If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, today’s passage comes out of the book of John, chapter 8, starting at verse 31. We will get to it eventually, I promise. But we are going to start off with a little bit of an introduction. As most of you know if you have been here a while, we are going through the summers series called “Do not Conform. Be Transformed.” Again, it comes out of this passage found in Romans 12 which actually says “Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The idea behind this series is that we would look at various patterns of the world that attempt to shape us into its particular mold. Then we look at the consequences of doing so and then make a bridge to some sort of a biblical response.
Today, being that we are leading into the Fourth of July week of the Independence Day Celebration, I thought what I would do is look at the pattern of freedom. As most of you know, the Fourth of July isn’t simply about the banks being closed and the post office being closed and the businesses being closed. It is not about just stuffing yourself full of picnic food or shooting off fireworks. The Fourth of July, also known as Independence Day, is really meant to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence by our forefathers. Really it is a declaration of independence from those stuffed shirts and tea-drinking people we call the British. That is what it was independence from. One thing I can be relatively confident in is that the British will not be invading America anytime soon. I think they are done with invading us. The last invasion was in the 60s when the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Who made their way over here and invaded us with their music. That wasn’t such a bad thing. The bad news is that when we think about the Fourth of July, I suspect that most of us don’t really think much about the British. I don’t. We are really not thinking about it. That is okay because really the Fourth of July is not so much independence from the British but it’s a celebration of freedom. In the United States of America, we value freedom. So much so that if anyone tries to come against or challenge our freedom, we are going to defend ourselves. We are going to defend other nations, our allies, against any oppressive government that would seek to challenge the freedom of the United States of America. As we know, hundreds of thousands of lives have been given for the cause of freedom.
Today, what I wanted to look at is really what is freedom. What is the meaning of freedom at least in America? But really the question I want to consider is freedom really even possible? Is complete freedom really possible even in the United States of America? When we think about the meaning of freedom, especially when we think about freedom in the United States of America, we know that first and foremost, because we have a strong military, we know that we are pretty much free from any foreign invasions where a foreign country would come in and take over the United States of America. That is one freedom that we have. Really, the freedom extends not just from the large level of the United States but really down to the individual level through a document called the Bill of Rights. Spelled out in the Bill of Rights are some core freedoms. Things like the freedom of religion. Things like the freedom of speech. The freedom of assembly. The freedom to bear arms and the freedom against unreasonable search and seizure. Those are inherent freedoms in what we call the Bill of Rights. Those freedoms actually imply some other freedoms. They extend down into the freedom of just being able to come and go as we please. To move anywhere we want to move across country. It involves the freedom to marry or not to marry. It gives us also the freedom to pursue education. The freedom to get a good job or pursue a career and to take the money we have from that career and pretty much spend it in any way we want. To buy the things we want to buy from whoever we want to buy them. Really what we are talking about here is we have the freedom to pursue our own happiness. That little bit of freedom is spelled out in a clause that we find in the Declaration of Independence. Some of you may be familiar with it. It says “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As we consider this clause for a minute, it says these rights are given to us by their creator. By our creator. As a side note, some people think freedom of religion means no mention of God in government. All you have to do is go back and read some of the documents of the Founding Fathers and you will see that the mention of God is all over those documents. Visit the monuments in Washington, D.C. and you will see God’s name all over the place. These rights are given to us by our creator. These rights extend even farther out. They extend to just our individual actions. We have the right to be generous with our money or to be stingy with our money. We have the right to be forgiving or not forgiving. We have the right to be healthy or unhealthy. We have the right to be kind to other people and complete strangers or we have the freedom to be mean and nasty to people. We have that freedom. We have that particular right. It really even extends even farther to how we think. If anything we have the freedom of is really just how to think. What is going on in our mind. We have the freedom to be able to think very good and positive things and things that are beautiful or some bad and negative things to the point of even ugly or horrific things. We have those rights and freedoms within us. Those freedoms are not given to us by the United States Government. They are affirmed in many ways by the United States Government but they are given to us by our creator. Again, our creator created us with a sense of free will which basically means that we are not robots. He is not up there trying to control us like a robot. He gave us the freedom to choose to make our own decisions even if that decision means walking away from God. He loved us so much that he gave us that complete freedom.
