Freedom in Christ
This talk was given at Christian Student Fellowship on September 20th, 2022.
Hi everyone! It’s so good to see you all here. Last week at Lost River Cave was so fun! But it’s still good to be back in the basement this week. Let’s pray before we get into it.
If you don’t know me, my name is Leah and I’m on staff here at CSF. To start, I just want to share a little about myself. I graduated from WKU in 2020 and I was an English and Religious Studies major. So I like to read and write and talk about religion and, more importantly, talk about Jesus and His Word. I live in a house on State Street with six lovely ladies, several of whom are here tonight. I have a cat named Socks, and he’s the love of my life. Here is a picture of him. I had so much fun choosing a picture to show you because, as you can imagine, I have many.
Oh, most importantly, I am super into being healthy. I eat fruit for breakfast most days and I want to eat veggies with every meal. I always want to be moving. I play tennis and ultimate frisbee every week. I go climbing at least once a week. On top of that, I want to go to the gym every day, and I’m super motivated all the time. I lift crazy weights. I’m like one of those fitness influencers on Instagram when I’m at the gym… Well, kind of.
For any of you who know me, you know that this isn’t true of me all the time. Most of those things are true or I really want them to be true all the time, but actually, I also get super lazy. I really like lounging around, reading and watching TV. I ate barbecue chips and straight frosting out of the jar for lunch the other day. Like nothing else. I haven’t been to the gym in weeks.
All of these things are true of me. I want to be super healthy and fit but I also want to eat Oreos for breakfast and watch TV all day. My ultimate desire is to be healthy, but so often, my desire for Oreos or a dairy-free milkshake from Brusters is too overwhelming to resist.
Have you ever done something you didn’t really want to do? Have you ever eaten seconds on Thanksgiving even though you were really full after your first plate? Sure, you wanted to keep eating on the surface, because grandma’s stuffing is just that good, but you knew it wasn’t the best idea. And you were right; you felt sick after.
Often, we feel like we really can’t help but give into our temptations. The temptation to eat more even when you’re full. The temptation or desire to watch Netflix instead of doing your English homework. The desire to sleep in instead of getting up early to do your Quiet Time. The desire to drink too much alcohol with your friends so you can “let loose.” The desire to watch porn on the internet.
You give in to your desire and then you feel ashamed or guilty. But you felt like you couldn’t help it. Your desires were controlling you.
Let’s read John 8:31-34 and then we’ll talk about it.
John 8:31-34
31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
33 They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?”
34 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.
First of all, the Jews had been slaves before. They were slaves in Egypt for 400 years, so they were just completely wrong. But that’s not what Jesus is talking about here anyway.
Jesus says everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Do you ever feel like a slave to your desires? Like you have to give in to them? I feel that way sometimes. I just have to hit snooze even though I know I should get up. I just have to eat a whole sleeve of Oreos instead of real food. I just have to get that quick fix, give in to that impulse to get a hit of dopamine even though you know, you know, that it’s not good for you. You don’t even want to be doing these things, but you just can’t help it.
You are a slave to that thing. People are slaves to whatever has mastered them.
We act not because we have chosen to but because we have to. We cling to things, people, beliefs, and behaviors, not because we love them but because we’re terrified of losing them. In a spiritual sense, the object of our attachments and addictions become idols. We give them our time, energy, and attention, whether we want to or not, even, often especially, when we are struggling to rid ourselves from them. This is the root of our troubles. This is slavery to our flesh.
I listened to a podcast last week by John Mark Comer, who is an incredible pastor and theologian. You should totally listen to this podcast episode; it’s amazing; just make sure you wait like a week or two so that you don’t realize that a lot of my ideas tonight are from this particular teaching. He summed up our slavery to sin like this:
“The devil’s go-to stratagem for ruin in your soul and our society is deceptive ideas that play to disordered desires that are normalized in a sinful society.” —John Mark Comer Teachings Podcast, “The Slavery of Freedom: Part 1 | Fighting the World, the Flesh, and the Devil E3”
We are in a battle against our flesh (our flesh, meaning our sinful nature), which is used by our enemy to tempt us and is normalized in our society to confuse us.
