FRIDAY
The irresistible gospel of freedom is that in Christ we are free from sin (original sin, the curse of sin and the guilt and shame of our sin) and free to serve God and others. This only happens when God makes us new and reorders our loves. Only then can we be free to truly love God as the ultimate object of our affection. Only then can we genuinely love others as God defines it and as the Spirit produces in us.
I recently read in Sharon Hodde Millers’ book Free of Me about a study by Jean M. Twenge. In her book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before she notes that our culture’s emphasis on self-esteem and self focus has ultimately failed. The results have largely been 1. ironically, a drop in self-esteem and 2. not surprisingly, a rise in self-absorption.
A couple of weeks ago I noted Mark Sayers and John Mark Comer’s comments about finding meaning in sacrifice.
To thrive we need community meaning and freedom. Right now our culture is all freedom with little community and meaning because we aren’t willing to sacrifice our freedom for it.
Spiritually, the church must reveal that in Christ is a better freedom. In Christ we find freedom from our sin and the curse of sin (death). In Christ we find freedom to give ourselves in service to God as we have been made by God and for God. This gives us purpose. We find freedom to give ourselves genuinely to one another and love one another. In this we find community. Our culture is bloated on freedom. We have an evangelistic opportunity to demonstrate the true, irresistible freedom in the gospel. To do so, however, we cannot get caught up chasing freedom from all restraints. We must remember that we are free to give ourselves to God and others.
The irresistible nature of the gospel on this topic of freedom is that we find this to be truly liberating. Remember Keller’s quote, "Freedom is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us." This of course ties into our purpose and our destiny as we’ve been talking about. The most freeing place to be is to live within our purpose, rooted in our true identity, and towards our ultimate destiny. This is freedom grounded in truth. It may not be the freedom that we want in our sinful nature (which checks out, according to original sin) but it is the freedom we so desperately need. We have been created by God to know him, love him, live with him and to glorify him forever in the new creation. If this is true, we will not find freedom apart from him. Prior to Jesus we are enslaved to our sin. (These are the very words of Jesus from John 8:34.) Without salvation and new creation we are unable to truly live freely to love God and others. Prior to salvation and new creation, our loves are disordered. Jesus liberates us.
The Christian life, then, is truly freeing. It is the better freedom. So, let’s not view our faith as a restraint on our weak concept of freedom. Instead, let’s believe and live in the truth: “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” Christian, bask in the freedom that Christ has given you. Live freely within your purpose, rooted in your true identity and towards your ultimate destiny.
Additional Content
C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity
The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of “little Christs,” all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to “be myself” without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call “My wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils... Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away “blindly” so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking at Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given awaxy will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.