Galatians 5:1
What do you hear when you hear the word, “freedom”? I would guess what we hear is along the lines of either, “freedom from…” or, “freedom to…”. We think of situations, or people that we have been freed from, so that we can live without terror or guilt or oppression. Or, we think of situations, that because we are free, we get to do.
Freedom is a huge value for us as individuals. Many of the advertising cliches trying to hook us are based on freedom, or our yearning to express our freedom. Phrases like:
“Do your own thing.”
“Pull your own strings.”
“If it feels good, do it.”
“You aren’t the boss of me.”
“Just do it.”
Those are all freedom statements, spoken to a people who have a good measure of freedom to choose to do any of those. Most of us have no personal experience with living a life where we don’t have the freedom to choose something, or do something.
As Americans, freedom is our national right: “…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
"Give me liberty, or give me death!" is a quotation attributed to Patrick Henry from a speech he made to the Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775, at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia. He is credited with having swung the balance in convincing the convention to pass a resolution delivering Virginian troops for the Revolutionary War. The catchy phrase inferred that it would be better to die, than to not be able to live a life of freedom. And so, freedom, became one of the dominant quality-of-life foundations of our country and the way we live.
The apostle Paul gave us a similar Patrick Henry type of phrase, that has been a rallying statement for Christians down through the ages. “For freedom, Christ has set us free.” It is a striking phrase, especially if you have read through the book of Acts, and seen how Paul was most often being either thrown out of town, or thrown into jail, or held in stocks and shackles while being beaten.
How can a person who was in jail so often for preaching the gospel, talk about freedom in such a way? Paul’s idea of freedom had to be shaped because of and during his jail time. I’m thinking what he was thinking about freedom was way different than how most modern people think about freedom.
So many people are in a jail cell. But the jail they are in has no bars. There are no locks. And thus, no keys. But they are in jail cells nonetheless. So what do those jail cells look like from inside? Let me describe a couple these jail cells, without walls or bars or locks or door, that I have seen people get themselves into.
First, there is the story of Herman.
One night at a concert, a distinguished pianist suddenly became ill while performing an extremely difficult piece of music. He had to stop in the middle of the piano piece and be escorted off stage. Quietly, a man named Herman, got up from his seat in the audience, walked up on stage, sat at the piano. He flawlessly and masterfully finished playing the piece. He then went on to play several other pieces, to the amazement of the audience.
Later, when being interviewed, Herman was asked how he was able to perform such a demanding piece so beautifully without notice. He then related this story:
In 1939, when I was a budding young concert pianist, I was arrested and placed in a Nazi concentration camp. Putting it mildly, the future looked bleak. But I knew that in order to keep the flicker of hope alive that I might someday might be free and play again, I needed to practice every day. So I began fingering a piece from my repertoire on my baseboard bed late one night. The next night I added a second piece and soon I was running through my entire repertoire, and I did this every night for five years. It so happens that the pieces I played tonight at the concert hall were part of that repertoire. That constant practice is what kept my hope alive. Every night I renewed my hope that I would one day be able to play my music again on a real piano and in freedom.
What Herman understood was that he wasn’t just practicing his piano pieces. He was playing out his truest and best self, holding on to that self, but knowing that that self couldn’t be known until he was free.
I think the Holy Spirit knows our truest and best self. The Holy Spirit is trying to give everyone of us a clear sense of that, an accurate picture of who we are at our best. A sense of our talents. A sense of our capabilities. A sense of our own self-worth. A sense of our direction and dreams.
If you are living out the Holy Spirit’s vision for you, do you not lie on your bed at night, and in your best Godly imagination, play out what it might look like to be totally free and let that truest, best self out?
But, sadly that best self, that Holy Spirit self, may be locked up by our internal gestapo in a cell of insecurity. Maybe it is locked up in the concentration camp of all the ways we have given others control of our life, with their judgmental and oppressive ways.
Remember the story of Zacchaeus? Others had a vision of Zacchaeus as a sinner. They grumbled at him. He was hated. He was a short man, and people belittled him. But deep inside him, Zacchaeus had a different vision of himself. Someone who was generous. Someone who saw the ways he lived a small and stingy life and wanted the chance to repent. When Jesus came through Jericho, Zacchaeus knew in his truest heart, this was his chance to become the man the Holy Spirit was showing him he could be.
And, by Jesus, that chance was had. “Today is salvation day in this home!” Jesus said to Zacchaeus, looking up at Zacchaeus who had climbed a tree to see Jesus. What does “salvation day” mean in this story’s context other than the fact that Zacchaeus has finally been given the freedom to become the man he knew he could be—the man the Holy Spirit had put as a vision in his heart and mind. Zacchaeus was released from the cell of his own self-loathing and the judgement of others.
Another way to understand our freedom in Christ is to know about caterpillars. One biologist did an experiment with processional caterpillars. First he took a plant he knew the caterpillars loved to eat and planted it in a clay pot. Then he took a number of processional caterpillars, put them on the rim of the pot, and lined them up so that the leader was head-to-tail with the last caterpillar. The tiny caterpillars circled the rim of the pot, following each other round and round for over a week. Not once did any one of them break away to go over to the plant and eat. Eventually, all the caterpillars died of exhaustion and starvation.
We think we are a much more highly developed species than caterpillars, but are we? We get ourselves in ruts, doing the same thing day after day. We end up avoiding and ignoring that which would feed us and nourish us and sustain us; but why?
