Dwight Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth President of the United States, said, “If you want security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care, and so on. The only thing lacking is freedom.”

Many who speak of freedom convey a freedom that is limited and managed: “Freedom is the power to choose your own chains,” felt Rousseau. “There ought to be limits to freedom,” the forty-third POTUS stated. “You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness,” postulated Frost. And of course, Jefferson’s: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

I have no idea how many sermons I’ve heard about freedom in Christ, freedom from the law, from sin, from damnation, from demand; freedom to live, freedom to be; freedom with God, freedom in the Spirit, even freedom to sin because I’m forgiven.

Freedom is sought, and celebrated—impoverished, and limited.

And not just theologically. The same is true sociologically as well, mentally and emotionally too, and certainly physically.

Knowing that freedom exists, humankind is always straining at the harness to break free from bondage—real or perceived—into true freedom. Malcolm X preached, “Nobody can give you freedom. If you’re a man, you take it,” while Frankl spoke of the final freedom: freedom of choice.

I wonder: Do we long for freedom or do we long for the idea of freedom?

Whatever freedom may be, freedom does not appear to be free and its partakers do not appear to be carefree.

No. Freedom is governed—by either control or responsibility.

Control: Those in power want to stay in power. They can do that with vision or they can do that with legislation, either legal or illegal. This is true of government and this is true of every individual.

Responsibility: “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” So said Sigmund Freud.

Consider freedom in Christ: With salvation, you are set free from your sinful nature—an inherent disposition that is rebellious toward God, cursed, and alienated from God. To be separated from God is to be of no redemptive value, to be irretrievably useless to God; to be utterly, irrevocably, and absolutely on your own in this life and the life to come.

This condition is so grave that only God can remediate it… if He chooses.

To be distant from God is so problematic that Saint Paul spends the first eight chapters of his Romans treatise considering whether or not there is any justification—from God’s perspective—of life to degraded, destitute, debauched, and distant humankind. And if so, at what cost?

We celebrate that God determined justification of life for humankind was worth the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In Him, we are justified, sanctified, redeemed, given life, and filled with the Holy Spirit. Our old self is crucified with Christ, a new person is raised, and we who were in bondage to sin are set free to walk in a new life and in a new way of living.

Freedom!

This freedom is Good News. It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Yet, the passage of Scripture that speaks the most directly about freedom in Christ, Galatians 5, is also the most graphic, pointed, hostile passage of Scripture. It is set within the most angry, intense, confrontational book in the Bible.

What is the concern that Galatians is addressing?

It is the failure of Christians to embrace freedom, the costly freedom that cost Jesus Christ His life. Instead of taking freedom in Christ to heart, the Galatian Believers attempted to mix freedom and bondage. Paul said anyone advancing this false gospel should be cursed—and to be certain his point was not lost on his readers, he proclaimed his curse twice in his opening chapter.

Freedom in Christ was simply too much for the Galatian Believers to adopt. Freedom was too hard, too amazing, too remarkable to absorb into their souls.

So, they sought to manage spiritual freedom by diminishing the “finished” work of Christ with control measures, i.e., legalistic requirements. In their practice, Christ’s sacrificial work fell short, leaving them less than justified. To make up Christ’s [perceived] shortfall, their effort was necessary to fully achieve justification. Whatever remains unsanctified will be remediated with physical death—or so their human reasoning went.

As it turns out, their freedom was too grand.

Ironically, freedom left the Galatians feeling less-than secure. In their insecurity, they reverted to ritual, routine, and legal standards to earn God’s favor. “When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither,” said Jefferson. Paul put it like this in Galatians 3: “You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?”

What is it about freedom in Christ that’s so overpowering that it creates feelings of insecurity?

The same two governances: control and responsibility.

Under the control of your fleshly, independent ways, your only appeal is to religious practice, i.e., your ability to prove yourself worthy of God’s favor. This was the Galatian philosophy that irritated Paul so badly. Subservient to the dominion—the control—of your self-resourcefulness, you operate under dramatically limited resources—an insufficient effort by Jesus to justify you before God—and your ability to freely relate to God is… well, it’s controlled and the wildness that is His Spirit is harnessed.

Reference the early quote by Frost. To the Galatians it was easier to control God by limiting freedom than to enjoy God through their endowed freedom.   

Responsibility: The remarkable, amazing, inspiring message of God’s grace is that you are free—free from demand, limitation, and the barriers of separation and fallenness. It’s glorious theology.

But to what end?

