Free Indeed

So our text is found in John 8, verses 31 through 36.

John 8:31–36

It's not, we're not doing the normal Exodus book at this time.

We're looking at freedom.

And so I've asked Joanne to read this passage, please.

John 8, 31 through 36.

Dispute over whose children Jesus' opponents are.

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, if you hold to my teaching,

you are really my disciples.

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

They answered him, We are Abraham's descendants and have never been slaves of anyone.

How can you say that we shall be set free?

Jesus replied, Very truly I tell you, 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. deed.

In today's scripture, Jesus is talking to some Jewish believers who were new to the faith.

They were weak in their faith at this point, and Jesus begins by telling them,

if you hold to my teaching, you are my disciples.

He's saying right now, you are new in the faith, but if you continue to hold

to my teachings and keep on obeying them, not just believing in my teaching, but obeying them,

then you are really one of my disciples, and you will know the truth,

and the truth will set you freed.

Jesus in another passage says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

And so we know that the truth, and this truth being Jesus, is one who sets us free.

And if you are free in the Spirit, you are free indeed.

Message Bible clarifies this a little bit more by saying, if you stick with

this, living out what I tell you, I like that, you are my disciples for sure.

So let's say that again, If you stick with this, the teaching,

living out what I tell you, you are my disciples for sure.

Then you will experience for yourself the truth, and the truth will free you.

During this time when we celebrate our nation's declaration of independence,

we have heard a lot about freedom and living in a country where we are free

to choose and free to speak.

And yet, as we demonstrated in the kids' time, freedom comes at a cost.

We don't understand that oftentimes we think free should be free.

I'm free to be me. I'm free to do whatever I want.

And yet there's a freedom. There's a cost to that freedom.

We are free to go where we want to. We're free to worship or not to worship.

We're free to decide many things for ourselves.

Freedom has been a part of our thinking throughout history.

At the close of an important speech to Congress on January 6th,

1941, President Franklin D.

Roosevelt shared his vision of the kind of world that he wanted to see after

the war in Europe was over.

He spoke of four basic freedoms, freedoms which could be enjoyed by all people.

Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Of course, World War II expanded far beyond Europe, and the world never achieved Roosevelt's ideals.

Even if it had, however, we would still need another freedom the president didn't

even mention, and that is freedom from ourselves and the tyranny of our sinful nature.

The root of all sin is self, and self is what has caused us to disobey and run

away from God, and we need freedom from ourselves, don't we?

You talk to an addict, and an addict knows that they need to have freedom from

their past and from their tendencies and their desires and their addiction.

Jesus was talking to these new believers about a new kind of freedom,

spiritual freedom rather than political freedom.

At that point, they didn't understand what he meant, and they were still thinking

of freedom from oppression by the Roman occupiers at that time.

And yet they were trying to live up to a lot of rules and regulations that the

Jewish leaders had put on them.

They had not come into the knowledge of what it meant to be free indeed spiritually.

Spiritually i'm not sure modern day christians have

come to know that freedom any more strongly that

that jesus was talking about here either because

many people are living such defeated stressed out

lives rather than the abundant life that

jesus spoke about when he said i have come that you may have life and have it

to the full i think oftentimes we live in a life that we want that get-out-of-jail-free

card or that fire insurance that comes by professing Jesus,

and we come to the altar and we pray and say, yeah, we're saved now,

so everything's okay, but we still live in that life of sin and that life of

degradation and the life of almost a,

demonic hatred for everyone around us.

We need to learn as followers of Jesus Christ that we are the light.

That Jesus talked about, he has given to the world.

And if we're not free in our spirit, if we're not free as lighthouses of Jesus,

then we're not giving a very good example of it.

You may say, I must not be experiencing the freedom that Jesus talked about

here, or otherwise I would not be struggling with sin so much.

I would not be struggling with my tendencies. I would not be struggling with my thoughts.

Remember we said, thoughts produce feelings, feelings produce actions,

actions have consequences.

Consequences when we begin to think these things in our

minds and we think hateful thoughts or think evil thoughts

or all of this we begin to or even

think things of want we want certain things

our desire come forms in our minds and we begin to go out and achieve those

things that we probably wouldn't want to do if we were really following jesus

as i shared on the radio slots this week last two weeks thoughts produce feelings

feelings produce actions actions have consequences.