There are probably lots of reasons. Everyone else is doing it, it must be right. Everyone else is circling the pot, round and round. But if we ask the person ahead of us where they’re going, they don’t know either. And if that person were to ask the person ahead of them why they’re going the direction they are, they wouldn’t know either. We aren’t told or taught to ask questions. We are taught to keep our mouths shut and just keep following the rest. Round and round.
What everyone is doing is following others who are visionless and fearful to make a shift in their lives. One of my favorite Farside cartoons showed a posse riding through the woods at night. Several had torches. They all had guns. They were all following a bloodhound, who had his nose to the ground but was thinking to himself, “I don’t smell a darn thing.”
That is so many people’s lives: locked up in the cells of their going round and round, not knowing where they going, or why they are going round and round.
Think of the story of Jesus and the woman at the well. Remember her story? You can find it in John 4. She’s had had five husbands and she’s working on number six. She was living the unreflective life of the immoral round and round. Instead of trying something new, jumping out of the jail cell of her round and round, she just kept doing the same thing over and over, trying to find a new life by making the same mistakes she had made before. Thinking that the more she did the same, just maybe there would be a different outcome. But not so.
Jesus came and gave her the chance to quit living a processional caterpillar life. To quit following the parade of her useless same old-same old solutions. To step out of the circle. To step towards the one who gives us the courage to step aside from the procession of thoughtless, unreflective living.
And what does she do in response, once she’s jumped off the merry-go-round of her former life? She ran into town and said to everyone she met, “Come and see a man who…knows me inside and out. Do you think this could be the Savior?” The Savior. The one who releases us from the invisible jail cell of the round-and-round.
Another way to understand our freedom in Christ is to be released from the jail cell of our fears. There’s a dramatic scene in a play about a farm family that had been taken hostage by an escaped convict. They were being held in the family’s living room. Somehow, while the convict was waving his gun around, the father recognized there were no bullets in the chambers. The man was holding the gun to the head of the young son in the family.
The father began to calmly talk to his son. He tried to get the boy to come to him and away from the escaped convict. All the other family members were crying out to the father, pleading with him to stop trying to get the boy to come. All the while the convict was yelling that he’d kill the boy if he tried to move. The boy was crying and shaking his head “no.”
Still the father reassuringly beckoned the son to come to him. “Come on,” he’d say. “It’s OK; it’s gonna be OK. Just come to me, son. Trust me.” Finally, after what seemed like forever, the boy, crying out, “Daddy,” broke free and ran to his father’s arms as the convict pulled the trigger of his unloaded gun.
The fear that has kept your truest and best self captive is an unloaded gun. All the while, the Father God is calling to you, “Just come to me; it will be all right. That fear is empty and has no power over you. Come to me.” Once in the Father God’s arms will you see and know what an empty gun fear is, and how free it is to be out from under the barrel of fear that may be pressed to your head.
A final way to understand our freedom in Christ is to feel the bands of guilt, in which we are so tightly bound, finally released.
In the book, God’s Smuggler, by Brother Andrew, the early chapters tell the story of Andrew’s time serving in the Dutch Army in Indonesia. He bought a young monkey, a gibbon, as a pet for the barracks. He noticed, though, that when he touched the monkey on certain places of his body that the gibbon would let out a squeal. He examined the gibbon more closely and found a raised welt that went all the way around its waist. What Andrew surmised was that when the monkey had just been a baby, someone had tied a piece of wire around the monkey’s middle and never removed it. As the monkey grew larger, the wire became embedded in his flesh. And now was very painful.
That evening, Andrew began his operation. Using his razor, he shaved off all the monkey’s hair in a two inch wide swath around its middle. Gently, he cut into the tender flesh until he exposed the wire. The gibbon lay there with the most amazing patience. Even when he was obviously hurting the monkey, it looked up with eyes that seemed to say, “I understand.” Once down to the wire, Andrew cut it and pulled it slowly out of the monkey’s skin.
Instantly, as soon as the operation was over, the monkey jumped up, did a backflip, danced around Andrew’s shoulders, and pulled Andrew’s hair in sheer happiness. Andrew wrote:
After that, my gibbon and I were inseparable. I think I identified with him as strongly as he with me. I think I saw in the wire that had bound him a kind of parallel to the chain of guilt still so tight around myself—and in his release, I saw a symbol for the thing I also longed for.
Guilt is probably one of the hardest things to be free from. Guilt is an internal reaction to an external action that we did that was bad, wrong, hurtful, or sinful. And the problem is, we can either feel overly guilty, which is its own kind of jail cell. Or we can feel too little guilt, and thus don’t take responsibility for our actions.
Just like the gibbon couldn’t get rid of the wire that had become lodged under his skin, neither can we remove the guilt that cuts into our spirits, and keeps us locked up.
Think of the apostle Peter who denied knowing Jesus three times, during the arrest and trial of Jesus. Peter could have carried that guilt the rest of his life. But the risen Lord came to Peter, asking Peter if he loved Jesus three times—one for each of the denials. And Peter had to speak that love to Jesus’ face. Freed of that guilt-like wire that dug into Peter’s spirit, Peter was then empowered to lead the church, which he couldn’t have done still strapped by his guilt.
“For freedom, Christ has set us free.” Now what do you think of when you hear the word freedom? Hopefully you are thinking of Jesus, and how he has come to you, either in the past, or maybe now in this moment, to release you from some kind of jail cell, that you have fashioned. It is time to come out. To be free. To be released from your guilt, your fear, your round-and-round life, or your insecurity that keeps you from living your best life in Christ. Whatever it is that holds you back and holds you in. Come out. Christ has broken down your jail cell door. It can never lock you in again.
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