But the good news is this: Jesus can set us free. He has set us free. He says at the very beginning of the passage that the truth will set us free.
The truth is that our distorted desires, our flesh, will only lead us to death. Without hope, we are already dead. There was no way we could escape. There’s no getting off this train on our own. But God, rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ. He sent his son to take our death for us, to die in our place, and then He defeated death and invited us into his eternity. That truth—Jesus’s saving work on the cross and his resurrection—is what sets us free from the bonds of sin.
So great! I’m free! But… I still sometimes want to sin. I still do things I don’t actually want to do. I still feel guilty even though Jesus has taken my guilt.
What does it actually mean to be free? This is what I’ve been wrestling with for the last month or so. Sometimes even as Christians we feel trapped in sin in one way or another. Just because we’ve accepted Jesus doesn’t mean the temptations suddenly go away or we’ve got this crazy willpower to never give in to them again. We’re still in a fight. We just have the answer now.
There’s this interesting concept in philosophy (and biology and I’m sure other sciences) that basically says we, as humans that are different from animals, can choose what we do. This is self-determining freedom. Freedom to choose whatever we want, to self-determine our choices, as long as it doesn’t hurt others, is the mark of a free society.
So the answer I’ve found to “how are we free” is this: we don’t have to sin and we have what we need to choose not to. And even when we do sin, there is no condemnation for us because the penalty has already been paid.
We choose what we do. Our distorted desires don’t have to lead us to death because Christ has already died for us. Our freedom in Christ is our freedom to choose Him because, without Him, there is no life. Without Him, there is only death.
So because Jesus took our death, our punishment for sin, we can do whatever we want! I can look after my own self-interests, drink myself into oblivion every night, watch whatever I find on the internet without worrying about any punishment because Jesus already paid the price.
No. Imagine if I just ended there. But didn’t I just say that self-determining freedom is the ability to choose whatever we want?
Let’s read Galatians 5:13-25.
Galatians 5:13-25
13 You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh[a]; rather, serve one another humbly in love. 14 For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”[b] 15 If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever[c] you want. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
19 The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20 idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21 and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.
We can’t use our newfound freedom to go on sinning. If you haven’t read Romans 6-8, do it. I can’t get into it tonight because of time, but essentially, Paul says there that we shouldn’t go on sinning because when we accepted Christ’s death for our sins, we also died to them. We’re new now! We walk in a totally different realm—the realm of the Spirit, which we’ll come back to in a minute.
Anyway, here in Galatians, Paul says that we shouldn’t use our freedom to indulge our flesh, our sinful nature. The acts of the flesh are obvious—sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and the like. Our world is full of these things. But if you live like this you will not inherit the kingdom of God.
If we truly have given our life to Christ and accepted the gift He has given us—the life and reward that He deserves for living perfectly—the freedom from the death we deserve—then why would we run freely back to sin that enslaved us? Galatians 5:1 says that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free, so stand firm, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery.
So how do we do this? Here’s Paul’s answer. The end of verse 13. “Serve one another humbly in love.” Love. That’s it. That’s what we’re free to do.
The entire law is fulfilled in this one command: Love your neighbor as yourself. The flesh—our sinful nature—is anti-love. Love isn’t just a feeling. You can’t command a feeling. Love is an act of the will to put another person’s good ahead of your own even if it comes at great cost or self-sacrifice.
I’m doing this study called Preaching the Gospel to Yourself with my discipleship group, and it’s been really helpful in making me understand my freedom in Christ. So I want to share two quotes from it that made everything click for me.
