Freedom
Jesus Christ sets us free from sin, guilt, and self-centeredness.
John 8:36
“So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free.”
Chuck Colson, a name once synonymous with power, politics, and scandal. As a key figure in the Nixon administration, Colson was known as the "hatchet man" for his ruthless political tactics. He was a man of immense influence, feared and respected in equal measure. However, beneath the veneer of success and authority, Colson was a prisoner to his own ambition, guilt, and self-centeredness.
In 1974, Colson's world came crashing down when he was implicated in the Watergate scandal. Facing legal battles and public disgrace, he was convicted and sentenced to prison. The once-powerful political operative now found himself stripped of everything—status, power, and reputation. His life seemed to be in ruins, and he was confronted with the full weight of his sins and the emptiness of his pursuits.
During this dark period, a friend gave Colson a copy of C.S. Lewis's book, "Mere Christianity." As he read, Colson felt a profound conviction and a stirring in his heart. He realized that despite his outward success, he was shackled by his own sins and the consequences of his actions. In a moment of humility and desperation, he turned to Jesus Christ, seeking forgiveness and redemption.
Colson's conversion was genuine and transformative. He publicly confessed his faith and repented of his past actions. As he served his prison sentence, he experienced a deep sense of freedom and peace, knowing that Christ had forgiven his sins and set him free from the burden of guilt and self-centeredness.
After his release from prison, Colson founded Prison Fellowship, an organization dedicated to bringing the hope and redemption of Jesus Christ to prisoners and their families. Through his ministry, he touched countless lives, sharing the message of freedom and transformation that he had experienced firsthand.
Chuck Colson's story is a powerful testament to the truth of John 8:36: "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." Despite his past, he found true freedom in Christ, breaking free from the chains of sin, guilt, and self-centeredness. His life serves as an inspiring example of how Jesus Christ can redeem and transform even the most broken and seemingly irredeemable lives.
There are two reasons why I have chosen the topic of freedom. The first is that everybody is thinking and talking about freedom this week, and many people are spending their lives in pursuit of it.
For some, it is national freedom: emancipation from the colonial yoke. For others, it is civil freedom: civil rights and civil liberties, freedom from an oppressive regime. For others, it's economic freedom: freedom from hunger, poverty, and unemployment.
For all of us, it is personal freedom. Even those who are campaigning most vigorously for other freedoms I've mentioned, often know that they are not free themselves. They cannot identify what the oppressions or tyrannies are in their lives, but they feel frustrated, unfulfilled, and unfree.
So freedom is a common topic of conversation and thought today.
Secondly, freedom is a great Christian word. The Lord Jesus is portrayed in the pages of the New Testament as the world's supreme liberator. Jesus quoted from Isaiah 61 in the first sermon he preached. He said he came "to proclaim release to the captives and to set at liberty the oppressed." Later in his public ministry, he said, "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed."
The apostle Paul appealed to the Galatians to stand firm in the liberty with which Christ has set us free. And for those who find "salvation" a rather embarrassing word or a word of traditional religious vocabulary that has no meaning today, "freedom" would be an excellent substitute. To be saved by Jesus Christ is to be set free.
Those are the two reasons why I've chosen this topic.
Tyrannies from which we need liberation
What is freedom? I want to begin negatively with those tyrannies from which we need liberation, and then I will turn toward the positive counterpart. There are many tyrannies, but two major ones are guilt and self.
I'm thankful there is a reaction today against Freud's insistence that guilt feelings are pathological. Guilt is a symptom of various kinds of mental illness or depressive illness, but not all guilt is false guilt. Psychologists are now telling us that we must take our responsibility and guilt seriously. Indeed, it's part of our distinctive humanness that we are moral beings with an urge to do what is right and a sense of guilt when we do what we know to be wrong.
You'll know, I'm sure, one of Mark Twain's many witticisms about man as the only animal that blushes and the only animal that needs to. For there have been times in all our lives when we did things for which we now are thoroughly ashamed.
The Bible is explicit on this point. It tells us that we have asserted ourselves against God's love and authority. We've gone our own way. We've provoked his just displeasure, and our conscience tells us so. Our first and greatest need is forgiveness.
Nobody is free who is unforgiven. If I were not sure of the forgiveness of God by his sheer unutterable mercy, I could not look him in the face. I could not even look you in the face. I'd want to run away and hide as in the Garden of Eden, because it was there in Eden, not at Watergate, that the device called "cover up" was first invented.
A leading British humanist was interviewed recently on television. In a moment of surprising candor, she said, "What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness. I have nobody to forgive me."
There is forgiveness with God, for he entered into our world in the person of his son, Jesus Christ. He lived a perfect life of love, and on the Cross identified himself with our sin and guilt. God in Christ bore in his own innocent person the condemnation that we deserve, and he did it in order that we might be forgiven.
Guilt is the first tyranny. We know it very well, and I trust we found the remedy in Christ.
The second tyranny is self or self-centeredness.
Once speaking to some Jews who had believed in him, Jesus said, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly My disciples;” John 8:31
The Jews were indignant. They said, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been enslaved to anyone;" John 8:33
Like "salvation," "sin" is another word of traditional religious vocabulary, and many people today are saying that sin has no meaning.
