Galatians 5:1 [show]Galatians 5:1 Christ Has Set Us Free [5:1]For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. (ESV)

Galatians 5:13-25 [show]Galatians 5:13-25 [13]For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. [14]For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." [15]But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. Walk by the Spirit [16]But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. [17]For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. [18]But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. [19]Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, [20]idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, [21]envy,(1) drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. [22]But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, [23]gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. [24]And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. [25]If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. (ESV) Footnotes 1. [5:21] Some manuscripts add 'murder'

If there is a key word for understanding the aspirations and the ambiguities of American history, and, in a sense, of all human history, that word must be “freedom.” Ask anyone in our story as we have learned it – - the Old World explorer, the Puritan pilgrim, the revolutionary patriot, the oppressed minorities of more recent times, the troubled youth, ask any of them what it is that agitates them so, what it is they want so desperately, all their answers boil down to this one word: freedom.

Those of us here, as free as we seem, are captives, too. We are captives to many different masters for many different reasons, but we all have some sense of yearning. The word that best describes the place where our longings come together, where our aspirations overlap, is freedom. Everybody wants to be free from something.

In these individual struggles to get free from something or someone, some of us would secretly like to be free even from God. If freedom is what we want most, if freedom is our God, who needs God? Have you ever run from God? “I fled Him down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him down the arches of the years; / I fled  Him down the labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears / I hid from Him, and under running laughter.” (Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven}

Do you realize that both the desirability and the possibility of freedom are taken seriously in the Bible? Probably you assume as much. But, actually, this was unique in the ancient world. No ancient philosophy saw freedom as its highest virtue. No ancient culture deemed freedom the highest good. Yet the Bible affirms freedom as a gift of God.

Here is a truth worth pondering on this Independence Day. The freest person who ever lived was the person who was most dependent on God.

Jesus was so free it threatens us. Free in all the ways we are not. Jesus was free from the terrible insecurity that keeps us needing to prove ourselves and justify our existence. Look at him!

Secure enough in who he was and what he was about that he could openly challenge the religious authorities of his own people. So secure he could let the brightest prospect for discipleship simply walk away. Jesus was so grounded in his own truth that he could watch his followers betray him and his enemies condemn him without speaking a word in his own defense. He was the freest person who ever lived.

Jesus was free from the heavy weight of other people’s expectations. This is impressive to pastors and other clergy because we can’t pull it off. The congregation’s expectations so often seem both more immediate and more important than God’s expectations. But you and I both, because we aren’t sure who we are, let the expectations of others determine how we live.

Not Jesus. Everyone, absolutely everyone, loaded him up with expectations. Messianic expectations are the worst, and the most impossible. They expected Jesus to enter Jerusalem in a chariot like a conquering hero, but he showed up riding a little donkey. Jesus was free enough to say, “No, thank you,” to those who wanted to make him king, preferring to remain among the common people as one of them. He was the freest person who ever lived.

Jesus was free even from the rules and proscriptions of religion. Look at him! Free enough to be seen at Jacob’s well telling a Samaritan woman with a scandalous reputation that God loved her anyway. Jesus even broke the Sabbath laws, because he was keeping the higher law of love.

Jesus was the personification and definition of freedom. In him freedom rang like a frenzied bell. His was the freedom we know we need, and, in our better moments, want.

But what was the secret of his freedom? Not any of the things we would suppose. Not his courage, though he endured encounters with the devil, Pontius Pilate, and God-forsakenness. Not his wisdom, though what little we have from his mind is, two millennia later, utterly inexhaustible.

The secret of Jesus’ freedom was in his subservience to God. We freedom-lovers and freedom-seekers have understood freedom as the annihilation of all forms of bondage and constraint, and this may be our gravest mistake.

Take a child. Turn the child loose in the world, free from every restriction and constraint, and the child will not survive. But hold a child within the confines of a family, and those loving constraints will provide the environment in which the child  can  become a responsible self. Love creates the constraints that make true freedom possible. Love creates, not the restraints of legalistic relationships, but the constraints of committed relationships.

Ask the person who has fallen in love. Ask the person who has lived for years in a life of love with another person. Ask them, Does love create bondage? The “yes” will come through a smile. A chosen bond, a blessed bond, the bond of communion.

Finally, I have a hypothesis: the higher the love that holds you, the greater the number of constraints from which you are free.

Paul said, “The love of Christ constrains us.” Constrains. Encircles us. Holds us. Sets our limits. This is why Augustine could say, “Love God and do as you please.” But we cannot have the freedom of the resurrection without the discipline and constraint of the cross. We have never been told the way would be easy. Certainly we have not been told it would be the way of self-indulgent license. But it is the way of true freedom. And “if the Son shall make us free, we shall be free indeed.”

He was the freest person who ever lived.

Prayer:

O God, when we have anchored our souls in you, we are most truly free. When we have bound our wills to your will, we are most truly free. When we have aligned our hopes with your promises, we are most truly free. Grant us such dependence on you, we pray, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

C. David Matthews  /  Royal Lane Baptist Church, Dallas, TX  /  7.4.10