To Find Freedom
As we reach for God’s Word each day we find love, we find someone in whom we can trust, and we find a hope that never dies. And there’s more – the Psalmist writes this in Psalm 119:45: “I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts.”
Are you spiritually free?
Many people think that the Christian life is a life of bondage and restriction. They think that Christianity is all about avoiding certain pleasures. That a Christian is one who is boring because they are tied to a certain moral code.
God's Word: A Path to True Freedom and Joy
But the truth is it is actually the life without God that is a life of bondage and restriction. The Bible speaks of humankind being in bondage to sin. We are compelled by our sinful natures to do things that we weren’t designed to do. The broken world around us messes with us and compels us to take God’s good gifts and distort them into godless ways. This is what sin is – it is taking something God designed for good and twisting it for our own pleasure instead of for God’s glory!
But God’s Word shows us how to avoid all that. All those Old Testament laws and rituals were made to bring freedom – they were in place because if God’s people lived that way, they would avoid twisting God’s good gifts into something selfish and sinful. They were like barriers put in place to help God’s people running off the edge of a cliff.
God’s precepts and guides in the Bible are put in place to keep us close to God. And it is when we are close to God that we find ultimate joy, ultimate peace, ultimate freedom!
Kevin Youngblood said it like this: “Contrary to popular opinion, freedom is not the ability to do whatever one desires. This inevitably leads to enslavement to one’s own passions. Rather, the Bible defines freedom as the ability to deny one’s self, to deny one’s desires in the interest of pleasing and glorifying God.” (Holman Bible Dictionary p6387).
Freedom in Christ: Breaking Chains, Finding Joy
You see, Jesus came to enable us to do this – to free us from our enslavement to our own passions. Once we put our hope in Him, and our faith in Him, our desires change and instead of living for our own pleasure, we live for His glory and we find ultimate freedom and joy doing that.
Friends, come to Jesus. Give your life to Jesus and be set free from the bondage of selfish living. Reach for your Bible every day so that you can be guided in a free, godly way of life. Then you will discover that Jesus’ words were true: “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
