The word “free” is one that we hear often around this time of year (on/near July 4th). Lately, I’ve heard it so much that I found myself thinking about how the word can mean something very different to two people who are not all that different (like my husband and me). Every time I tell my husband that I have a “free” drink on my Starbucks gold card, for example, he gives that look that says, “Oh, no, there’s nothing free about it!” And in a real sense, I know that he’s right. I had to purchase a certain number of drinks in order to get the free one (and those drinks certainly weren’t cheap). The reality is that it cost someone; this life here always does.
I then pondered too what God says about being “free.” From his perspective, our freedom is clearly tied to his son Jesus. If we choose to believe what God tells us about who his son was (and is) and what his son did on our behalf, then we are free, at great cost. Yes, someone had to pay. Someone always has to pay in this life down here; and Christ did. And for those of us who do choose to believe (unlike Jesus’ earliest followers), we begin to “see” God because we’ve believed; we don’t believe God because we’ve seen. No, we’ve never seen nor touched the costly scars on Christ’s body. Yet, we believe. And God tells us that we will be especially blessed by him because we do believe without ever having seen his Christ.
Similarly, we “do” because we’ve become; we don’t become because we do. In other words, in God’s words, we’ve become a new creation through what his son has done; and as such, the actions that we consistently choose in this life are colored, or at least should be, by that newness, by Christ’s action. No, we cannot “behave” ourselves into “free” status. Have you ever thought, “If only I could be free of this thing or that thought, of this temptation or that trial, of this envy or that evil…..then I’d be such a good Christian”? In Christ, we are indeed free (in his “deed,” not ours)–it just doesn’t feel like it sometimes. But, our feelings are not trustworthy at all; feelings betray us. We don’t really have to feel free for it to be true. In order to feel free, however, we really do have to believe that all God says about Jesus is true.
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