We know that addicts know that that type of thing is consuming to them,

and it gets them on this road to bad consequences that they see.

But the obvious opposite is true for us who are followers of Jesus Christ.

If we do as Philippians 4, 8 says, whatsoever things are pure,

whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever righteous, whatsoever things are noble,

whatever things are pleasing to God, it says, think on these things.

Thoughts produce feelings, feelings actions, actions have consequences.

When we think on the holiness of God and the righteousness of God,

when we think on what is pure and lovely and right, when we think on Scripture,

or as Liz said up here, singing the song, because he lives in our mind,

when we think about those things, those things will put the emotions of love

for God and our desire to serve him and be righteous before for others,

and we will put on the actions that give the consequences of people wanting to be just like Jesus.

And we need to do that. We need to have that. But that's a freedom that we have in Christ.

So what did Jesus really mean when he said, so if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed?

This morning, I want us to look and kind of wonder about the word freedom and

how it applies to Christians in this 21st century.

I believe it goes beyond the freedom to simply attend church where you want or when you want.

It goes beyond the freedom to read the Bible, to choose the denomination we

prefer, or even no denomination if we prefer, the truth to speak out about our faith.

When Jesus sets us free, he makes a much greater impact on our lives in that

we are free indeed to live overcoming productive lives.

We are free not just to barely hang on as a Christian, but we are free to live

a life that's overwhelmingly Jesus-oriented, one that people will see in the street.

At a farmer's market in a little village, there was a covey of quail walking

around in circles, walking around a pole in circles.

They had strings attached to their legs, and they continued to walk around and

around and around, hour after hour, around this little pole.

A man came into the market and asked, how much will you take for all of them?

And he paid the owner the agreed-upon price, and then he began to cut the strings

off of the legs of those quail.

What are you doing, the owner asked in disbelief.

I'm setting them free, said the new owner.

But in spite of the strings being cut, giving the quail their freedom,

their newfound freedom, they continued to walk around the pole in the same old circle.

They didn't even realize that they had been set free and that they could go

in a different direction.

Not until the man began trying to shoo them away did they move off.

In an abrupt routine. They began to find out that they could be scattered out,

and as they discovered their new freedom, they didn't even know what they could do.

It's often said that's the way it is with us. When we are first set free from

our sin, we don't realize our freedom, and we continue to walk around in the circle of our sin.

Jesus said, if the Son sets you free, you're free indeed.

We need to realize that we are free today from all kinds of things because of his freeing us.

We need to go in a different direction. We don't have to continue to march around

in circles of guilt and sin and drudgery.

We're free indeed. What does that include?

That includes the Spirit of God setting you free from the guilt of sin.

Sometimes we have a cloud of guilt hanging over our heads because we're guilty of sin.

How many of us have done things in our life we wish we'd never done.

We should all be raising our hands, right? We all wish that.

And that when there's a coming of that freedom from the guilt of sin,

we'd no longer have to take that punishment on us.

This is an actual letter sent to the IRS.

Gentlemen, enclosed, you'll find a check for $150.

I cheated on my income tax return last year and have not been been able to sleep ever since.

If I still have trouble sleeping, I'll send you the rest.

Sincerely a taxpayer. This is typical of how people deal with sin. They bargain with God.

But we can do something about true guilt. We go to Jesus and we simply say,

I'm guilty, I've sinned, I've blown it, forgive me.

Help me to start this new life and to live for you.

Sometimes we have a more difficult time with that than we do with true guilt.

When many Christians will say, I feel guilty because I'm not good enough,

I don't live up to what I think I should, or I feel guilty because I don't know

if I so-and-so this and that, whatever.

And what happens is we are living under a cloud of condemnation,

condemning ourselves for our own action.

Jesus has set us free by his blood and his resurrection. He has paid the price for us, it's over.

Not only is our past sin gone, but we do not have to live in that sin anymore.

When Jesus met the woman who was condemned of adultery, when he asked her who

condemns her, who are there to condemn her, nobody condemns me. They've all left.

The guys put down their stones, and walked away.

