The word freedom is thrown around as if its about picking your pleasure of the day or the ease with which you can travel around the country. But the kind of freedom Galatians 5:1 and John 10:10 offer is a deep soul freedom that has nothing to do with where you live or in what conditions you live in.
You might live your whole life and never know freedom because you can’t understand freedom until you are faced with losing everything if you choose to believe what those verses say:
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” -Galatians 5:1
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I [Jesus] have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” -John 10:10
Rejecting “a yoke of slavery” and having life “to the full” is about personal freedom. It requires being honest first with yourself and then with others.
You must shed false pretense, ditch your own games and willingness to play other’s games, refuse to go along to get along when it means lying or hurting someone, stop calling something one thing when it is clearly something else.
Whether you’ve taken these steps or not, you know that the personal cost is very high. You’ve watched others suffer for speaking truth in the face of untruth, misremembering and likely seen them removed from the group.
The world will always demand that you must be willing to deny ever increasing elements of the truth about yourself, about God, and ultimately about Jesus in order to keep what it gives you.
It starts with small personal sacrifices like trading time with your family to work, participating in talk or activities that make you feel uncomfortable, thinking that your team is above some of the rules others must play by because you all deserve it, telling “white lies” to “protect” others.
Somewhere along the way you’ll take part in shaping a new god to replace God. Your little “g” god will have mastered you: money, sex, gossip, alcohol, prescription drugs, street drugs, food, popularity, grades, position, or something else.
Those gods start as temptations. They are not necessarily evil or even wrong. They are just the gateway to the sin that will bring you down. If your enemy can get you to create a god for yourself, it’s an easy push to pride.
Pride is the enemy’s “money maker.”
Once you’ve set up the new personal god(s), it takes ever increasing levels of pride to maintain them. The next step is to deny your Savior. If you are secure in all those personal gods that keep you comfortably numb, the real God of the universe seems optional, maybe even obsolete.
Rejection of Christ rarely comes in the form of a dramatic proclamation – “I don’t need Christ.” No, you’d see through that.
To know personal freedom, you must have a servant’s heart and daily reject the gods that lead to pride. It’s costly but worth it.