The Christian's Glorious Freedom

You may have been a Christian for some time and yet not grasped your new status in Christ. You may still be intimidated by the domineering character of the tyrant who once ruled over you.

Believers sometimes wrongly assume: “I have sinned; therefore, sin still has authority over me. I cannot possibly have ‘died’ to sin.”

Paul unambiguously contradicts this thinking. Sin has no authority over anyone who is in Christ. You are no longer under its dominion. You have received a new identity. You have died out of that old kingdom. You have been raised through Christ into the new kingdom where He—not sin—reigns. From this vantage point, you can look back to your former king and his kingdom, and say: “You once ruled over me, but no longer. I am a citizen of the kingdom of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He alone reigns over me now.” You may not yet be what one day you shall be; but thank God you are no longer what you once were (Rom. 6:17–18).

Paul asks the Roman Christians: “Don’t you know this? Was there a slip-up in the teaching you were given? Around the time you were baptized and came into the fellowship of Jesus Christ, did no one tell you that this is what it means to be a Christian?”

Perhaps that was true in some of the early churches. Believers did not always know these things. Perhaps no one told them. If so, it is all the more likely to be true in contemporary churches. Perhaps no one has explained to you that no matter what Tyrant Sin, in all his various guises, may say, we are no longer under his dominion. He no longer has grounds for blackmail. He has no right to paralyze us into thinking that we can never make any real advance in the Christian life because we will never be free from this prevailing sin.

I enjoy reading crime novels and have frequently relaxed on long journeys by reading the novels of Margaret Perry. Many of them are set in nineteenth-century London.

One of her central characters is a detective named William Monk (not to be confused with the American TV detective Adrian Monk). His life and adventures are made the more intriguing by an event in his past. While a police officer in London, he was thrown from a horse-drawn cab driven at high speed. Monk survived but lost his memory. As a result, he finds himself in situations where he is at a great disadvantage because he has no memory of what happened to him in the past. He does not know who he really was, so he does not clearly understand who he really is.

That is a basic problem for many Christians. We lose touch with the person Scripture says we really are. Perhaps we never really understood that becoming a Christian meant receiving a new identity in Christ.

Paul is saying: “Christians of Rome, you need to understand who you really are. You are people with a new citizenship. You are no longer under the dominion of sin. That makes a radical difference to the way you live the Christian life. It releases you from captivity.”

It is easy to read this passage, and say: “Paul, you are not talking about me. I certainly don’t think of myself as someone who has died to sin.”

If that is true, a serious accident has taken place. You are like William Monk, constantly in situations you cannot handle properly because you suffer from spiritual amnesia. You do not clearly understand your identity in Christ. You are always trying to piece things together, but never getting the picture clearly.

But when you begin to understand that in Christ you died to sin and have now been delivered from the dominion of sin; that you are no longer under its bondage; that you no longer need to be a victim of its subtle paralysis—then you find yourself saying not only “Isn’t this amazing grace?” but “What glorious freedom Jesus Christ has bought for me on the cross.”

The Undaunted Message of Freedom

“I think, therefore I am.” René Descartes penned this popular line in his 1637 treatise, Discourse on the Method, and it’s a good summary of the book itself. Heralding the importance of scientific discoveries and the necessity of doubting one’s own view of the world, Descartes’ work is often considered the first domino to fall in what is now called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, with its explosion of scientific discoveries and philosophical arguments, had one task: to replace authority and tradition with reason and self-sufficiency.

For centuries, the existence of a divine being beyond our realm was largely assumed. When people talked of events in their lives such as miracles, disasters, and everything in between, they spoke of it as the will of some divine being. They were always looking vertically for their answers to life’s most essential questions. The Enlightenment, however, proposed that we must look horizontally at what is observable around us for such answers. Many of the questions that were settled for so many years became fair game in the eyes of the “enlightened” culture.

In regards to Christianity in particular, the Enlightenment hastily rejected any talk of divine authority or supernatural occurrences. While Christians believed so that they could understand reality, Enlighteners demanded that they only believe what they could understand. This seismic shift in worldview permeates our culture today, leaving Christians uneasy about the world and the world uneasy about Christians.

So although Enlightenment brought distrust for the authoritative claims of Christianity, we as Christians believe that we are servants of a God who has defined what is objectively true. What God says, who he is, is true reality for all people forever, whether a person accepts it or not.

But for the modern mind, this is foolish. Truth is not objective, but subjective, they say. In other words, it is constantly changing as we gather more data and learn more about the universe around us. Truth is often defined as what is best for the individual. If one man thinks it is acceptable to marry another man and you don’t, that’s your opinion. Your truth versus mine. And you can’t tell me otherwise. That’s the great escape of modern thinking.

To society, it is laughable that Christians gladly call themselves “servants” of God. Submitting to such an overarching authority is imprisonment, they must think. Christians are shackled by the very One who claims to set them free. Beyond all this, there is simply no observable, factual evidence that this God even exists. You can see their problem, right?

But for the Christian, being a follower of Christ is much more than adhering to a factual statement. We don’t simply say, “I’ve weighed all of the evidence and believe that the highest probability is that the Christian God exists.” That may be part of it, no doubt. But the hearts of believers experience more than a mental assent — there is an inner burning for the glory of the God who saved us. The apostle Paul tells us this in 2 Corinthians 4:3–6.

We are not simply fools chasing a unicorn through fields of four-leaf clovers. We have received “the knowledge of the glory of God.” This is why God’s authority is not an affront or an attack on our freedom. God has revealed himself to us through Jesus, and through Jesus we see that true freedom exists in submission to him in whom are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11).

The Enlightenment wasn’t entirely bad. In many ways, its focus on the mind should both embolden and humble us. In an age where God is not a foregone conclusion, we are driven to take Peter’s words seriously when he warned us to be ready to respectfully and gently give a defense for our hope (1 Peter 3:15). And we are reminded that we cannot simply sit on the sidelines and hope that people show up to our worship gatherings. We must humbly go, both to the ends of the earth and across the street.

The effects we feel today from past ideological shifts are neither a surprise nor a roadblock to God. He is in control. As such, the gospel frees us to abandon both fear and self-righteousness, to push aside gimmicks and coercion. No brow-beating or salesmanship required. We carry with us the message of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18–19). We get to join the mission of a God “who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).

As the truly enlightened citizens of the Kingdom, we get to marvel as God shines his light into the darkness of lost hearts, just like he did our own.