Hopefully you can see that, at least in America, we have a ton of freedoms not only given to us by the United States of America through the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, but we have a ton of freedoms that God gives to us. Given all those freedoms, I would go out on a limb and say that really there is no one in this room or in the whole United States of America that is truly absolutely free or at least free as we hope to be. Because what happens is we see very commonly when we begin to exercise some of those freedoms, we often fall into some other form of enslavement, some other form of entrapment. The simple example is that there are a lot of teenagers, college aged people, or young adults who are still living at home and they can’t wait to be free from the oppressive home life. The place where they have to do dishes and take out the trash and, God-forbid, make their bed. Finally, they are free of their parents and what do they have to do? They go to a dorm or another house where they have to do what? They have to take out the trash. They have to do the dishes and ideally make the bed. Not only that, they have to pay for the house over that bed. What they have jumped from is one freedom into another form of slavery or oppression. We also see that in the work environment. We know people that just hate their jobs. They have been with them for years and years and years. They get the attitude like the old country singer Johnny Paycheck used to say I just can’t wait to tell them to take this job and shove it. I ain’t working here no more. What do they do? They do it and they think they are free and they jump back into a worse work environment. We know there are people that have relationships that just stink and they just say I want to get out of this relationship whether it is a casual relationship or whether it is marriage. I hate this life. I hate living here. I can’t wait to be free from this. What happens is some people aren’t smart enough to figure out they sometimes jump from a bad relationship into a worse relationship. From one form of slavery into another.
We have the idea, too, that we should be free as Americans to pursue whatever we want. We should be able to do anything to our body that we want to do. Whether it is smoking, alcohol, drugs, looking at things that we shouldn’t probably be looking at. What happens is we have the freedom to do that, but the consequences of doing that is often that we find ourselves in some new form of enslavement by the name of an addiction. That is slavery. Some of us like to be able to spend our money and we are given unlimited credit lines. So what do we do? We go out there and spend, spend, spend. We have the freedom to spend and then what happens is we find ourselves in a mountain of debt that we feel enslaved to. Once you are in those situations, it is very hard to break those chains to get out of there. Freedom has a cost and consequences.
We have the right to think about whatever we want to think about people in any way we want. We can have positive thoughts or negative thoughts. Sometimes those negative thoughts about people, if they are given free reign, they can result into really negative attitudes. They can result into stereotypes and possibly even prejudice. When you are involved in prejudice and stereotype, what you have done is your mind is in a form of enslavement because you can’t think freely about other people. We have the freedom to respond to people any way we want based on how they treat us. When somebody makes us mad or something, we have the freedom to respond positively or negatively. Negatively we could respond in anger or possibly violence or even killing someone. Then what happens is that freedom results in being imprisoned. It is freedom that causes us to sometimes move into a new form of imprisonment. We have the right to think whatever we want about ourselves. The government or anybody can’t tell us we can’t think what we want about ourselves. We can think very positive thoughts or negative thoughts or humbling thoughts. If we think too positively about ourselves, what happens? Those positive thoughts often result in haughtiness and pride left unchecked. Or we think low of ourselves and those negative thoughts left unchecked lead to all sorts of feelings of inadequacy, fears, and possibly depression, and even suicidal thoughts.
My point in all this is really that freedom isn’t really all it is cut out to be. I would propose that having boundaries in life gives a person more freedom than if they don’t. I will explain it by an illustration. It was a story that I heard many years ago. There was a group of sociologists or psychologists. They did an experiment using a group of children. What they did was put the children in this field with a fence around it to keep them safe and then they allowed the children just to play in that field for a number of weeks. The kids got really comfortable playing in that fenced-in yard. Then what the adults decided to do was take down the fence. Some of the kids went a little crazy and probably went a little farther than they should but most of the kids ended up huddling to the center. Why? Because they were afraid. They lost their sense of safety. They didn’t know how far they could go. They had no idea when they would be crossing into the danger zone because they didn’t know where the danger zone was. In fear, they huddled toward the middle. In that case, the restriction created more freedom for the children than having no restriction at all. My point is that boundaries aren’t that bad. But yet in the United States of America, a country that values our freedom at all cost, we say we don’t want any boundaries or any restrictions. We don’t need any restrictions. My answer to that is yes you do because we all have something in us that doesn’t quite work right. That causes us to not make good decisions and to jump from freedom back to bondage and that is that three-letter word called sin. The three-letter word called sin. What we are saying is we have this thing within us that I talked about a few weeks ago, this pattern of sin that is in everyone. We have this taint that is in each of our hearts. The thing you cannot get your handle on. The thing that Paul referred to as the flesh or the sinful nature or the old man or the old woman. It is the part in us again that we can’t seem to get a grip on but we know it is there. Everybody knows that someplace deep in their heart there is something that just is not right to cause them to make bad decisions at times. What happens is because we have this sinful nature and if we are put in a situation where we have unbounded freedom, it is only a certain amount of time before we jump from freedom back in to sin.