And Jesus says, neither do I condemn you. Now go and leave your life of sin.

That's what Jesus gives us the freedom to do, is to leave our lives of sin.

Have you ever felt like this hanging over you so that you've lost your joy?

You're trying to live up to what you think God requires of you,

and you know that you never can live up to his full expectations,

and yet we also know that in the Spirit we are free to live for him.

We also know that we don't live up to things because we have a huge requirement

of ourselves and results in condemnations of ourselves because we can never

achieve what we set out in our mind to do.

Scripture says in Romans chapter 8 verse 1, mark this down, come to this verse

Romans 8:1

whenever Whenever you have this temptation, whenever you have this guilt,

whenever you have this spirit of the enemy fighting over you,

repeat this, Romans 8.1, Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,

because through Jesus Christ the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.

The Message Bible puts it a little differently, and again, I like this.

I sometimes read the Message. It's really a paraphrase. It's not translations

from Eugene Peterson, but it says it in ways that sometimes we can understand better.

It says this, "...those who enter Christ's being here for us no longer have

to live under a continuous low-lying black cloud.".

A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind,

has magnificently cleared the air,

freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hand of sin and death.

One of the biggest things that he has set us free from is the guilt of sin,

whether true guilt or false guilt.

Today is the day to cut the strings off of our feet and allow us not to just

continue around in that circle of sin, but to go free and go toward Christ in all that we do.

The second thing we see is that we have a freedom from the consequences of sin.

Thoughts produce feelings.

Feelings produce actions. Actions have consequences.

Now, we understand that when we get released from that past sin,

and when we get released from From the life of sin, we now have new actions

and new consequences that come.

So we're released from some of the old actions. Now, there's some to tell us

that, I mean, it's not untrue to say that if we've smoked cigarettes forever and ever and ever,

chances are we're going to pay some consequences for that, right?

Okay? But we're also free from the consequences of sin in that the sin that

we have committed through our lives no longer has a hold on us,

and the punishment for that sin,

the consequences for that sin, is no longer ours. Jesus has taken that away from us.

Sin has its consequences. Much of the time we have to suffer those consequences,

and we can't go back and erase the results of our actions.

As I said, a lifetime of self-destructive habits take a toll on us.

Sometimes we can't repair the damage done in relationships that we have with

others. Sometimes we can't always fix things.

Parents often want to fix problems for their children. Husbands...

Always, almost always, want to fix problems for their wives,

and we can't always do it.

Sometimes we just have to be willing to be there for people.

Sin has its consequences. Romans 6.23 says, the wages of sin is death,

but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The wages of sin is death. We are deserving of death and separation of God.

But Jesus has purchased our price, our blood price, and has bought us back,

and we now have a free gift of eternal life.

We can be free from the final consequence of sin through God's gift of eternal life.

We might have to experience consequences of our own sin here and now,

but because of what Jesus did on the cross, we can have freedom from the final

consequence of sin because he gets us off that downward spiral and turns us up into a new direction.

The word repent means turn around, okay?

And so repent means that we were going in the evil way, in the direction of

evil, and we are repenting and turning the opposite and going toward Christ and all that he does.

When we do that, our lives are free from the punishment of sin,

and Jesus has given us new life.

One couple tells the story of

their scary experience of going whitewater rafting on the Cahuilla River.

When they started out, it seemed like they were in control of the raft.

But then they came to the first set of rapids. The big waves threatened to engulf them.

The water swirled around them and pushed and pulled at them.

No matter how hard we paddled or even in what direction, we had no choice but

to go through the rapids and down the river at the will of the current.

It was the river, not us, that was in control.

In the same way, it is sin, not man himself, that is in control.

Control when we are living in that circle of sin.

No matter how hard we try, sin and evil plunge us straight ahead into the abyss

of ruin and destruction.

How many of us have tried to get past our lives of sin on our own strength?

It's impossible. We can only do it on the strength of the blood of Christ and the Holy Spirit of God.

When we come to Jesus and decide to go totally his way, we can be certain that

sin's power has been broken.

Jesus has broken that curse of sin on us, and we're no longer under sin's control.

We can live in the spirit of life, Romans 8, 1.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Many people don't believe this. You might not believe it. I can't change things.

