If the Son has set you free, you are free indeed.                                                                                                                            John 8:36

We Americans prize our freedom.  We celebrate it, we exercise it, and, thank you eternally, we have many who willingly lay down their lives for it.

Can the same be said of believers?

God’s design is that we live free of the burden of sin and shame and guilt and unrealistic expectations and judgement and the entanglements of slavery to sinful self.  We know this.  Every believer can testify to the truthfulness of the above verse and yet shockingly few have I seen know how to move the truth from knowledge to practice.  

If I am free, what might that mean to me?  What might a life of ‘freedom’ look like?  

Christ says we are free from our bondage to sin, no longer slaves to sin but now adopted sons and daughters of a God who has offered us forgiveness and freedom in Christ.  While we do continue to sin, our sinful natures no longer reign supreme over our lives and thoughts and emotions.  We are no longer slaves to sin without authority and power to depose that old master of the flesh.

And yet there are so many areas of my life where I feel powerless against it, where try as I might, that besetting sin just wins every time.  By its constantly winning the victories, I’m relegated to the loser, handing over my powers to resist more and more with every defeat.  

And then there are all those chains that bind our souls daily, those we either ignore, cherish, or aren’t even aware of.  Shame often wears this dress.  We allow ourselves to be enslaved to our pasts, our mistakes, and our guilt.  We wear the chains for decades, feeling it some sort of just punishment for our misdeeds.  

We also live enslaved to tradition and religion.  There’s an old song, I think it was Jars of Clay that sang it, where they speak of churchgoers sitting on their pews who ‘can’t feel the chains on their souls.’ When we miss an opportunity to walk in the church, when we say no to filling a volunteer need, there’s this touch of guilt that we buy into that tells us we might not have made Him happy by doing that.  Or perhaps it’s the other extreme, we feel that by all we have done, we have earned it, He is happy with our innumerable offerings.  As if somehow, somewhere deep inside us we really do believe that the greatness of eternity with Him can be both won and lost.

Those are ‘religious’ enslavements.  How about the social ones?  So many live lives enslaved to things they either love or hate.  They want desperately to offer their families the finer things and they sell their souls to the taskmaster of wealth.  They want to be popular and influential and so sell their very lives to the harsh and ever changing god of social acceptance–chasing the Jones’s who move mansions daily.  Those are the more noticeable, but don’t think there aren’t others that might hit home with the more docile of us.  We allow ourselves to be bound by  every other enslaving master without even realizing what’s become of us, often wearing our chains as a badge of honor and importance, not at all sure of how to work and live and survive without the weight of them.  

Might busy-ness be your master?  While freedom is what’s been offered, have we, like the Isrealites of old, denied the freedom in favor of another King instead?  It’s not a new story.  I think of our pet rabbit.  She likes closed, confined spaces. With all the available space of her cute little house, she passes over such freedom in favor of something far more limiting.  I believe we do it for a number of reason, but that one of them is fear of what might be outside our limited nest.  If we are free, we may wander into something we haven’t faced before.  We may wander away from where things are going on we want to be ‘in’ on.  We may wander away from what people would call normal or socially acceptable.  We may even wander away from the known, controlled, and safe.  

I see people every day  enslaved, chained to every manner of taskmasters they don’t see or concede to, masters they never realized they’d sold their freedom to.  You are no longer a slave, you are a free child of a gracious Father who grieves at the thought of your handing over the freedom for which He so painstakingly moved heaven and earth on your behalf.  Who is your master?  Who or what is it that has the final say in what you do, where you go, how you dress, how you spend your time,  what it is you’re working for?  I haven’t yet been able to ask myself that question without feeling the sting of knowing that that throne is, in fact, divided.  

May He sit uncontested on the throne of my heart, with all other far lesser gods relegated to their rightful places of service to Him.  I long to live a life that testifies to my desire to no longer serve the god of busyness, of approval, of comfort, of ease, of self, of indecision, of money or alcohol or lust or anger or bitterness or rage.  But to live in the weightlessness of glory.  Under the full and gracious reign of the God who has indeed secured my freedom.

It wasn’t cheap for Him nor has it been cheap for we Americans.  Someone, many someones live, lived, and died to gain it for us.  Let us not disrespect the gifts we’ve been given by either party by dismissing them, handing them over without a fight, allowing them to be taken, or denying the ones who secured them for us.  May we be a people who truly and daily let freedom ring in every corner of our lives and hearts. And may we be grateful for the opportunity to do so.