This is the one-hundred-sixty-third lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

[For our friends in the USA, July 4 is celebrated as a day of freedom. It’s also an opportunity for us to contemplate the freedom we have in Jesus Christ, which is the greatest freedom any of us can experience.]

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” Galatians 5:1

We cherish freedom as a gift, but why is it that human beings have such a difficult time handling freedom when they have it?

• A young person turns 21 and now has new freedom, legal rights that should be seen as privilege and honor, but instead he turns it into a spree of illegal and dangerous behavior.
• A young man and woman get married and they have an opportunity to flourish in a new God-given garden of responsibility and pleasure, but instead what happens behind closed doors is a battle–and it begins just weeks after the blessed event. They get locked into a struggle for territorial power that is not essentially different than the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
• Iraq is freed from the oppression of one of the 20th century’s all-time worst despots, but despite the decapitation of the monster, the people of Iraq plunge into civil war and feel no freer than they did before.

Why doesn’t freedom always work? Why can’t a tiger held in the captivity of a zoo be released into the wild to flourish among his wild-born cousins? Why is it likely he’ll languish and die?

Here is an important distinction: freedom is not just freedom from restraint; it’s freedom to be able to do what God has empowered you to do. The person who is released from prison may step out with a lightness in his step, gazing at the clear sky above, looking out to the horizon whereas he used to see only concrete walls before. He is free. Free from prison. But free to do what?

The rate of recidivism among ex-convicts is as high as it is because many of them don’t know what to do except go back to what they used to do. Now if that happens to us spiritually, you can see what a disaster that can be. It isn’t enough for a person to find that Jesus Christ will forgive his or her sins and experience the breaking of the chains of guilt. That’s where grace begins, but it’s hardly where it ends. God wants us not only to be free from guilt, but to be free to live good and healthy lives, and to be agents of freeing others. God didn’t forgive us our sins, so that we could go on sinning, but so that we could be free. 1 Peter 2:16 says: “live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God.”

A person may get free from alcohol or drug addiction, but what will take the place of the demons that have been exorcized? Jesus was very clear: one demon has been cast out, and there are seven others waiting in line to take its place.

2 Corinthians 3:17-18 says: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

Transformation is what we’re looking for. Nothing less will do. Freedom that is merely getting off the hook for wrong things you’ve done puts you in no better position to prevent those same things from happening again. But in real freedom we’re transformed, metamorphosed. This passage refers to Moses coming down Mt. Sinai with a veil over his face so the people wouldn’t be superstitiously captivated by the radiance of his face after being in the presence of God. But now, since Christ, God takes the veil away. He says: look at my Son, be transfixed by who he is, be transformed yourself, show God’s glory in your life, an ever-increasing glory. And then you will know what it is to be free. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

And then there’s this reminder in Galatians 5:1: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” I love that verse because it slaps me in the face. It reminds me that I can’t coast on the obvious. Christ has set us free for what? To be free. So, the passage goes on to say, don’t “let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery,” and “you were called to be free.” Paul is talking about avoiding, at all costs, taking Christian faith and going backwards to some kind of system of laws and regulations. We’re called to grown-up faith. God does not treat us like toddlers. He doesn’t treat us like idiots.

People have had fun collecting some of the inane instructions on consumer products where the manufacturer must think we’re idiots. Instructions on sleeping pills that say: “Warning: May cause drowsiness.” Or the package of Christmas lights that says: “Warning: for indoor or outdoor use only.” Or the pepper spray canister bearing these words: “Caution: Never aim spray at your own eyes.”

Grown-up faith is our calling. It’s for freedom that Christ has set us free. And where Scripture talks elsewhere (in James 1:25; 2:12) about “the law that gives freedom,” it’s talking about a force in life that’s ever present. As the “law of gravity” and the “laws of thermodynamics” describe inevitable forces in the physical world, the law of Jesus, the law of love and truth, keeps working on us making us ever freer until that final day when the whole creation is freed. Today’s freedom is just a foretaste of the final freedom when “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). No more earthquakes. No more tsunamis. No more wars. No more disease. No more death. No more tears.
___________

___________

[If you believe this series will be helpful, this is the perfect time to forward this to a friend, a group, or a congregation, and tell them they too may sign up for the weekly emails here]

Mel Lawrenz (@MelLawrenz) trains an international network of Christian leaders, ministry pioneers, and thought-leaders. He served as senior pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for ten years and now serves as Elmbrook’s teaching pastor. He has a PhD in the history of Christian thought and is on the adjunct faculty of Trinity International University. Mel’s many books include Spiritual Leadership Today: Having Deep Influence in Every Walk of Life (Zondervan, 2016). See more of Mel’s writing at WordWay.