This week I tried out a new small group from the church I’ve been visiting and a reoccurring theme seemed to crop up again and again as we were discussing John 8.
Jesus replied, ‘I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. John 8:34-36
It was in these two verses I saw something that is warring within my at all times. I have had so much confusion and experienced so much friction within me that stemming from these two truths.
I still continue to sin, which makes me a slave and yet Christ has freed me so I am truly free. Do you see how this could be confusing? I have been completely freed and yet I am still a slave in the process of being freed. Being two seemingly opposing things seems impossible.
As a small group we began to discuss this state of tension we are in, freed and yet still being freed. These two stages can’t co-exist in my mind and yet I see these truths play out in my life everyday. It is exhausting. I spend so much time beating myself up for choosing sin because I know better. I have encountered Jesus and I know that I have been bought. My sin cost my God to come to earth as a man and take on His own wrath for me. Shouldn't this astonishing and completely remarkable truth be enough to motivate my away from sin? And yet it doesn’t. Talk about frustrating.
As I was sharing my frustration someone shared a simple truth that created that moment of clarity and peace. This would be the scene in he movie when the lights shine down and angels sing. I was gently reminded that this state of tension between earth and heaven, redeemed and brokenness, freedom and slavery is exactly where I am supposed to be right now. Of course I have had friends patiently reminding me of that for years but I seem to completely wash this truth out of my heart regularly. Every time my heart is washed in this truth my soul is refreshed and renewed.This seemingly incompatible state of transition is compared to child bearing in Romans 8. Paul says,
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subject to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.
I love that. I remember when my sister went into labor and crazy stir of excitement and joy gripped our family. We weren’t rejoicing because of the labor but what was to come, life! From what I have heard labor is hard and painful work but the life produced is so amazing and worth it. This state of tension that we live in, or the child bearing stage, is right where we're am supposed to be. My hope is what is to come and that is what has saved me.
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“Son,'he said,' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.”―C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