What I am saying is again, for an American, as much as we value freedom, it is impossible, having a sinful nature, to experience true freedom. The lack of freedom does not come from our outside external oppressors. It doesn’t even come from the internal oppressors. The people that say they want to take my guns away or they don’t allow me to do this or they don’t allow me to have abortions, whatever it is. Those aren’t the things that are the oppressors. The oppressor is right inside here. It is in the heart. The biggest challenge to freedom is sin. What is the answer? I suspect that most of you know the answer and the answer is Jesus. The answer is Jesus. The answer is Jesus. Jesus is the answer as trite as that seems. Jesus is the answer. What we see in this verse that I am finally getting around to is that Jesus, using this passage, basically sheds a light on this concept of freedom that just opens our eyes up to everything that I have been saying.
A little bit of background before I jump to it is that again we know that Jesus didn’t get along very well with the Pharisees. He got angry at them but in his anger he never sinned. He had righteous anger toward them. Every time he would go out and try to share his ministry, his message, or do a miracle, he would butt heads with them. They would constantly be challenging him in this. What he would do is just kind of throw out a challenge back at them and say things that just confused them. Most of the Pharisees would just get mad at him. A few would actually believe. They would say I think he is kind of starting to make some sense and I would like to hear more about that. In this particular passage we read “To the Jews who had believed in him Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’ They answered him, ‘We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves to anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?’ Jesus replied, ‘I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.’” Reading this, even the most casual reader, the people who have the basic understanding of the Old Testament know that either the Jews here that are speaking like this were either deceived or delusional or had a very short memory because of course they were enslaved. They had been slaves in Egypt for 400 years. They had been slaves to the Babylonians and the Assyrians and all sorts of people out there. They had been enslaved. Jesus knows that and we know that. Really the Pharisees know that. But instead of Jesus saying did you forget about the time in Egypt or did you forget about that time when you had to go up to Assyria, he doesn’t go there. He doesn’t have to go there. He just makes a statement. Everyone who sins is a slave to sin. What he is saying is he is getting at the heart of the matter. He is getting back to the whole idea that it is not the external oppressors that you have to worry about. The oppressor you need to worry about is the one right here in your heart. That is the biggest hindrance to freedom. It is the sinful nature within every single human being. Why? Because what sin is at its foundation and at its core we talked about it being missing the mark. What it really is is a willful desire to step out of the will and the safety of God. It is saying God’s desire for me is here but I choose just to go over here. That becomes sin right then. What Jesus is saying is once you do that, you are enslaved by sin. He doesn’t mince as many words as I did. He basically says once you make that movement towards sin, sin has got you. It begins to put its grip on you and you have a hard time getting loose. Some of you know that. When you spend a little bit too much money and now all of a sudden you feel the grip of debt. Or you tried an illegal substance you shouldn’t be and now you are addicted to it. Now your whole life revolves around it. Some of you smoke cigarettes and your life revolves around where are you going to get that next cigarette. That is enslavement. Some of you like to drink. Some of you like to drink too much, so your whole life is enslaved by that particular sin.
The good news is that Jesus does not leave us stranded. He gives a very clear answer. But in order to see that, we just have to jump upstairs in the beginning verse where he says “To the Jews who had believed in him Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’” Holding to his teaching means that they are listening, they are applying, they are asking for more. But this word truth is a little bit more difficult to unpack because the word truth has deep, deep theological meaning in the book of John and throughout the gospels. At the minimum, it means in the conventional sense free of falsehood. Really in this particular context he is talking about you will know the truth of God because is truth. God is the source of all truth. What he is talking about is if you become my disciples, you will have access to the truth about God. Of course, they did. They were with Jesus three years sitting at his feet, learning from him, and Jesus would just keep pouring information into them about God and his kingdom and his plan for all humanity. His love for his people. His all-powerful nature. His character. All those things. As they were his disciples, they would learn the truth about God. But really learning about God did not come primarily through information. We go off to Bible College or we go off to seminary and we get a lot of good information about God, but really you never really know God just strictly by information. How you get to know God is through Jesus Christ. That is how you get to know God. Remember in John 1:18 “No one has ever seen God, but God the one and only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” We know God through Jesus. The real revelation of God came through this man Jesus who said he was not only going to reveal truth, he said in John 14:6 “I am the way, the truth, and the life. Whoever wants to go to the Father must come through me.” Jesus reveals himself as the one who not only reveals the truth of God but reveals the truth about himself that he is God and he is there to reveal all of God to the people.
