FREE TO LIVE A FREE LIFE — free as the sky

Galatians 5:1-6, 13-18 (The Message)

1 Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.

2-3 I am emphatic about this. The moment any one of you submits to circumcision or any other rule-keeping system, at that same moment Christ’s hard-won gift of freedom is squandered. I repeat my warning: The person who accepts the ways of circumcision trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law.

4-6 I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.

13-15 It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

16-18 My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness.

Apostle Paul gives an “emphatic” warning and offers what life of freedom really looks like.

“For freedom, Christ set us free.” This statement from Paul is congruent with Jesus’ “mission statement” (in the words of prophet Isaiah) from Luke 4:18-19: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”

This is one reason I am so drawn to Jesus! He is forever the ultimate defender and uplifter of the underdogs. “The poor, the captives, and the blind” were the underdogs in the culture in Jesus’ time, because their predicament was believed to have been a direct result of their sins and thus God had rejected them and had withdrawn God’s blessings from them. Conversely, being rich was believed to be a direct blessing from God. Thus, Jesus’ words upset these widely accepted beliefs. Later, Apostle John succinctly captures Jesus’ powerful words, “The Truth will set you free” (John 8:32). John also does not fail to grasp Jesus’ own punchy line, “I am the truth” (John 14:6).

Paul is absolutely clear in making the distinction that freedom is neither self-seeking nor self-indulging (e.g. “I get to do whatever I want to do or whatever pleases me,”) but in its practices and ultimacy toward and for others. Paul warns us that unless we embrace and live for others, we will “destroy” our freedom. This false freedom can and will destroy our true freedom. Paul goes on, “The free spirit is incompatible with selfishness.”

“Freedom gives and serves, while selfishness hoards and adds. The purpose of freedom is to do good.”

Living under “the rule-keeping system,” “the obligations of the slave life of the law,” and “your own religious plans and projects” are what Paul starkly calls the “old message” and slavery. Rather, “What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.” Paul calls the Galatians and the later saints to “use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows.”

The old messages of “rule-keeping systems,” “obligations,” and “religious plans and projects” are still alive and well, and they can put us and others in bondage. Matters turn grave when the old messages become the accepted norm and thus heralded blindly, putting others under the slavery of what Walter Wink calls, “domination systems.” We “fall out of grace” and are “cut off from Christ” when operating out of these old messages. Often times, old messages don’t start out being bad or old, but the exact opposite. Initially they can be noble and even necessary. But over time, they morph into old messages, if exercised without the freedom in Christ that sets us free. Keeping our eyes open for the entrapment and illusion of old messages is part of the freedom discipline and part of the freedom for which Christ invites us to fight for. There is a poignant truth that while Jesus always forgave individual sinners, He neither forgave nor succumbed to old messages and domination systems.

FREEDOM

must be undergirded by love. Freedom is always subservient to love.

The ultimate barometer of our freedom lies in the unselfish, outward, and others-oriented action founded on love. In this case, our external behaviors and actions flow directly from our interiority. One way to gauge our inner freedom is to observe our external behaviors (without pride or self-condemnation but with honesty and self-compassion) because they are the true reflection of our interiority.

Back in 1998, I took my family to Singapore for a 2-month break (it was supposed to be a furlough, but at the time, I did not know or have the tools for rest and renewal…soul care was a foreign concept for me then). While we were in Singapore, I learned that one of my (notice I am saying my) staff decided to move on to some other ministry. I remember having a difficult time with it internally and was forced to deal with the loss. In the following days, I eventually realized that I was operating under the harmful premise that the ministry of the Korean American Center for World Mission was mine. “How dare God move one of my staff workers to some other ministry!” was my honest thought at the time. What blasphemy and danger! I confessed my sin and released not only the staff but the Center. I still vividly remember a clear bodily sensation of freedom I experienced when I “opened my fists” and let them go. Years later, I came across what Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun, captured in her book, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love, “Personhood is the freedom to be oneself and to love what one is without possessing one’s being; to know oneself in another.” That is the great paradox: freedom is the unconditional-others-directed-love, which is the true reflection of our interior freedom. Freedom is serving others in love.

The Truth that sets us free is not a concept or a carefully constructed belief system. It is a Person! The Truth is not this or that, but a Who. It is Jesus Christ!

“It is impossible to find Truth without being in love.” -Abraham Joshua Heschel

Could it be that the truths we have come to know and accept in life are Personal characteristics of Jesus Himself? The Truth cannot be and refuses to be downgraded to knowledge. Knowledge and Truth are not the same. While knowledge is about knowing something or someone, Truth is knowing the Someone. Knowledge can lead us to the Truth but can never be a substitute for the Truth.

Ilia Delio wrote, “Wisdom is knowledge deepened by love.”

We know the Truth through being perpetually in love with Jesus. That is wisdom leading to the Truth at work.