What's a Biblical perspective on freedom?

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Hi friends,

In the summer of 2014, I directed a week-long “Summer Institute” for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) on the theme of “Freedom: Dream or Delusion?”

Throughout the week of preaching, teaching, and discussion on Wheaton College’s campus, we explored how ‘freedom’ is understood.

Is freedom the right to do as we please, without the restraint of finances, other people, or even morality?

Or is true freedom the ability to live for God without the restraint of sin?

Little did I know how vividly Ravi illustrated the conference theme with his life - preaching the freedom to live for God while secretly practicing the freedom to live as he pleased!

This experience came to mind as I read this provocative quote in Richard Bauckham’s book, The Bible in the Contemporary World: Hermeneutical Ventures:

I have long thought that the understanding of human freedom must lie close to the heart of any fruitful Christian engagement with contemporary western culture.

It seems to me an issue with which Christians have so far failed to come to grips, despite some use of such attractive but ambiguous terms as liberation. A notion of freedom as freedom from all limits, which began to take shape as early as the Renaissance, has spawned a variety of key features of our contemporary world, including its hyperindividualism, its consumerism, its excessive suspicion of all authority, its alienation from nature, the atomization of urban life and the problem of chronic loneliness, even the rejection of God.

Freedom has trumped goodness as a supreme value. Freedom from has usurped the more important value of freedom for. An understanding of freedom that is incompatible with limits or belonging has sacrificed relationships and contentment to ludicrously unrealistic dreams of individual fulfillment.

However, one of the challenges in discussing a theme like ‘freedom’ is that this simple word carries such deep rhetorical power.

For our entire lives, we’ve been inundated with messages promising us freedom. If only we would vote a certain way, buy a particular product, marry the right spouse, take a nice vacation, retire with wealth… the list goes on and on.

But over time, we start to believe these messages. We might verbally proclaim our resistance, but what do our lives reveal?

And when our “freedoms” become our “rights” and expectations, we have a blind spot.

So, it is challenging to come to terms with what we take for granted as our “rights”—much less reimagine what it would look like to experience the freedom to live for God.

How would you define freedom?

Do you see freedom as freedom from any restraints to do as you please?

Or do you see freedom as freedom from the restraint of sin - so you are free to please God?

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This is so important to talk about for this discussion. No matter how confident I am in my definition of freedom, I am often tempted through these constant messages and my own sinful desires to believe and live as though freedom meant doing whatever I want whenever I want.

Yet following craving after craving that can never satisfy, can never be freedom. The Bible speaks to this so clearly when it talks about slavery to sin. What seems to promise life instead only leads to ruin and death, a pattern that can be seen over and over again in the Bible as well as over and over again in so many lives.

So, though I’m often tempted to believe otherwise, I know that true freedom is freedom from sin. It comes through the death and resurrection of Christ, by which we’ve been made a new creation, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who enables us to truly live as we were created to, according to the Spirit and not according to sin.

For me though, the hardest part is the continued struggle to put to death our sinful nature that Paul talks about in Romans 7-8. And I long for the day that I’ll live fully in freedom, made perfect in new creation at Christ’s return!

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