The Apostle Paul declared in
Galatians 5:1, “It was for freedom that
Christ set us free”.
As a Christian, under New
Covenant Grace, do you have the freedom to do anything you want, and yet not
sin?
It depends on how you answer
the question.
Does God or man have
absolute freedom? No! Neither God nor man has absolute freedom. God cannot do
whatever He wants! You might say, “Blasphemy!” But consider that all freedom
has a context, even God’s. Although God can do whatever He wants (“with God
nothing is impossible”), yet what He does is always consistent with who He is;
and He therefore always acts consistent with His character for He can do
nothing contrary to His own character.
God is a Free Being. God is
an Independent Self. God has Free-will. God is absolute. His character is that
of absolute holiness and purity. He acts consistent with His perfect character.
God is absolute but He will not, He cannot, act contrary to His character. The
context of His freedom is always Love. God is free to be who He is; God is Love
and therefore always consistent with His character. Absolute freedom would
imply that God could do something inconsistent with His loving character, and
thus deny Himself.
What about man? God did not
create us to be like Him. He created us to receive from Him. In order for man
to understand who he is and how he was intended to live and function as God
designed, we must always start with God. He is always to be man’s point of
reference.
Does man have freedom to do
whatever he wants? Yes and No! If you answer the question from an either/or
mindset –you would be wrong to answer “yes.” However, if you answer the
question from a both/and perspective and answered “yes,” you would be correct.
As we have seen, freedom always has a context, both for God and man. What is
the context of freedom as God intended man to be?
We could say that freedom
has responsibility. Please don’t misrepresent the word ‘responsibility’ as
something you have to do. We might say that, a person who is responsible has
responded to an ability, “response-ability.” Freedom is responding to His
ability. Christian ‘responsibility’ is our faith response to God’s ability.
Faith is our receptivity to God’s activity.
A responsible Christian only does or acts in freedom when he or she acts
in harmony with what the dynamic life of Christ is initiating in them. Anything more or less would be sin or
license.
I can hear someone ask at
this point; well what will this kind of freedom look like in real life? I am
often asked, “How do I live like that?”
My answer is usually, “I
don’t have any idea.” However one thing I can say with certainty is that it
will look unpredictable, as unpredictable as God Himself.
However, God’s purpose from
the beginning, as seen in Adam, was the indwelling presence of God’s “breath of
Life”. God’s highest purpose for man was
“the outlived life of God”. For man to choose to live in loving dependence on
God, deriving all that man needed from God, in a beautiful experience and
expression of the “abundant life” of God in/as/through man. God’s purpose for
man was to experience and enjoy the fullness of the dynamic Life of God through
His grace activity through man trusting and believing day by day.
Christians are volitionally
free, but not free “to do” anything that comes to their mind if they are to
function in the freedom that God designed for man. Religion often views freedom
predominantly as freedom from something but Christian freedom
is the freedom to love and serve others.
The context of freedom
always loves because God is love, and our behavior as Christians is to be a
loving expression of His loving character through us. God is “for others” and
therefore the attitude of freedom is never focused on oneself but others.
Too often the focus of man
has been on performance rather than function. God’s functional design was that
man would be receptive, which is what faith is, receptive to all that God had
planned and purposed for him even before the foundation of the world. It is the
very life of the risen Lord Jesus living and reigning in the Christian that allows
him to experience the freedom of grace that God had desired for man. Freedom is
never found or experienced outside functionality as God intended.
The Christian therefore can
choose to do whatever he or she wants, and not sin as long as the expression of
character or behavior has been initiated by Christ as one’s life. So Christian, you are as free as Christ has
made you to be. “Act as free men, and do
not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God,”
1 Peter 2:16.
Don Burzynski © 2013
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