Do you ever feel trapped by life? I do. Sometimes it feels like I have no control over the things going on around me. It feels like I’m in a story that someone else is writing, and I have no say over what happens to my character in that story. I think we all want more freedom in our lives. There are so many TED talks and self-help books out there telling us how we can get more freedom. Maybe it’s freedom to retire early. Maybe it’s freedom from clutter. Maybe it’s freedom from our struggles with our weight or our struggles with self esteem or our struggles with our finances or our struggles with addiction or our struggles with (fill in the blank).
But what is freedom? Oftentimes, we define freedom as “being without restraint.” We think if we could just go where we want and do what we want without any consequences or with only positive consequences we would be truly free. The Bible defines freedom a bit differently. Biblical freedom is the ability to respond to God as the person God created us to be. Biblical freedom is living life exactly as God designed us to live it. It’s full expression of all the talents and abilities that God has placed in us from the moment of our creation. When we are fully expressing who we were created to be, we will have freedom.
So how do we become the person God created us to be? Well, first we have to know who we are. When you purchase a product, it typically comes with an instruction manual. The creator of that product knows what he/she created it to do. They instruct you on the proper use and care of that product so that it reaches its full potential. We are no different. God is our creator. So He knows what He created us to be and to do. We can try all we want to define our identity in some other way–by what we do, by what we think, by what we feel–but the truth is that only God has the right to define us. We find out who we are, not by how we feel about ourselves or how we see ourselves, but by how God sees us and how God feels about us.
God’s view of us defines us and gives us our identity. When we are saved, we receive our true identity in Christ. We are restored to our “factory settings.” Our spirits function as they would have functioned if Adam and Eve had never sinned. We are back to the purity of the Garden of Eden from a spiritual standpoint. So why do we still struggle with things like addiction and oppression and a lack of freedom? It’s because 1) we live in a world still tainted by sin and its consequences and 2) we have an enemy who seeks to undermine everything that God has planned for us. When God created Adam and Eve, He gave them dominion, or authority, over everything that happened on earth. When Adam and Eve sinned, they handed that authority over to Satan. So Satan is the one with authority over everything that happens on earth right now. That’s why he is often referred to in Scripture as the “god of this world.”
Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf created a legal loophole for us to regain dominion and authority. As God, Christ had the ultimate authority to act as God’s representative on earth. Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 28:18 that “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.” In Luke 10:19, Jesus passed His authority on to his disciples. In Christ, we now have authority over all the works of Satan. Paul says that when we are saved, God “rescued us from the dominion of of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves.” (Colossians 1:13)
So in Satan’s mind, we used to belong to him, and God has kidnapped us from Satan’s kingdom and taken us to a new kingdom. What would you do if someone kidnapped your child? Wouldn’t you be tenacious in trying to get them back? Wouldn’t you use any and every weapon you could find? Wouldn’t you explore every legal option, every open door, every opportunity to regain your child? Well, we can think of Satan the same way. He wants nothing more than to have control over us. He will be tenacious in trying to undermine what God is doing in our life. He will use every weapon he can find against us, every legal option, every open door, every opportunity to try to get us to renounce what God has done and to win dominion over us again.
Galatians 5:1 tells us “it is for freedom that Christ set us free.” God does not want us to be in bondage to Satan or to sin. He wants us to be free. Christ said in Luke 4: 16-21 that He fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah to “proclaim good news to the poor, freedom to prisoners, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Since Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, we know that His mission has not changed. It is still Jesus’ mission to set us free.
The first step in finding freedom in God is to “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). By definition, we can only seek one thing first. Everything else we seek will fall underneath what we seek first. Whatever we seek first has the authority to govern and order our lives. We are all seeking after something first. Something has the preeminent position in our lives. Something is governing and ordering our lives. When we are focused on our anxiety, even if we are seeking freedom from that anxiety, anxiety takes the position of the first thing in our lives. It’s what we’re thinking about all the time. So then the rest of our lives is governed by this anxiety. If we’re seeking escape from something, our lives will revolve around attempts at escape. That’s why God tells us to seek Him first. When God is first, He has the preeminent position in our lives. That means that God governs and orders our lives. 2 Corinthians 3:17 tells us that “the Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” When we put God first, freedom naturally follows.
Freedom, then, is not the absence of something: addiction, fear, etc. It is the presence of Someone: God. Our job is to seek God, and in seeking God, He will provide freedom. It may not be all at once. It may be a process of God working in our lives, but by allowing God to do what He wants to do in us and through us, we will find the freedom we seek.
A Beautiful Mess 