I can remember when I was an undergraduate student, how enlightening it was to learn from Charles Ryrie that what the Bible means by sin as "self-centeredness." Let me tell you how Ryrie puts it. He says, "I am the center of the world I see. And where the horizon is depends on where I stand. Education may make my self-centeredness less disastrous by broadening my horizon of vision. It's like a man climbing a tower who sees further in terms of physical vision while remaining himself the center and the standard of reference. I am the center of the world I see."
That's what the Bible means by sin. Luther talks about man curved in on himself. Malcolm Muggeridge talks about the dark little dungeon of my own ego. That is sin, a twist of self-centeredness that has us imprisoned. But God's order is that we love him with all our being, and then that we love our neighbor and put ourselves last. Sin is the reversal of the order.
We Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the only remedy for this radical self-centeredness. He not only died on the cross, he also rose again. He is alive, and by the power of his Spirit he can enter our personality and begin to change us from within. Christians do not claim to be perfect. We claim that Jesus has begun to liberate us from the cramping bondage of our own self-centeredness.
Here is the good news of freedom from tyranny. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we have freedom from our guilt WHY, because he died for us, and freedom from our self-centeredness in the power of his resurrection.
The nature of our freedom
I cannot stop there because I think the second part of my talk is more important. It's a great mistake to think of freedom in purely negative terms—in terms of those things from which we've been set free. We need to think of freedom in positive terms—that for which we've been set free.
This is the principle I want to develop: True freedom is freedom to be myself, my true self as God made me and meant me to be. Let me illustrate that principle.
I begin with God himself. Have you ever thought that God himself is the only person who enjoys perfect freedom? You could argue that God is not free. His freedom is certainly not absolute in the sense that he could do absolutely anything whatsoever. He cannot. The Bible speaks of several things that God cannot do. He cannot lie. He cannot sin. He cannot tempt or be tempted. So, God's freedom is not absolute, but God's freedom is perfect because he's able to do absolutely anything that he wills to do.
The major thing that God cannot do, according to Scripture, is to contradict himself. God's freedom is freedom to be always entirely himself. But there's nothing arbitrary about God, nothing capricious (impulsive), nothing unpredictable. He never changes. He's always the same, and he never contradicts himself. If he did, then, of course, he would be God no longer. So, God finds his freedom in being himself and never changing.
What is true of God, the Creator, is equally true of all his creatures; absolute freedom is impossible. It's impossible for God. It must be impossible for us. It's an illusion. The freedom of every creature is found in its or his or her nature, and it is limited by that nature.
Take a fish as an obvious example. God created fish to live and thrive in water, whether salt or fresh. Gills are adapted to absorb oxygen from water, so water is the element in which a fish finds its identity, its "fishness," its freedom. It finds itself in the element for which it was created: water. It's limited to water, but in that limitation is liberty.
Suppose you had a little tropical fish in one of those old-fashioned, spherical goldfish bowls. Suppose the little fish swam round and round his blessed bowl until its frustration became unbearable. The fish decided to make a bid for freedom and leap out of the bowl. If it landed in a pond in your backyard, it would increase its freedom because there would be more water to swim in. But if it landed on the concrete or on the carpet, then its bid for freedom would spell death.
If fish were meant for water, what are human beings made for? It would be interesting if we had time to sit down alongside one another and share our answers to that question. If fish were made for water, what are human beings made for? What is the element in which human beings find themselves, as water is the element in which a fish finds itself?
I don't hesitate to say that according to Scripture the answer is love. Human beings are made for love because God is love. When he created us in his own image Gen 1:27, he gave us the capacity to love and to be loved. So human beings find their destiny in loving God, loving ourselves, and loving our neighbors.
It's not an accident that the first commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our being and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:30-31) because in obeying those commandments we find our humanness. A truly human existence is impossible without love. Living is loving, and without love we die.
That brings me to a startling Christian paradox: True freedom is the freedom to be myself as God made me and meant me to be.
God made me for loving, but loving is self-giving. In order to be myself, I have to deny myself and give myself to others in love. In order to be free, I have to serve. In order to live, I have to die to my own self-centeredness.
Michelangelo is recorded as having said, "When I am yours, then at last I am truly myself."
True freedom is the exact opposite to what many people think it is. Most people think freedom is freedom from responsibility to God and others in order that I may live for myself and be free. That isn't freedom. That's bondage to my own self-centeredness. True freedom is to be set free from my silly little self, in order to give myself in love to God and to my fellow human beings.
Conclusion
In conclusion, let me remind you that this is what Jesus himself taught. He taught it in one of his famous, favorite epigrams, which in the King James version goes like this:
"He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Matt 10:39
I used to think that Jesus was talking about martyrs who lost their lives in a good cause, maybe the cause of the gospel. Let me read the same epigram in more modern English:
"He who holds on to his life and refuses to let himself go will lose himself, but he who loses himself is willing to give himself away in love and in the service of God and others. In the moment of complete abandon, when you think everything is lost, at that moment you find yourself, and you are free."
