A New Devotion - Freeing Freedom

Here's a new devotion that I wrote. You can find a recording of this devotion at the bottom of the page.

Romans 8:1-11

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law — indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

Freeing Freedom

For some reason that I just don’t understand, a lot of Christians really don’t like spiritual freedom. In fact, the idea that Jesus Christ has set of us free from the law of sin and death makes them so uncomfortable that they begin to reimpose some of the very standards from which we were set free. Of course, these folks still pay lip service to freedom, and often their new law is extremely inconsistent and applied in a very selective way. Still, they create a new set of standards and dogma and apply it as a way to determine who’s in and who’s out, you know, to do God’s job and to separate the sheep from the goats right here and right now. You see, these believers just aren’t able to accept spiritual liberty and so they do the best they can to enslave freedom itself.

But that’s the exact oppose of what Paul told the Romans to do. I mean, instead of encouraging them to impose new limits, he instructed them to trust the movement of the Holy Spirit within the individual and to allow that Spirit to guide the person in the way he or she should go. You see, instead of limiting human response by instituting a whole bunch of humanity-inspired rules, he wrote about claiming Christian liberty and then deciding to live a God-centered life. In other words, he challenged them and his words challenge us to put aside our desire to reimpose burdensome and shifting law and to free freedom.