Free Indeed
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Two hundred and forty-four years ago yesterday, the Continental Congress, representing all of the 13 American colonies of Great Britain, finished an all-nighter in Philadelphia, Pa.
The delegates to that congress had been sent by their home colonies to consider a document that had been prepared by Thomas Jefferson, a man from Virginia, with input from a five-person committee that included Benjamin Franklin.
I hope you will recognize these words from that world-changing document, which we know as the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
If we were living in normal times, many of us would have celebrated this 244th anniversary of the adoption of this Declaration of Independence yesterday by watching fireworks celebrations, attending Independence Day parties, heading off to the beach or engaged in some other act marking the freedom we proclaimed from Great Britain.
Ever since that day in July 1776, Americans have set aside the Fourth as a day on which they especially “Let freedom ring,” and I believe that it is right and proper for us to do so.
But I want to talk today about the matter of freedom, because it doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody.
Certainly in 1776, with slavery in America nearing its peak, freedom didn’t mean the same thing to African-Americans that it meant to their slave-masters.
And even today, with slavery and Jim Crow long in the nation’s rearview mirror, it’s clear that it doesn’t mean the same thing to all Americans.
Does freedom mean that we all have access to the same resources? Does it mean that we all have equal opportunity under law? Does it mean that we all have the right to the same levels of health care or to jobs that pay $10 or $15 or $20 an hour? Does it mean that we can refuse to wear masks in public in the midst of a pandemic or demand that cities set aside police-free zones where the law does not apply?
The very fact that we have to ask those questions reveals something about this nation that declared itself free of British tyranny 244 years ago: It reveals that this nation, much as the rest of the world, remains enslaved.
What I want to submit to you today is that the political freedom we proclaim — the freedom we celebrate and honor and even idolize — is a pale shadow of true freedom.
This true freedom that I want to talk about today is something separate and wholly distinct from political freedom. Where it exists, it does so apart from political power structures.
Throughout history, we have seen that it has been found in the greatest democracies and in the midst of the most brutal totalitarian states. It is held and honored and celebrated by people of all ethnicities, people of all economic classes, people of all political persuasions.
This kind of freedom does nothing out of selfishness or conceit, but instead compels us to think of others as MORE important than ourselves, and it calls us to look out for the interests of others, rather than for our own.
All who experience this freedom are indeed created — or, rather, re-created — equal; the CEO and the inmate and the mayor and the beggar and the housewife and the pastor — all equal before God as His adopted sons and daughters in Christ Jesus, the Truth who offers true freedom.
But the simple, heartbreaking truth is that most folks do not know this truth, and therefore they remain un-free; they are still in bondage — even, perhaps as they celebrated Independence Day.
So today, I want to talk about this true freedom, and I want to talk about the bondage, the enslavement, that Jesus, the unique and eternal Son of God, came to earth to end.
We’re going to be looking at a few familiar verses in the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel today, so you can go ahead and turn there if you have your Bibles.
But before I read today’s focus passage, I would like to go back to the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, which is recorded in the chapter 4 of the Book of Luke.
Let me read a few verses from that chapter for you to help set up our discussion from John, chapter 8.
And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding district. And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all. And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are oppressed, To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.” And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
We can look at this incident as a sort of declaration by Jesus. He was proclaiming to the people the purpose of His mission.
And what we see in the text that He read from the prophet Isaiah is that Jesus, filled with the Spirit of God, had been sent on a mission or mercy and grace.
He had been sent to preach the gospel, the good news, to the poor, to those who had not experienced the riches of God’s grace. He had been sent to proclaim a release for the captives, freedom from bondage to sin. He had been sent to give sight to those who were spiritually blind. He had been sent to free those who were oppressed by the impossible but just demands of the Law.
And He had been sent to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord. This was a reference to the Year of Jubilee that God had commanded Israel to observe every 50th year.
On the Year of Jubilee, those who had become slaves to pay their debts were to be released. Any land that had been sold from one tribe into another was to be returned to the tribe that God had given it to.
The point here is that Jesus was announcing in the synagogue that His messianic kingdom had come and that it would manifest itself in grace and mercy — in true freedom for those who were poor, those who were captives, those who were blind and those who were oppressed. In short, His kingdom would be one of true freedom, established in grace and mercy.
And it’s important to note that Jesus stopped reading before He got to the next line of this prophecy from Isaiah, the one that refers to “the day of vengeance of our God.”
