Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: How to Be Free (Galatians 5)
Date: May 28, 2023
One of the more badly cliched ideas floating around out there about freedom is that freedom isn’t free. As cliched as the idea itself may be, though, it is nonetheless true. Freedom always has a cost associated with it. That cost has to be borne by someone. If you were not the one to pay it yourself, then it was paid by someone else. That’s simply the nature of freedom. It never exists on its own terms. It is consistently provided by someone else.
Now, that last idea may strike you as a bit of a head scratcher. After all, if freedom is given to us by someone else, that would imply that we owe that person a debt of some kind. And, if we owe someone a debt, then we aren’t really free. We’re simply slaves of another kind. Still, this idea is true all the same. Free people are free because someone has made them that way. Before then, they were not free. They—we—were beholden to one master or another. We were so beholden and we could not free ourselves.
That’s kind of a big idea, so let me put it in context. Let’s take a quick mental field trip to the American Colonies in the early 1770s. You are an average colonist living in the King’s territory of North Carolina and you hate the fact that you are ruled over by a King from across the ocean who has no idea what your life is like and yet insists on his divine right to tell you what you can and can’t do, and who can (and does) use the power of the state to seize your hard-earned money to fund his tyrannical exploits across the world. What can you do to free yourself from that particular form of slavery? The answer is nothing. You can’t take on the King by yourself. And if you move out of that territory into the various and wild lands to the west or the south, you are only going to put yourself under the control of the French who claim the Louisiana Territory, the Spanish who still lay some small claim to parts of Florida, or one of the various Indian tribes who will just as likely kill you as not, and it’s hard to be free when you’re dead.
How, then, do you come to enjoy the freedom as an American citizen you have a few years later? It is won by those who laid down their lives in rebellion against the tyranny of the English crown. That is, it was given to you by others. Our freedom has always been given to us by the sacrifices of others. They sacrificed themselves in the 1780s and in 1812. They did it again in the 1840s and the 1890s. Differing notions of freedom led to a particularly disastrous pursuit of it by opposing forces within our own nation in the 1860s. Thankfully the more robust understanding of freedom won out. The same call to defend freedom not immediately for ourselves, but for our allies across the sea arrived yet again in the second decade of the 20th century as well as in the 1940s. Then came one long slog for freedom against the most repressive ideology ever conceived by humans when it exploded out of the Russian revolution against a tyranny of another kind and began looking hungrily at the world with aggressively expansionist plans. Those battles were fought in Korea and again in Vietnam. In the 1990s and the early 2000s through just a couple of years ago we faced a different but equally dangerous and murderous totalitarian ideology in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today still history has brought us a familiar rhyme as an old foe of freedom has again grown strong in Russia and, more significantly, in China, that will likely yet bring the need for yet another sacrifice by many to preserve the gift our nation has enjoyed for nearly 250 years. As President Reagan reminded us, freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction.
As far as our nation is concerned, this sacrificial gift has always and primarily been given to us by those brave men and women who have served in our various armed forces. Our debt of gratitude for them is great indeed. This weekend—and especially tomorrow—is a time we have long set aside to honor their sacrifice and reflect gratefully on what they have given us. This is particularly true for those who have given their final full measure of devotion; a sacrifice whose full reward won’t now come until the kingdom of Christ arrives.
This morning I want to ask and seek to answer a fairly simple question together in light of the time. How should we respond to such a gift as we have been given by those who have served to guarantee and safeguard our freedom as a nation? Well, on weekends like this one we hold remembrances and ceremonies and remember names and tell stories and the like. Those are all good and important things. But there’s something I think is even more important than all of that in a bit more ultimate of a sense. You see, if you are a follower of Jesus, you have a freedom that is far more precious than what we have as citizens of this great nation. And that freedom came at an even greater price than did your freedom as an American. The apostle Paul had something to say about the proper response to this greater freedom, and his counsel actually speaks to the right response to both kinds. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way to Paul’s letter to the Galatian believers. When you get there, turn to Galatians 5. We’ll start right at the beginning of the chapter.
