedom."
Eve and Adam found to their sorrow that not only was disobedience to God not liberating, it was enslaving. It gave Satan a hold on them, to lead them where they did not want to go, to trick them into doing things they regretted. Their experience has been universal to the human race. The promise of freedom in giving in to the desires of the flesh turns out to be a most cruel and enslaving lie.
There is such a thing as real freedom, however. It is that won for us by Jesus' atonement for our sins with His cross. Jesus promises that whoever continues in His Word will know the truth and that truth will give freedom (John 8:32). The truth is that Jesus has broken sin's power and released us from its hold and from its final result, which is death and eternal damnation.
The really surprising thing about the freedom that Christ gives is that it is exercised in bondage to God. Real freedom turns out to be this: to be able to do, not what we want, but what He wants. The flesh wants to be free from God, to follow its own desires. But the spirit -- that new nature in us that is the creation of the Holy Spirit -- knows that it is good to be God's slave.
As Paul wrote: "But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life" (Romans 6:22).