“In our freedom in Christ, we should seek the good of others in order to build them up. In our freedom in Christ, we walk in joyful obedience as we seek to glorify God in all things.” —Preaching the Gospel to Yourself, Week One Day Three
“Therefore, we are freed to love and serve God and others, not to earn our salvation, but as an outpouring of the grace that we have been given. 1 John 4:19 declares that ‘we love because He first loved us.’ We are free to love our neighbors despite their sin because Christ loved us in the midst of ours. We are free to cultivate habits of Bible study and prayer, not to earn God’s favor, but to know and love Him more. The gospel frees us to be not good enough, or strong enough, or worthy enough because Christ is our sufficiency, and when we are weak, He is strong in us (2 Corinthians 12:9-11).” —Preaching the Gospel to Yourself, Week One Day Two.
We’re not set free in Christ to do whatever we want, to indulge our every desire, but to love. To love the people around us and to love God, who has saved us.
Our culture has sort of warped the definition of freedom. Now, we think of freedom as “freedom to.” Freedom to do whatever we want, as long as it “doesn’t hurt another person” (which is a whole other thing). And anything that puts a limit on our desires, anything that restrains us, is suddenly infringing on our freedom.
The Bible does not define freedom this way. Biblical freedom is freedom from internal oppression, from slavery to desire to sin. And we achieve this freedom by putting ourselves under the authority of Jesus, who knows best and who wants the best for us. When we become Jesus-followers, we submit ourselves to His will for us, whether we “want” to or not.
Verse 16 & 17 of Galatians 5 says to “walk in the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desire of the flesh. The flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.”
All human beings recognize a hierarchy of desires and to be a healthy human being we have to self-edit those desires. A key part of our apprenticeship to Jesus is fighting our flesh and, through the practices of Jesus, cultivating the soil of our heart into fertile ground for the Spirit to grow His fruit.
And “the fruits of the Spirit are,” verse 22, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”
But we can’t forget the very next verse: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”
The beginning of apprenticeship to Jesus is death. Death to our fleshly desire, to our sinful nature. But on the other side is life. True life, eternal life, with King Jesus. A picture of the work that Jesus did for us when He died on the cross and rose again.
So sometimes we still feel trapped, still feel enslaved, to our sinful desires. But let’s not forget: when we come to Jesus, we receive a new heart and our fundamental desire orientation changes from the flesh to the spirit. We are changed. Our desires have changed too.
But our desires are multifaceted. Just like I want to be super healthy and active but also want to eat really unhealthy food and lay around all day. Sometimes in the moment of our temptation, the only desire we feel is the desire to sin. But when we step out of that moment, to sin is not our deepest desire. As followers of Jesus, our truly deepest desire is, or should be, to honor God.
I may be tempted to eat a jar of frosting for a meal but my deepest desire is to treat my body like a temple of the Holy Spirit. I may be tempted to drink a ton of alcohol and get drunk with my friends but my deepest desire is to point others to Christ. I may be tempted to watch porn or explicit TV shows but my deepest desire is to honor God with my mind and body. Not because I’m super spiritual or whatever, but because I have the Spirit of God in me. Just like you, if you’ve trusted and believed in Jesus.
Our deepest desires are often sabotaged by our surface-level and often stronger desires. Our strongest desires are not always our deepest desires. But instead of doing whatever we want in the moment, we are free to take advantage of the spirit-power we have in Christ Jesus and live as He wants us to. Walking in relationship with the Spirit of God. The solution to the problem of our sin is not willpower, but spirit-power. And that’s what it means to be free in Christ.
Next week, we’re going to talk about walking in the Spirit and what that looks like practically. At least that’s my plan right now. God may have something different in mind, so we’ll see. But if you’ve listened to all this talk about freedom in Christ and realized that you’re still enslaved to your sin, to your fleshly desires, today is the day to let Christ set you free. If you don’t know how, talk to someone on staff or someone on leadership here or a friend who you know loves Jesus. I’ll be in the back after if you want to talk to me. You don’t have to be a slave to sin. The truth of Jesus will set you free.