God has given His Son all power and authority on earth and in heaven, and one day Jesus will judge the nations and all who have lived. But in his incarnation as the God-man, He came to offer reconciliation, peace between the perfect and holy God and the sinful and depraved race of mankind that had rebelled against God.
So, from the beginning of His ministry, Jesus was talking about freedom.
It’s important for us to recognize, though, that freedom didn’t mean the same thing to everybody then, any more than it means the same thing to everybody now.
Remember that Israel was no longer a nation at this time in history. Judah and Samaria, which would have roughly corresponded with the Southern and Northern kingdoms of Israel, were, at this time, simply provinces under the rule of Rome.
And just as our original 13 colonies chafed under the rule of an absent tyrant king, so the Jews hated living under the tyrannical rule of the Roman Caesar and his puppet governors and kings in Jerusalem.
So, many of the Jews longed for freedom from Roman rule. The hoped and prayed for a Thomas Jefferson who would declare independence from Rome and come with the army to back up the declaration.
But, as we glimpsed in this passage from the Book of Luke, Jesus had something else in mind when He talked about freedom.
So let’s turn to our passage in John, chapter 8, and see if we can get a better understanding of the kind of freedom that Jesus came to offer.
We’re going to pick up in verse 31 and read through verse 38.
So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that You say, ‘You will become free’?” Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. “The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. “I know that you are Abraham’s descendants; yet you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you. “I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father.”
The first thing to notice from this passage is the audience to which Jesus was speaking. John describes them as “those Jews who had believed Him.”
But then we see through the rest of the passage that Jesus did not consider these people to be true people of faith. “My word has no place in you,” he said. In fact, He knew they wanted to kill Him.
So we can see here that there are different levels of belief, and not all of those types of belief lead to salvation.
It’s one thing to know that there was a historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth. Almost nobody disputes that.
What these folks believed about Jesus was that He was simply a great teacher, perhaps even a prophet. Those are the kinds of things the world is willing to admit about Jesus today.
But those are not the things He claimed for Himself. At the end of this chapter, in verse 58, we see that Jesus said, “Before Abraham was born, I AM.”
I AM was the name that God gave for Himself when He spoke to Moses from the burning bush. It is the covenant name that we know as Yahweh, and it denotes that God is eternally and completely self-existent. He was never brought into being, and He does not require anything from anyone else to sustain His being.
And when we link verse 58 with verse 38 and the rest of Jesus’ teaching from earlier in the chapter, what we see is that He made a clear and bold claim to be not just the Son of God, but equal to God.
The Jews to whom He spoke here were not willing to accept that, and they were unwilling to accept it for much the same reason that most of the world is unwilling to accept it today.
If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, then you will continue in His word, you will remain in it, you will keep it, you will abide in it.
The people who were following Jesus at the time were disciples in that they were learning from Him. They were being taught by Him.
But the true disciples — the true followers — would be those who would continue in His word. They would know the truth, and the truth would set them free.
So, we ask the question that Pontius Pilate asked: What is truth?
There is truth in the statement: I love my wife. It is true that 2+2=4. It’s true that I love bacon.
But Jesus described Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He must have meant something more.
Among the things that He meant was that He is the perfect representation of His Father. He is the image of the invisible God. Everything that God the Father is, Jesus is. He does what His Father does, and He says what His Father says.
It means that He is perfect in all His characteristics — in HIs holiness, in His justice, in His righteousness, in His mercy and in His love.
And so, what Jesus was saying here is that continuing in His word — staying true to His commands and clinging to the faith that He is who He said He is — will give you access to the most important Truth of all — the Truth of the Father in heaven who loves you.
And knowing this truth — not just knowing ABOUT Him — but knowing Him personally through an ongoing personal relationship with Him through Christ, will make you free.
So, here we have to understand freedom, and Jesus knew that this term doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody, so He had a quick answer when the Jews answered that they weren’t slaves.
Notice that they appealed to their ancestry in their response. “We are Abraham’s descendents,” they said, and this gives us a clue to what made then simply people who believed some of what Jesus said, rather than people who believed IN Jesus.
As children of Abraham, they considered themselves rightful heirs to the covenant that God had made with Abraham of a land, a people, and a blessing.
They considered themselves to be right with God because they were descended from Abraham and because they had kept the Mosaic Law. They didn’t think they had any need to be freed from spiritual enslavement, because they were righteous in their own eyes.