Galatia wasn’t a town or a person the way Ephesus or Philippi or Timothy or Titus were. Instead, Paul’s letter to the Galatians was to a whole region of churches. It was a kind of church network. Because they were all connected like this, they were all dealing with some of the same issues such that Paul could write one letter addressing all of them. The short version of Paul’s message to them was that they needed to stop trying to add a works-based element to their understanding of salvation. They were wrestling with sneaking in some of the ways they used to think about getting right with God into their new understanding in Christ. By doing this, while some clever teachers were doing their best to convince them they were taking hold of their salvation in a way that made them more of an active participant in the process, they were actually making themselves less free in Christ by moving themselves back in the direction of the law that once dominated their lives. Galatians 5 finds Paul offering up the final punch of his argument before wrapping things up in chapter 6. Listen to what he had to say here.
“For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Let’s just jam on this idea for a second. Notice that what I said just a second ago about freedom fits with what Paul says here. Freedom isn’t just something you have. It is given to you. If you are free in Christ, you are free because of Christ. He has given that freedom to you. Okay, but like we said a second ago, doesn’t this just make us slaves of Christ instead of slaves of sin like we were before? Well, according to Paul in his letter to the church in Rome, yes, it does. Well then, how is that any better? Exchanging a bad master for a better one still means you have a master. I thought being free meant you had no master.
The truth is that’s merely an incredibly common misconception of the nature of freedom. Let’s chase this rabbit trail for just a minute, because it is necessary to get to where we are going this morning. I have been studying through the book of Exodus recently in my personal study time, and I recently spent some time looking at Moses’ exchange with God at the burning bush. When God introduces Himself to Moses for the first time and Moses asks for His name to be able to gain a hearing with the Israelites, He tells him that His name is Yahweh. Your Bible probably puts it like this: “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.” There is obviously lots and lots that could be said about this, but for our purposes right now, the key thing to take away from God’s self-identification with Moses is that God is the foundation of all reality. In philosophical terms, God is a necessary being. He has to exist for the universe and everything in it to exist. Everything else in the universe is contingent—that is, it is dependent upon Him for its existence. In other words, God is the right and proper master over all of creation. It is all subordinate to Him for the very reason that He created it. It would not exist without Him. Creation—including you and me—was built to have a master, and a master it will have. If our master is not God, then we will invariably find another one. We might try to fool ourselves into thinking we don’t have one, but we do even if our master is simply our own desires.
So then, freedom is not about having no master at all like we are taught to believe by the world, but rather it is about having the right master who gives us the most spacious boundaries within which to live and move and find our being, to quote Paul’s message at the Areopagus in Athens in Acts 17. Paul’s argument throughout Galatians is that the boundaries afforded to us by Christ are the most spacious there are. That is, we can find the greatest amount of space to do as we please (with the single caveat that doing as we please necessarily includes remaining within our boundaries) in Christ. Our ability to make meaningful and consequential choices is greater with Jesus than it is without Him.
The Galatian believers, though, were struggling with the idea that maybe they could find an even greater freedom apart from Christ, or at the very least in addition to Christ. They thought that by adopting some extra rules that Jesus didn’t actually give us, they would give their freedom more of a clear definition. The specific issue that was receiving their attention was called circumcision, and Paul comes back to that in this passage several times, but that doesn’t matter so much right now. The point was that by trying to look for freedom in places other than Jesus—and in this particular case, they were looking for it in the Law of Moses—they were not actually going to find it. In seeking freedom in places other than Jesus, they were necessarily relying on what they wanted whatever form that happened to take. It may have seemed benign or entirely more sinister, but either way, they were not going to find the freedom they were seeking there. Worse yet, by pursuing freedom in these other places, they were at risk of losing what they already had. This is what Paul was getting at a few verses later when he said in v. 13: “For you were called to be free, brothers and sisters; only don’t use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love. For the whole law is fulfilled in one statement: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you bite and devour one another, watch out, or you will be consumed by one another.”