What we see here again is we see that he is saying this is the truth and the good news about this truth is that it begins to free us. He says if you know the truth then the truth will set you free. You don’t have to be a Christian for that long to realize what that means. Even if you are not even a Christian but you have been around Christians you know the basic freedom that comes through Jesus Christ. You know about the cross. You know about Jesus came and allowed himself to be put on the cross so we would be free from the guilt, the penalty of our sins. That is an easy one. That is Christianity 101. Because we know the truth, we can become free of our past sins. The people that understand their past sins and how bad they were, they feel even that much freer. Because they know what they have been freed from. It is not only about our past. Jesus came to free us of our future. In particular, he wanted to free us from the fear of death. If there is anything that seems to grip the culture, it is the fear of death. Most of us won’t admit it, but I would say at least for non-Christians and I think many of us have a fear of death. We don’t want to admit but of all the freedom we have, the one thing that has a grip on us is this constant nagging knowledge that we are all going to die someday. Especially all of us who are getting older. We know that death has the ultimate grip on us. No matter how free we think we are, we will one day die. Because of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we too are free from the fear of death because we know that death does not get the final say for the Christian. Through Christ not only do we have the freedom from our past sins and the freedom from the fear of future death, we can experience freedom in Christ today.
This is where I begin to tie it all together and wind it up so just hear me out. Remember last week I used the passage out of 2 Corinthians that said “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come.” This again speaks of what we call the born-again experience. If anyone is in Christ, he is basically reborn, a new creation, a fresh start, you become in Christ. Not only do you become in Christ, Christ comes into you through his spirit. As I said before, when Christ ascended up, the spirit came down to fill his church and to fill every believer with his very spirit. With the spirit of the living Christ. What that means for the believer is that we have access to the freedom that comes from being in Christ. Two chapters back, Paul spells it out exactly. He says “Now the Lord is spirit and where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom.” There is freedom there. Although this is a mystery in many ways, it makes practical sense. Hear me out on this. Jesus was probably the freest man who ever lived. Sure he died on the cross and everything but that was his option. You know that he wasn’t caught up in bad behavior. He wasn’t caught up in addictions. He was caught up in stinking thinking about people and stinking thinking about himself. He wasn’t caught up in all these enslavements that we find as human beings. He was the freest person who ever lived. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. So we have the spirit of Christ within us. That means we have in us Christ. We have the freest person who ever lived within us, which means we have the capability to live as free people. It should make sense to you. It means as we continue to open up and allow the spirit of Christ within us to do the work to shape us and form us and mold us according to His will, we gradually move away from slavery and we move towards freedom. It is a freedom that no American can ever get. Christians have the ability to be the freest people on earth. Just again by virtue of having the spirit of the one who is free, the spirit of the living Christ within him or her.
In closing, God desires that we would be free. That we would be totally free. That we would no longer be slaves to ourselves or slaves to the world but we would live as free people. We would live as sons and daughters, not as slaves, as sons and daughters of the king. I said before slavery was a common thing in the first century according to the Romans. Some slaves had it pretty good. Some slaves had it very good. No matter how good they had it, they were never considered family because they could always be bought or sold at a moment’s notice. What came to me when I was thinking about it was the show Downton Abbey that some of you watch. You have this weird relationship between the servants and the aristocrats. They are all friendly with each other, but the servants know better than crossing the line and getting involved with one of the aristocrats because if they do there is hell to be paid for that. A slave is not family. What Jesus says is that he wants us to be not a slave but to part of his family. Where a slave can be moved around and has temporary residence, a son is free forever. The last part of today’s verse says “Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” That is a promise. That is an amazing promise. As you begin to allow the spirit of God work within you and you will begin to feel a movement away from slavery and into freedom. Like the guy from the Men’s Warehouse says “I guarantee it.” He got fired but I am still here. He said I guarantee it. I can 100% guarantee it. I will say 100% if you live a life that walks according to the spirit, 110% guarantee that you will begin to slowly experience a new found freedom. God desires us to be free. God desires us to live as sons. God desires us to live under his Son Jesus Christ in order that we would not be slaves but in order that we would be set free. Again “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” Let us pray.