I really don't have the courage to change it.

In fact, maybe sometimes some of us don't really want to to change our attitudes

in our life because we think we have control over others when we do.

Each one of us really knows what we can change. God, through the power of the

Holy Spirit, gives us freedom from the control of sin when we give ourselves completely over to him.

Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things

are righteous, whatsoever things are noble, whatsoever things are admirable, think on these things.

When we dwell in the life of Christ, when we dwell in the Spirit of Christ,

when we let our mind be invaded with the Spirit of Christ and the Word of God,

we will live those lives of freedom and we'll be free from the consequences of sin.

Galatians 5 verse 1 tells us this, It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.

Galatians 5:1

Stand firm in them and do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery.

You who were called to be free are free indeed, deed, but do not use your freedom

to indulge the sinful nature.

That's to say, just because you're saved, just because you claim to be born

again, doesn't mean that you can still live in a life of sin and be forgiven.

It doesn't give you a license to continue in the life of sinful nature.

In fact, being saved and born again should give us so much more of a desire to live for Christ.

Third, we can have the freedom to

be all that you could be. It sounds like something from the army, right?

So what is the truth? Scripture tells us that Jesus himself is the truth that sets us free.

He is the source of the truth, the perfect standard of what is right.

Jesus frees us to be all that God wants us to be. Let me say that again.

Jesus frees us to be all all that God wants us to be.

Romans 14, 6, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

And then in the passage that we read, he says, if you know the truth,

the truth will set you free.

This was one of his Jesus I am statements. He didn't have to say I have the

truth or I know the truth or I represent the truth.

What he said is I am the truth.

We could begin to experience a new life because of his guidance and direction in our daily lives,

galatians 5 16 says walk under the

control of the spirit we will no longer be forced to live

in the bondage of desires of the flesh titus chapter 2 verse 11 and 12 tells

Titus 2:11

us the grace of god teaches us to deny ungodliness and worldly lust it teaches

us that we should live soberly righteously, and godly in this present age.

Can you imagine what would happen if the Church of Jesus Christ,

universal in this world?

Would as a whole and individually live soberly, righteously,

and godly in this present age.

Sometimes I think the greatest deterrent, and Dallas Willard said this,

one of the greatest deterrents to evangelism is the church and how we live and

how we act and how we speak and how we social media this and that.

What we do and say is recorded on people's minds.

Forever. Many people want the promise of heaven when they die,

but they want to live like the world around here while they still are here.

They want to have the fun of living in this world, but they want to have the eternal glory.

I don't think things work that way if we're trying to become what God wants us to be.

Not that the life of Christ is a boring, tiring life.

It is an an exciting life, but it's a life for Christ and not for us.

Ephesians tells us that we are being made into the workmanship of Christ to

glorify God in all that we do.

Jesus was telling these new Christians that if they could continue to do what

he taught, they would really be as disciples, not just learning what he taught,

not just reading what he taught or listening to what he taught,

but doing what he taught.

In your going, make disciples, make followers, not students, but followers.

That's what Jesus said. Paul says it a little differently in 2 Corinthians 3, verses 16 and 18.

2 Corinthians 3:16

He says this, But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is,

there is freedom, and we are going to be transformed into his likeness with

an ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord.

We are free to become all that the Lord wants us to be.

We can make that happen, and Jesus can make that happen in us.

So the question is, are you free today? Are you free from the burden of sin?

Do you have the nagging sense of guilt hanging over your life?

Do you have that cloud that seems to be following you around,

that ever-lowering black cloud that seems to be living on your life?

Or are you coming free in the Spirit of God? God, Jesus has given us the spirit

of life and the spirit of freedom and the spirit of the truth.

And he says, you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Let's bow in prayer. Heavenly Father, as we close this time of worship,

we thank you for the celebration that we can have as a nation,

as a Christian nation who is formed in Christian principles to worship you.

But even more than that fact of our freedom as a nation and our Christian founding,

abounding, we want to serve you in the Christian makeover of our lives.

Father, we pray that we will be like they said of the Christians then,

that they were little Christs.

Somehow, Father, make us into little Christs. In Jesus' name, amen.