The mistake the Galatian believers were making was that they thought they needed to fulfill the Law of Moses before they could really become followers of Jesus rather than relying on His having fulfilled it for them.. At least, that was what they were being taught. And these false teachers were slick enough that they were convincing not a few of them to buy into their deceptions. We buy into the same kinds of things today. Most notably, we buy into this delusion that freedom is really all about being our own masters, of having no one who is in charge of us. When we’ve bought into this, we quickly and easily fall prey to the thinking that if we want something for ourselves that Jesus has said through one of the guys the Holy Spirit inspired to contribute to the New Testament that we shouldn’t have, then He is restricting our freedom. It is necessary for the sake of freedom for us to get it for ourselves anyway. But it’s a lie. It’s a trap. We grab it, yes, but then we find ourselves in a mess of sin in which our ability to make meaningful and consequential choices—choices we might identify as “free”—has been reduced.
Maybe a different set of terms will help this all make a bit more sense. Let’s say you’ve gotten married. You’ve had some kids. But things aren’t what you might call “great.” You feel like your spouse keeps putting all these demands on your time when you’d really rather be doing something else. After a while, you’re sick of this. Then you meet someone. And they’re willing to listen and go along with whatever you want to do. This other person doesn’t put any restrictions on you at all. It’s great. You feel like you have so much freedom in this other relationship. You start to more and more resent the lack of freedom you have in the restrictive marriage relationship you’ve been living in for years. And so eventually, you leave it. You leave your spouse. You leave your kids. All in pursuit of freedom.
When you’ve done all of this, are you more free now? Did you get what you were seeking? You didn’t, did you? Your ex-spouse now expects even more from you, and isn’t particularly inclined to give you any kind of a break when you don’t do it. The state now tells you how much and when you can see your kids. It also tells you how much money you can’t spend because that goes to your kids. And if you don’t follow through on what the state tells you to do, they’ll come put you in jail where you really won’t be free. By leaving behind the spacious boundaries of your marriage relationship—something you did because you spent so much time hanging on the fences, looking out at what looked like the giant pastures on the other side of the fence, but which were really tiny paddocks ringed with mirrors designed to make them look deceptively larger than they actually are, that you foolishly convinced yourself the mirrors weren’t real—you didn’t find more freedom. You simply lost the freedom you had before. You traded it in for something less.
What Paul is getting at here, and the conclusion to which I’ve been trying to lead us this morning, is that the best response to a gift of freedom (and just by the way, marriage is a gift, not a reduction, of freedom as our culture would have us believe) is to live with it. All life exists in relationships. All relationships have boundaries. A free life is found in living with the most spacious set of boundaries possible. If you have been given the most spacious set of boundaries there are, the boundaries of a relationship with Jesus, the best response to that gift is to learn to live comfortably within them.
Paul actually lands on this point decisively at the end of chapter 5 here, but he does it in such a way that it often gets overlooked because what comes just before it gets so much attention. Starting in v. 16, Paul calls the Galatian believers to live by the guidance of the Holy Spirit and not merely what it is they want for themselves. The reason for this is made clear in his list of the kinds of things we want for ourselves when left to our own devices. It’s the longest list of vices you’ll find anywhere in the New Testament. There’s all kinds of ugly stuff on the list. But then he shifts gears on us. He lists out the kinds of things someone who is following the lead of the Holy Spirit in living within the spacious boundaries of our freedom in Christ is going to pursue. He uses an illustration for this list that is super memorable. He calls these things the fruit of the Spirit. You’ve probably heard this before. Say them with me: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” And that’s where most of our study of these two verses ends. We wax long and eloquently about these various virtues and what they look like and how we can have them manifested more fully in our lives and so on and so forth.
But the verse isn’t actually over when we get to “self-control.” There’s just a little bit more there. Look at how Paul wraps up his list. What’s he say next? “The law is not against such things.” Another translation puts it like this: “Against such things there is no law.” Laws are boundaries, right? We know that. The more laws there are, the more boundaries we have; the more narrow our boundaries become. When we live as we please and do all the things on Paul’s negative list what happens? Well, given that all of us live out our lives in the context of a society where we have to get along with other people, when we are doing what we please all the time, those other people around us are going to come together to put in place laws that make doing those things officially illegal. They’ll make it such that doing them carries a social and even legal consequence intended to discourage our doing them. If we do them anyway, the consequences will be enacted and our freedom will be limited. But whether the consequences get enacted or not, the very fact that we have more laws than we used to have before we decided to do as we please means our boundaries were already shrunk down a bit. In other words, we were less free.
