Imagine a fellow who has been in state prison for 25 years. Then he receives a pardon from the governor. The warden and a couple of guards come to his cell, open the door and tell him he's free to go. Good news! So the former prisoner runs out of the cell, but after only a few months he discovers that his newfound freedom is harder to handle than he imagined it would be. He has to make decisions he never had to make before. He has to work for a living, decide where to live, what to eat and what to wear. He has to pay taxes and maintain a car. He has to set his own agenda for each day. Life outside the joint is complex and confusing. Being free actually overwhelms him. Finally, he commits another crime so he will be returned to prison, where the routines are familiar, the stresses are known, and in his mind life is easier even though he has no freedom.
Believe it or not, this kind of thing actually happens once in a while.
Spiritual imprisonment is one way of understanding how the Apostle Paul came to understand the human condition apart from Christ. He used the metaphor of slavery to describe it. Slavery was found all over the ancient world and then as in modern times, slavery was a form of imprisonment. Paul taught that our prison doors are opened by Jesus, but we have to get up and walk out and make sure we don’t go back.
Galatians 5:1, 13-14:
1 For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. 13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14 For the whole law is brought to fulfillment in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
What Paul says is: we have already been pardoned by Christ, but we must not go back to spiritual prison once we have claimed the liberty Christ has already given us. Our freedom in Christ has a purpose and unless we live out that purpose, merely being pardoned does not make us free.
We are pardoned first of all from imprisonment by every kind of spiritual bondage already in the world. Paul handily provides an incomplete list just a few verses later that he calls works – note the plural – works of the flesh:
“… fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
The plural, works, is important to note because these are sins or sinful habits that we get to pick and choose. I’ll never fall into drunkenness because alcohol holds no attraction to me. But I have to plead guilty to at least some of the others, especially that category, “things like these.”
Works of the flesh are chains that bind us in spiritual slavery, they are the bars that hold us in spiritual prison. The tragedy is that we forged the chains ourselves and we installed the bars by our own choices. That is the real issue: apart from spiritual liberation, we do not make the right choices because we cannot.
“By contrast,” Paul continues, “the fruit” – note the singular – “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”
We do not get to pick and choose which of these we want and which we do not. The Christian character is a whole package. Unlike the works of the flesh, the fruit of the Spirit is sharply defined. It is these nine things and that’s all. There’s no “things like these” because love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control encompass everything we need to be free in Christ. They are inter-related and inter-dependent. We grow in holiness in all of them or backslide in all of them.
The paradox of Christian discipleship is that while spiritual freedom is gained for us by Christ, we can only realize it by serving Christ’s friends through love. Just following rules won’t do it. In fact, Paul said the whole Law is brought to fulfillment in the single commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Christian freedom is the will and ability to love others as Christ loves them: as perfectly as is humanly possible.
But our freedom in Christ is not freedom to do just anything. Paul never would have agreed that, say, adultery is immoral for Jews but permitted for Christians since we are not bound by Jewish Law. Being released from legalism does not give us a license to do just anything we want. Obtaining a driver’s license might bring new freedom, but it certainly gives its bearer much more responsibility, not less. True freedom always brings responsibility.
Such it is with Christian freedom. We haven’t been granted freedom by Christ in order to stay enmeshed in habits of sin. Our responsibilities are greater now than before! Indeed, in our baptism we have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” We are to live by the Spirit of God and be guided by the Spirit.
Jesus requires his followers to leave their past shortcomings, failures and sins in the past. No wistful looking back! I don’t claim it is easy. But our freedom to give Christly love brings responsibility to live as perfectly as possible, trusting that Christ’s power is strongest in our weakest places. We strive to become more and more conformed to Christ’s character in love. Martin Luther wrote that Christ makes Christians lords and masters over sin and death, so from deep thankfulness to Christ we become servants to one another in love. We are not compelled to do right from duty but delighted to do right in joy. So, said Luther, we are first to love God wholly and then we can do what we want, trusting that by the Spirit’s guidance we won’t go too far astray.
Here’s the rub, though: Freedom truly lived means making choices. But Americans today prize personal autonomy so much that, in the words of David Hart in Atheist Delusions, our culture has become "a fertile void in which all things are [claimed] possible, from which arises no impediment" to our desires – and therefore we "may decide for ourselves what is right or wrong.”
Which is to say that modern Americans as a whole no longer believe that there are objective criteria by which to judge our choices because there can be no higher good than being able to make a choice in the first place. All judgment, whether divine or human, infringes on choosing – and being able to choose solely on one’s own has come to take "an almost mystical supremacy over all other concerns."
This would be merely silly if it was not so literally lethal. True human freedom is emancipation "from whatever constrains us from living a life of rational virtue" and that leads to our intellectual and spiritual flourishing. Freedom is the ability to overcome "our willful surrender to momentary impulses, our own foolish or wicked choices. … We are free not merely because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well.”
To choose poorly is to enslave ourselves to the impermanent, the irrational and eventually the destructive. Simply choosing, unconnected from divine guidance and godly standards, is to choose ultimately to reject freedom, to stay enslaved to what Paul called the body of death and finally to choose to perish rather than attain everlasting life.
And that is one thing from which Christ has freed us – the dictatorship of personal autonomy unshaped by godliness or divine virtue. In contrast, wrote John Wesley, we should live as people who are washed and sanctified, “as well as justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.’
You are really changed [Wesley continued]; you are not only accounted as righteous but actually made righteous. The inward power of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made you really, actually free from the power of sin and death. This is liberty, true gospel liberty, experienced by every believer: Not freedom from the law of God, or the works of God, but from the law of sin and the works of the devil. See that you stand fast in this real, not imaginary liberty, wherewith Christ has made you free. And take heed not to be entangled again in the yoke of that vile bondage to sin, from which you are now clean escaped.
For freedom Christ has set us free: free to love, free to live in joy and peace and patience. Free to be generous in all we have, free to be gentle with even those who offend us, free to control ourselves to live in ways to please God.
Free at last!
Free at last!
Thank God Almighty,
We’re free at last!
