Do You Want to be Free?

I want to start off with a story that, until now, I’ve only told a couple of friends and my wife. I tell it so you know how personal this is for me. It was early October of last year, and after staring at my computer screen for too long, I decided to take a break and watch a sermon that a friend had recommended. The sermon was rooted in the text of John 5 and the story of Jesus healing a disabled man at a pool. In this account, Jesus famously asks the man who has been disabled for 38 years, “do you want to be healed?”. The preacher spoke powerfully about how the lives of believers today often resemble the man’s futile efforts at trying to get into the pool more than they reflect the radical healing of Jesus. His words were filled with the Holy Spirit and were hitting my heart deeply. Toward the end of the sermon he related the 38 years the man had been disabled to the 38 years the Israelites wandered in the desert, which ended up being significant to me personally. Almost an hour into the sermon, after joking about how the Jewish leaders were more concerned about the man picking up his mat than they were about how he got up off the mat, he said something to the effect of “that’s because religion is interested in method, not manifestation, but you were born for manifestation!” After that he stopped suddenly and said that he felt the room shift and started praying in tongues and calling out specific healing that was happening in the room and in people watching online. This is quite a bit outside of what has been normal in my church experience, and while I believe that God moves this way, I admit that I can be skeptical sometimes. However, while my skepticism was at an all-time low, I suddenly felt an overwhelming weight of emotion come over me and began to weep while standing up at my desk. I had such an intense awareness of his love, his goodness, and his nearness that I couldn’t help but just sit down, hands in the air, weeping. In the moment, I couldn’t have cared less who saw me or what consequences might come from my unorthodox office behavior. As I was sitting down weeping, I heard him say to me, “You were 38 years old when I took you out of the ministry. I’m setting you free.”

Biblically speaking, healing is just a form of freedom. But both point directly to God’s character as Healer and Liberator and his intense desire to deal with and remove whatever is keeping us from living the way he designed us to. If this is truly his desire, it begs the question, what do we need to be set free from? A solid Christian answer would be “sin”. It’s true! In the context of John 8, where Jesus tells us that “the truth will set you free”, sin does seem to be what Jesus promises freedom from. But what does that really mean? If so many church going Christians aren’t experiencing radical freedom from sin and instead have settled for attempting to manage sin by their own power, should we just lower our expectations for what freedom really looks like?

I think that a common misstep is to think of freedom primarily from the “wages” of sin versus the “power” of sin. Romans 6 tells us that the “wages of sin is death”, and praise Jesus that we don’t have to receive what we’ve earned. But 1 Corinthians 15 tells us that “the power of sin is the law”. So, if we’re going to experience freedom from the power of sin, we need freedom from the law? Yes! That can be a bit confusing. How can that which is good also be the “power of sin”?

Let me first explain whether this is even applicable to us. I will not go in depth, but most Christians believe that we are not required to follow all of the rules of the Mosaic Law. However, rules make a lot of sense to us, and in a desire to honor Jesus, we have an affinity of making the New Covenant into a New Law. The reason we do this is because it’s typically how we understand authority. Just like with our boss at work. Do a good job and earn favor. Do a bad job and fall out of favor. Because this is our worldly view of authority, we read the scriptures through this lens and assign a character to God that is more like a CEO than like Jesus. In opposition to this, many churches have emphasized grace to practically (and incorrectly) function as the “easing of rules” from legalism to the flexible four of 1) going to church on Sunday, 2) reading your bible, 3) praying, and 4) trying to be a good person.  The problem with ALL of these understandings is that we relate to God based on some set of rules rather than the gifted identity, position, and status of being his sons and daughters, and NONE of it produces the outcomes God desires.

And while the law is not the enemy, the enemy uses the law and finds opportunity through the law to arouse sin in us and lie to us about who we are, who God is, and how God feels about us. So, the power of sin is the law, and the way sin uses the law is getting us to relate to God based on rules. This moves us into an understanding of God that depicts him as performance oriented. Which makes him seem transactional in our minds. These views can be subtle, but they are SO common. Once the enemy gets us to see the Father this way, we become extremely susceptible to his lies. “You’re not good enough, you need to try harder” is one of his favorites. Once we get used to hearing the enemy’s voice he hits us with the killers, “You haven’t obeyed well enough to hear my voice or have me answer your prayers” and “I’m disappointed in you”. This is the result of relating to God based on rules and it’s not long before we are on the hamster wheel of religion just trying not to disappoint God. No wonder people run from this!!! The hamster wheel continues because the law causes us to look to ourselves for the answer and become self-reliant, rather than looking to Jesus. The law produces self-reliance that either leads to shame or self-righteousness, while the law of the Spirit leads to a dependent expectation of his power.

Performance based relationships are a breeding ground for insecurity. And this insecurity developed through the law produces a guilty conscience that KILLS intimacy. We must be freed of our guilty conscience before we can be freed of anything else. I had a close friend tell me one time, “Mark, you’ve lost the right to identify with your own level of righteousness”. Theologically I knew this, but insecurity and always comparing myself to others revealed that I didn’t know it very well in my heart. The best way to honor Jesus is not to perform better, but to meditate on him and remember that it was truly his performance that made you righteous. Religion hates this because it is afraid that it won’t lead to repentance and holiness. So, it uses fear and guilt to achieve good performance. Why? Because it believes good performance is what he wants! This grievous misunderstanding of God will NOT lead to freedom.

You will never feel safe around someone who is judging you based on your performance. You might if your performance is better than enough people to convince yourself that you’re “good”. Sometimes we love the law because it’s just a way to be better than other people. But there is no freedom there, just more chains of comparison that keep us from loving. “Good performance” will never make you feel safe enough to be brutally honest and childlike before God, and it’s this honesty and childlikeness in knowing you’re loved that leads to the kind of intimacy that truly brings freedom. Freedom is not the goal but just a consequence of knowing you’re loved, and therefore, a mere indicator of how much we’ve truly received him.

I share these things because they are deep and subtle truths that radically affect our lives. They deeply affect my life. When I heard God tell me, “I’m setting you free”, I knew he was freeing me from trying to perform for him because it was keeping me from REALLY knowing him. But there was a small part of me that was a bit offended. “Aren’t I already free?” It reminded me of the religious leaders in John 8 who couldn’t admit they needed freedom when Jesus was telling them how it would come about (knowing the truth, i.e. knowing Jesus relationally). Are we willing to admit that we need to be free?

Jesus wants his love to set us free from performance-based ways of seeing him. Free from insecurity. From comparison. From fear. Let us trust him enough to relate to him based on the identity he died to offer us. Beloved sons and daughters. I’ve heard it said, “The kingdom isn’t about being first, it’s about being free. And you’ll know you’re free when you don’t care about being first”. Free not to think about yourself so much. Free to love.

“For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under the law, but under grace.” (Romans 6:14)