FREEDOM!

Galatians 5:1, 13-18 / The Message

Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.....

There is slavery and there is slavery ... and this scripture, I believe, addresses every kind.  There is the obvious shackles-and-chains kind, yes, but other forms of slavery are more insidious – and often a lot harder to recognize.  Traditional translations of the Bible generally use word like: fornication, impurity, licentiousness,  idolatry, sorcery,  jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, envy, and drunkenness, to describe these.  I fully understand the meaning of these words and their applications in our modern world -- but they are not words common to our language today.  It seems to me they too easily fall into some category which could be labeled "bible words" and then ignored as being irrelevant to us today.

Instead, I really like the words used by The Message to describe the kinds of choices that can enslave us just as surely as a slave master with a whip:  repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage;  frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness;  trinket gods;  magic-show religion;  paranoid loneliness;  cutthroat competition;  all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants;  a brutal temper;  an inability to love or be loved;  small-minded and lopsided pursuits;  the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival;  uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions;  ugly parodies of community.  These are concepts that we can find on our TV's or in our on-line discussions any day.  They resonate with with the world we live in now.

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

Our freedom is never just about ourselves – no gift God gives us is ever just for ourselves.  And if the price of our freedom is another’s enslavement, then neither of us is truly free.  My freedom to live in comfort cannot be bought at the cost of the destruction of someone else’s quality of life.  We are not set free by Christ in order that we can force another person into our understanding of that gift.

We are free to live as one who lives in the Reign of God – and we know that in God’s kingdom, the rules are simple and clear: love one another as I have loved you.  In love, God has given us life and love and hope.  To love as God loves us is to offer others life and love and hope.  This is the freedom Christ offers.

My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don’t you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

“Choose to be led by the Spirit.”  Now, there, is true freedom.  Freedom from having to rely on my own fallible human understanding.  Free from uncertainty.  Free from fear that I might get it wrong.  When we choose to live our lives “led by the Spirit” we are free indeed.  Earlier here I read a list of things that can enslave us. Our reading from Galatians goes on to list the freedoms that are part and parcel of a life lived led by the Spirit -- the counterpoints to all those things which can so easily enslave us:  “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  None of these will ever put us in chains.  These things are indeed what freedom looks and feels like.

Praise God!