Last week in Freedom That Lasts we had an abbreviated service and were not able to cover a full lesson. Lord willing, we’ll be able to cover what we missed when we meet again this Friday. In the meantime, I would like to cover at least one important point in our upcoming session.
The final lesson in our series called New Creature Realities is “Freedom is Home Plate.” The main point of that lesson is that humility + hearing + obedience always equals freedom. It is a proven formula that always succeeds. As I mentioned before it is peanut-butter-and-jelly simple. Our problem is that we in our pride want to customize God’s plan for us and then we wonder why our lives become such a sticky mess.
When we go off on our own, we like to think that we are independent – captains of our own destiny. Scripture disagrees. In Romans 6:16 Paul asks an important question:
Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants [slaves] to obey, his servants [slaves] ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin [which leads to] death, or of obedience [which leads to] righteousness? (Romans 6:16)
The truth is, we are all servants to someone or something and we always become like the someone or something we serve. I cannot cover all the Old Testament examples of this, but if you look in books like Ezekiel, whenever God describes the idolaters in Judah, He always notes how much the idol worshippers become like the idols they worship. The idols had eyes but could not see, ears but could not hear, feet but could not move and their worshippers were just like them. They could not see God’s truth no matter how plain God made it to them; they would not hear God’s truth because their pride resisted it; and they were incapable of being moved toward repentance because, like their idols, their hearts were made of stone.
God created us as dependent creatures. Try as we might, we cannot get away from that aspect of our nature. Because we are dependent creatures, when we don’t make ourselves dependent on God, we become dependent on the wrong things: money, drugs, pleasure, celebrities, Facebook likes – the list goes on forever because there is nothing that completely meets our innate dependence other than God.
We are all slaves to someone or something and we always become like the someone or something we are slaves to. The question is: Am I a slave to Christ or am I a slave to someone or something else?
The only kind of dependence that leads to freedom rather than more bondage is dependence on Jesus Christ.
Grace in Waves 