Your freedom is to know God without impediment, pretense, or charade. In truth, the only [control] variable is whether or not you will seize this response-ability and wholeheartedly embrace your freedom to know God personally.

Viktor Frankl realized from his trauma in the Holocaust camps that the most powerful freedom he possessed was that of personal choice. This was a freedom that even Nazi brutality and internment could not steal or diminish.

Responsibility to choose is the most basic freedom, Frankl concluded. Responsibility is your response-ability, your personal responsibility.

It is an amazing ability to respond to God’s offer of salvation. “Yes,” you said, and entered into His grace and mercy and family.

As profound as this is, we speak of this salvation, forgiveness, and new identity as the deeper life. But this is not accurate.

The death of your old self, forgiveness of sin, declared a new creation, and filled with the Spirit: these are the endowments given to you at the moment of salvation. This is the beginning point, not your destination.

Just as Christ’s offer of salvation begs a response, so does the spiritual freedom granted to you.

The only thing God does not possess, and the only thing you can supply that He will not provide for Himself, is your “Yes” to His offer of vibrant relationship. The Gospel is not only salvation. It is also God’s hope that you will seize your redeemed response-ability and connect with Him personally, not simply to get you to heaven, but to know Him closely here and now.

Freedom in Christ means you have the ability to respond to God, to truly know Him, walk with Him, and live in vital union with Him. Freedom in Christ means that you are joined to Christ and relate to God as Christ relates to God.

This is grace and grace is remarkable, astounding, glorious, and inspiring because it means that you, once fallen, are now free to respond to God in friendship, family, and close connection.

All that remains is your response.

Yet, this freedom is so incredible that it is intimidating, incomprehensible. Surely this magnificence must be managed into containment. No telling what might happen if the wildness of God got loose!

The insecure feeling surrounding God’s magnificent invitation to join Him and His life, as opposed to simply being with the Galatians in their lives, is what tripped the Galatians in their walk of faith. Thus, they sought to control freedom in Christ with religious stipulations. Instead of soaring in freedom with God, they confined God to their personal concepts of life.

You are secure in Him. You do not need to cede control to your own devices, i.e., your fleshly patterns. You are free to take responsibility—with no risk—to pursue outright a vibrant relationship with God, where He lives and dwells, which is far more expansive than where you live. The intimidation of freedom is its magnificence, not its risk.

It is one thing to embrace that God lives in you and believe He is there if you hit a rough patch. In this, God is limited to what limits you.

It is quite another thing to embrace that you live in Christ, to believe that you go where He goes, engage what He engages, sharing in His dreams and aspirations.

In Christ, God became man. Through the redemptive work of Christ, you became a partaker of the divine nature, Peter states. Whatever this may mean in its entirety, I don’t know. But among other things, this is astounding. To choose this freedom unleashes the Spirit of God with you bound to Him inseparably.

When I consider God’s decision to grant justification of life to me—even while I was still a sinner—I want to say, “Thank you, but what were you thinking?!”

The only answer is so simple it is astounding. To paraphrase the balance of Scripture, I think God’s reply is, “I gifted you with life and freedom because I wanted you to be where I am, enjoying what I enjoy, going where I go, living beyond your mortal, mental, and emotional confinements, to get an early jump on eternity together.”

Your freedom in Christ makes this not only possible, but your freedom to respond to Him is the true desire of your heart—and it is the true desire of God’s heart as well. Herein is His rationale for justification of life for you.

In summary: The Christian life is not your salvation, your identification with Christ, or even being a recipient of God’s grace. These are the beginning elements of the Christian life.

To seize upon your freedom is to grasp your response-ability to join your heavenly Father, learn His ways, understand His heart, and walk where He treads.

This is the burden of the Christian life: to live in Him, not simply believe He lives in you. As Paul said, “I determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ” (cf. 1 Cor. 2:2).   

Plato believed that once upon a time mankind possessed wings to fly with God. But when humans chose darkness, their wings were clipped and they fell to earth. Plato, who lived four hundred years before Christ, had no concept of salvation or even mankind’s fall in Eden, but his image of the human condition captures an aspect of redemption useful to our embrace of freedom.

Having been made free, our wings are restored. We may walk with God in this life—but we may soar with God in this life and the life that is His. This is our response-ability.

Responsibility.

Of course, every human system tells us we are not meant to fly. We are meant to shuffle through the dust from which we were made.

Control.

But Freedom!

The unfettered ability to fly with God.

Response-ability.