But then Jesus said that everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The Apostle Paul wrote that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. We are all sinners, and therefore, we all were bound to sin.
Even as believers, we find ourselves drawn back to it.
In his letter to the Roman church, Paul wrote about this. “For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.”
Paul recognized that he was a slave to sin who had been purchased from his bondage, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ, who gave Himself on that cross at Calvary to pay the debt that we all owe for our sins.
So this freedom that Jesus talked about in today’s passage is the freedom from bondage to sin. And the only way to become free from that bondage is to be freed by the Son.
To the Jews who were listening to Him, His remark about the house would have been especially incisive.
As Abraham’s descendents, they thought they had access to the household of God, to God’s kingdom.
But what Jesus said was that they were not true sons and daughters of Abraham because they didn’t do the deeds that Abraham did. After all, children should be good representatives of their fathers, just as Jesus was the perfect representation of His Father in heaven.
And so, what were Abraham’s deeds? Well, among other things, he was a frequent liar. Remember that on at least two occasions — and probably more — he pretended his wife, Sarah, was his sister in order to protect himself when they went into new territory.
So Jesus wasn’t saying that Abraham was righteous by his the way he acted. What Scripture tells us is that Abraham had faith in God, and God counted THAT to him as righteousness.
It was Abraham’s faith in God — and, by extension, in God’s Son — that Jesus was saying the people should copy.
If they did, then they would no longer be slaves who were put out of the household, but sons and daughters who would remain there forever.
The people revealed that they did not have that kind of faith, because they sought to kill Jesus. He was speaking the things that He had heard from His Father; He was doing the things His Father had shown Him.
But they were doing the things of their father, who he said plainly in verse 44 was the devil.
He was telling them truth, and He was giving them words of life.
But they would speak lies about Him and murder Him on the cross. They were children of the devil, the liar and murderer who coaxed Adam and Eve to sin in the Garden of Eden and who convinced Cain to murder his brother, Abel.
And from that first bite of the forbidden fruit, mankind has been doing the deeds of its father, the devil. From that first bite of the forbidden fruit, mankind has been enslaved to sin, powerless, but by the grace of God, to do good.
We all have some mixture of good and evil within us, but there is no part of us that isn’t tainted with the evil of sin and the curse of death that it brought upon us.
But Jesus came to proclaim release to the captives, to set free those who are oppressed. Jesus came so that we who follow Him in faith — we who continue in His word, rather than continuing in sin — can be free indeed.
We were like heroin addicts when it comes to our sin. A heroin addict must have a radical intervention from outside his or her life in order to break that drug’s hold, and without that radical intervention, the addict will eventually die from the addiction.
Sin is the same for us. We cannot break its hold on us. We are stained with the blot of original sin in every part of our being. Only the blood of Jesus Christ — His death, burial, and resurrection — could wash us clean.
But just like the heroin addict, even after having been cleansed of our sins through faith in Jesus, we still experience the drawing power — the enticement of sin. We can still choose to pick up the needle again and submit ourselves to slavery, to give up the freedom we have in Christ.
Brothers and sisters, I can tell you from having seen it happen that it is truly heartbreaking to see a rehabilitated heroin addict after he has chosen to pick up that needle again, to watch him trade his freedom for a brief high.
And it’s truly heartbreaking to realize that you’ve traded your freedom in Christ for the brief pleasure that your old sins might have given you.
What can you do? James put it this way:
Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.
Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord. Mourn over your sin. Recognize that you do not have the power to resist the devil on your own.
You have your freedom only through Christ and you have the power to resist temptation only through the Holy Spirit. Humble yourself before Him, and seek His help.
The Apostle Peter put it this way:
Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world. After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you.
I think sometimes we do not suffer enough. When temptation comes, we just give in. But Peter tells us that we should resist it to the point of suffering, because the God of all grace will confirm, strengthen and establish us when we do.
If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you have been freed from enslavement to sin. Now, be willing to suffer for that freedom, even as He suffered to purchase it for you.
Remain in His word, and you will know the truth of His righteousness. You will recognize the lies that temptation tells you — that it’s no big deal, that you’re not hurting anyone, that God’s grace frees you to live however you want to live.
If you have been made free from the power of sin by the Son, then you have been made free to live as the person God made you to be.
Don’t go back to who you were. When temptation comes, draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.
Pull an all-nighter with Him if necessary. Spend your time in prayer and reading His Word. And then let your true freedom in Christ ring.