I once heard Merle Haggard give an interview where he talked about his early run-in with the law. He commented that had he had a good lawyer he probably would have gotten off. He went on to say, “Freedom’s only free if you have enough money to pay for it.” Those words have stuck with me.
We live in the greatest nation in the world but we too often misunderstand the concept of true freedom. Society wants to define freedom as the absence of laws. People ought to be able to do what they want. When they say that they really mean, “I ought to be able to do what I want.” No one wants their neighbor to do everything they want. They only want their neighbors to have “freedom” so long as it does not interfere with their own life choices.
The Bible paints a very different picture of freedom. Paul writes often about believers being slaves to Christ. That does not look like any picture of freedom that I have seen. So what is freedom in the Christian sense? Freedom is used to talk about our freedom from sin and the power that it holds over the unbeliever. Christ died to give us freedom but far too many of us want to live in the old life because it was easier or more familiar. Remember the slaves that Moses led from Egypt quickly told Moses that they should just go back to Egypt and into the slavery there. They assumed that the life of a slave was better than the life of a free person. As believers we have the freedom to serve God with all of our heart, mind and body. We are not free to make ourselves happy. We are free to make God happy. At this time of year remember that our freedom was not won fighting the British. Our freedom was paid for on a cross just outside of Jerusalem. Because of that freedom we can make a Kingdom difference.
