For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. | Romans 6:20–23
In the sermon on Sunday, we looked at the story of Jesus healing the man with many demons. At the end of the story, the people see what Jesus has done and they push Him away. They ask Him to leave. They are afraid of the power that He has shown. The takeaway should be: if Jesus can heal him, he can also heal me! Instead, the power that heals is rejected as ‘scary.’
While this is not surprising, it is something worth thinking about. Jesus shows that He has the ability to heal even the most extreme cases of corruption and bondage. Here was a man who was entirely controlled by evil and Jesus gave Him his life back. Of course, the freedom Jesus offers is not an invitation to do whatever you want. It is transferring a person from being an enemy of God to being a child of God. Paul describes this, in the verse above, as going from being slaves to sin to slaves of God.
If rightfully understood, this is a great move. Being a slave to sin is a fruitless life that ends in death (meaning a complete breakdown of all relationships). Being a slave to God is a life of sanctification and eternal life (a perfection of all things). Sin traps us and puts us on a path toward full and complete destruction, but Jesus rescues us, heals us, and secures eternity in perfection. Seems like an obvious choice.
The struggle is that to follow Jesus is to give up control. It is a life of submission to our Creator and Redeemer. We want the choice to be between slavery and autonomy. We want to have control over our lives. That is not an option. We will either be slaves to sin or slaves to God. The seductive lure of sin is that it makes us believe that we are able to maintain authority over our lives. It destroys us while convincing us that this is a better option than living for God. There is an old saying: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. The corruption of sin often leads us to choose the devil we know over the Savior we can’t control. We are more comfortable to keep living in destruction than to commit to something better.
This is about sanctification as much as it is about justification. In other words, we make choices everyday where we choose to either trust in God’s way and follow Him (even when it may not be how we would act naturally) or to follow our hearts. We are often willing to keep going in a destructive direction, simply because it is what we know.
I see this all of the time in counseling. People come to me because they know something is wrong. Often they can even articulate the problem. As soon as they hear the ‘cost’ of repairing it, they start defending their issues. I have watched people who spent an hour describing why they came to me quickly bactrack when I laid out the behavioral changes needed for positive change. In this, people often choose the devil they know over the healing that God offers. People would rather continue to suffer than trust in what God offers.
God will allow you to do this. In the story, we see Jesus say yes to one request and no to another, and they are not the ones that we would expect. He leaves, just as He is asked by those who are afraid of Him. He says not to the request of the healed man who wants to go with Him. In this, we see that the ‘freedom’ of getting what we want is not true freedom after all. Those who get what they want lose the Savior. The one who hears no is given purpose as He is shown His place in the plan of God. His part is work, but that effort comes with the promise of God’s power and presence.
In the end, we can do things our own way, on a path that leads to death (but where we maintain control) OR we can take God’s gracious gift of rescuing us from ourselves. In this, our lives are no longer our own. They become intertwined with God’s purposes. We are restored to our part in His plan, which is the real definition of freedom.