What does freedom really look like? What does being released from the Law truly mean? These are the questions that have been burning in my mind the past two weeks.
It all started when Billy, my squad leader, gave a talk at debrief on freedom. He talked about how God doesn’t want us to be doing things out of obligation to Him, and that is so true. Why would God want us to do things out of obligation to Him? If that was so, we wouldn’t have the choice to choose salvation, we would simply follow that path because we are obligated to. Anyways, I’ve really been thinking on this a lot here lately and God has truly shown me so much in my asking of these questions.
I know in my own life that I pretended and played church so much that legalism became very much engrained in me and that was just what I did. I played church because thats what I did to make things look good on the outside, but really was living a double life in which I was wallowing in sin and death. I followed that way of death for a long time and tried to live by the Law because thats what I thought was required of me.
After salvation, I still tried to live by the Law. There was a change in how I saw it, but it was not the best way I could live. I have been freed from the Law and in that, I have been freed from having to try to attain the righteous requirement that the Law brings. Christ died for me so that I could live a free life and so that I don’t have to try and be perfect or even try to live according to the Law because I can’t fulfill that requirement, only Christ can. Only through living life in the Spirit and walking by faith can I live a life that reflects Christ.
The hang up I had for the longest time with this was that I know that through Christ, I can do all things and that means living a life according to the Law if I so choose, but is that really the best way I could live? Is that really the most abundant life I could have? I am beginning to think not. The Law is good and holy, the Law is light because it shows sin for what it is and we wouldn’t know sin otherwise, but Abraham was considered righteous because of his faith, not that he tried to live life according to some rules, granted the Law wasn’t given until hundreds of years after him. I am a person that likes rules and the order that they bring, so I naturally clung to the Law because of that. However, I cannot continually put myself under the condemnation of the Law because as hard as I try, I can never completely obey the Law. I will at some point in life sin and in doing so have broken the entire Law, not just part of it. It is only through Christ’s death and resurrection that I am saved and that I can live life period. I like black and white kind of defined stuff, but our faith is so not black and white. God is not a god that we can define as being black and white at all. Of course, there are some things that are black and white, like the basics of sin separating us from God and there is no question about that, but there is so much about our faith that is a gray area and not strictly defined in Scripture. Evidence of this is just how people interpret the Bible differently in different sections of it.
A Scripture that really started this was Romans 4:14. “For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.” The promise being the promise that Abraham’s offspring would inherit the world. This shook me because I have been living a very legalistic life in putting myself under the law because that was comfortable to me, but I have not been called to a life of comfort. In Christ’s death, I died (which fulfilled the requirement of the law for my sin) and in His resurrection, I was raised with Him to walk in life and in freedom.
I don’t know what all of this exactly is gonna look like in my life, but I know that God is pushing me to step out of the legalistic mind set and step into the true freedom that He has for us. Freedom is what Christ died for. Freedom from the chains of sin and death. He died to bring us back to what we were intended to be, free to walk with God as we choose. Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden and thats what we were meant to do. Christ’s death has brought us back to that point and trying to live according to the law is taking that power away from Christ and making His death meaningless. If we try to live life according to the law, then we are trying to do it of our own power, or at least I was, and thats impossible.
I know that freedom is what I’m called to and I want embrace what the Father has for me. I want to embrace it wholeheartedly. I wanna give everything up for Him and go where He leads. I can’t do that and try to live according to the law at the same time, not because they are contrary, because the Law and Spirit come from the same Source, but my flesh and the law are contrary and so I can’t live by it. Only through the Spirit and walking with Him can I live life. Only through Him.