But what did Paul say? When it comes to things like these fruits of the Spirit, there is no law against them. There’s no law against being more patient with other people. No one is ever going to legislate against your being joyful. Kindness will always be legal. We could keep going, but do you see where we’re at here? The best way to respond to the gift of freedom is to live like you have it. If you have been given the gift of freedom—and we have all been given a gift of freedom at one level or another—the best way to honor that gift is to do the kinds of things that keep you within the spacious boundaries of that freedom. If you try to leave them behind because you’ve bought into one delusion or another that you’ll be able to find greater freedom somewhere else by living in a way other than your freedom demands, you’ll wind up with less freedom in the end. Being a free people requires living as a free people.
Free people don’t take from others because they know they have the ability to provide for themselves. Far from being merely a tentpost of some kind of rugged individualism, though, a free people understand that the things they need to enjoy their lives to the fullest extent possible are best provided by other people who are also free. There is a mutual benefit to their social cooperation. Free people don’t depend on anyone else to give them what they need because of their awareness of greater provision that comes from the mutual cooperation of their community working together toward a single goal that benefits everyone. Free people are kind to one another because they have an inherent sense that kindness like that has a way of coming back around on us. What’s more, if everyone practices kindness toward one another, you don’t have to put restrictive measures in place that seek to discourage acts of unkindness. Free people don’t take advantage of one another. If you take advantage of someone, they’re going to be less likely to trust you the next time. A lack of trust makes relationships more difficult, and when relationships are more difficult, it’s harder to get what we need to get along well in life.
Do you see how this works? A people that is truly free willingly pursues living virtuous lives; lives in which things like the fruit of the Spirit bloom and grow and bear their sweet fruits because they understand that living in such a way allows them to maintain their freedom indefinitely. Freedom is never taken away from a people. It is always and only given away. It is given away when they stop living like they are free. Being a free people requires living as a free people.
Freedom is indeed a precious gift. It is a costly one. Our freedom in Christ came at the cost of His life. Turn this around for a second and put yourself in the driver’s seat here. If you have given someone a precious gift, how are you going to feel if they take that gift, abuse it, neglect it, and finally throw it away in order to get a cheap substitute instead? You’re going to be furious, yes, but mostly just hurt. You’ll be heartbroken at this indicator that they really don’t love you as much as you love them. Because if they did, they would demonstrate it by honoring the gift. Now, God doesn’t share our insecurities, but He is still heartbroken when we take the gift of freedom He has made available to us in Christ and treat it like a trinket. This is especially true when once we have accepted the gift for ourselves. Being a free people requires living as a free people. Nothing less than that is a proper honoring of the gift we have been given.
In light of all this, climb down the ladder of abstraction with me back to where we started this whole journey today. Our nation is the freest nation the world has ever known. There is not a close second. And the freedom we enjoy and far too easily take for granted came at a great cost indeed. It has come and been preserved at the cost of tens of thousands of the lives of the incredibly brave men and women of our armed forces over the nearly 250 years of our history. If we are going to not simply honor this great gift and the sacrifices that made it possible, but preserve it for future generations such that maintaining it isn’t quite as costly as it was to achieve it in the beginning, that is going to require us to live like free people. Being a free people requires living as a free people. This doesn’t mean relishing the pathetic current cultural definition of freedom as being able to do whatever we please, but in the much more robust sense of willingly doing what is right and good for the sake of the people around us. Or, to go back to what Paul said: “For you were called to be free, brothers and sisters; only don’t use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love.”
Being a free people requires living as a free people. Imagine if our nation got this right once again. Imagine what an inspiration we could once again be for the whole world. Imagine how our example could topple totalitarian governments around the world as their people rose up to claim for themselves what we have. That may or may not be something we can do all by ourselves, but we can live as free people in our own spheres of influence, demonstrating for the people around us who may be tempted to buy into the lie that there is a more robust freedom available somewhere else what the real thing really looks like. Being a free people requires living as a free people. Let us honor the gift we have been given and be truly free.