"True Freedom in Christ" (Middlebrooks) | John 8:31-38

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A reading from John chapter 8, verses 31 to 38.

John 8:31–38

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

They answered him, We are offspring of Abraham, and have never been enslaved to anyone.

How is it that you say, You will become free?

Jesus answered them, Truly, truly I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

The slave does not remain in the house forever.

The Son remains forever.

So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

I know that you are offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my words find no place in you.

I speak of what I have seen with my father, and you do what you have heard from your father.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks, please.

Please be seated.

Well, good morning.

My name is Chad Middlebrooks.

I'm one of the other pastors here on staff, and I do add my welcome to Aaron's.

And if I have not met you, I hope to have the opportunity to do so at the conclusion of the service.

We do continue our sermon series in John's Gospel.

And so as we come to this text that we just heard read, let us go before the Lord and let's ask him that by his Spirit that He would use this word to bring transformation, to bring greater likeness to Jesus as we hear this word preached to us, that we would leave here differently than when we came.

Let's pray.

Let's go before the Lord now.

Heavenly Father, we do come to you today and we come carrying the weight and the burdens of this past week.

We come bringing in the worries that have followed us through the doors, the distractions that are continuing to tug at our minds.

And so, Holy Spirit, we ask that you would quiet the noise around us and within our own hearts, so that in these next few moments, our hearts would be still enough to hear from you, our Savior, our King.

Lord, would you open our ears to your word, open our lives to what you want to teach us today?

And we pray this for our good and for your glory in Christ's name.

Amen.

Well, in 1998, a movie came out called The Truman Show.

And if you haven't seen it, spoiler alert, but you've had almost 30 years to watch it, so I don't feel too bad.

The premise is this: a man named Truman Burbank has lived his entire 30 years in a small island town called Seahaven with a job, a wife, a nice house behind a white picket fence, and by every measure that he can see, Truman is a free man living an ordinary life.

Except none of it is real.

Unbeknownst to Truman, his entire life is a TV show.

Seahaven is a domed set.

And it has been since the day he was born.

His wife, his best friends, they're all actors.

The sky itself is painted.

It's not real.

And here's the detail that matters most for us this morning.

Truman doesn't feel enslaved in this life.

He wakes up every morning, he greets his neighbors, he goes to work, and by every measure that he has, he believes that he is free.

It's only when small cracks begin to appear, like a studio light that falls from the sky, or a radio broadcast that narrates his every movement.

Only then does he begin to suspect that his world doesn't quite add up.

But by the end of the movie, he sails in a small sailboat to the edge of everything that he's ever known, and the mass on his boat actually punctures through the wall.

He puts his hand up against the painted sky and realizes that he's been in a dome for the first time.

Everything that he thought was infinite was actually just a container.

And only at that moment could he truly begin to choose what he would do with his life next.

In our passage, Jesus says something that sounds kind of insulting to a group of religious Jewish people, and he says, the truth will set you free.

And they respond exactly how you might imagine confident people would respond.

Set free?

What do we need to be set free from?

We are Abraham's offspring.

We've never been enslaved to anyone.

They, like Truman, or what happened before the light fell?

They're sincere.

And by every measure, they think that they're free men.

So here's the question that I want to put before us this morning as we begin.

What if the freedom that you're experiencing this morning is sea haven?

It's familiar, it's sincere, it's comfortable, but it's not actually the real thing.

Where might the truth be trying to break through the dome of your life this morning so that you can experience the true and lasting freedom that comes through the gospel of Christ?

See, underneath this entire exchange between Jesus and this group of Jews is a pair of contrasts that Jesus will not let his listeners nor us escape.

The first pair is the difference between belief and abiding.

The second pair is the difference between a slave and a son.

And so you see in your outline, we're going to learn from this passage that Jesus sets us free to do three things that are laid out in this text.

He sets us free first to make our home in his word.

And secondly, he sets us free to acknowledge our past enslavement to sin.

And then finally, he sets us free to embrace our place in the Father's family.

So first, he sets us free to make our home in his word.

Now, if you'll remember from last week, verse 30 tells us that many believed when Jesus spoke.

But that belief had not yet been tested.

Verse 31 isn't introducing a new group of people that Jesus is interacting with now.

Jesus is turning to that same crowd, and he's treating their young faith as sincere, yet unproven and untested.

One pastor put it this way: he said, Jesus is saying, Now that you have believed, here is how you can know what you are.

And then Jesus' very next words function as that test.

If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.

The proof of genuine faith was never going to be found in them having believed back in verse 30.

The proof of their faith would be found in whether they continue to abide in God's word.

And notice though that Jesus doesn't give them just a test.

If you abide in my word, here's the promise, you will know the truth, and that truth will set you free.

Now that word abide there, it means to remain, to dwell in.

And the tense that Jesus uses, it signals this continual action, not just a one-time event.

It's the same word that John will use later in John 15 when he talks about the branch remaining firmly and permanently in the vine.

It's precisely the perseverance of truth, not the initial response of belief, that Jesus says leads to lasting freedom.

Jesus isn't merely asking here for followers who visit his word.

Paul says, makes the same appeal to the Colossian believers.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.

Charles Spurgeon put the idea about abiding this way.

He said, visit many good books, but live in the Bible.

Living in the truth of God's word is the fruit of genuine faith in Christ.

See, a vacation spot and a home are different, aren't they?

When we go on vacation, we check into a place and we visit all the sights and sounds and smells that that place has to offer, but then we check out.

We don't unpack our whole life there, do we?

But a home is where you return regardless of how you feel on any given day.

It's where the furniture is arranged around your actual life rather than a brief curated vacation experience.

And if we're honest this morning, I think that many of us can treat God's word as a vacation destination.

We check in on Sunday mornings and then we check back out.

And we might check back in when we have a tough week, but then we check back out into a life that's furnished by anything else other than his word.

Here Jesus is describing disciples who have moved into his word.

They have made this word their permanent address.

Back in high school, I took three years of Spanish.

I learned vocabulary lists, verb charts, conjugation quizzes.

And I remember standing up in Miss Valdez's Spanish 2 class, and I told the class that I was embarrassado.

I wanted to tell them I was embarrassed.

But what I didn't realize is I just told a group of 16-year-olds that I was pregnant.

Now, after three years of Spanish upon graduation, I would have told you that, sure, I can speak Spanish.

I've taken all the material in, I'd passed all the tests and quizzes.

But years later, my wife and I spent four years in China, and within the first few weeks, I realized something very humbling.

That none of that classroom Spanish prepared me for what it means to know a language.

Because in China, I wasn't memorizing vocabulary for a quiz on Friday.

I was using it to buy food at a restaurant, to negotiate rent, to buy stuff at the grocery store.

See, I even began over time to think in Chinese at times.

Even had a couple of dreams in Chinese.

That's the difference between belief and abiding.

It's possible believing could be a decision that you made at an altar years ago or at a summer camp, but you've never revisited it.

Abiding is a relocation.

It is a moving in.

It is all in.

This is why also growing up in a Christian home or in the South where church attendance is what people do, it's not the same as having personal faith in Christ.

Growing up in a Christian home, don't get me wrong, is truly a gift from God.

But cultural Christianity, where church and morality and biblical knowledge are inherited like an accent, they can only hand you information and maybe a few examples, but they can't grant you new life in Christ.

Christian culture, yes, can expose you to the gospel, but it can't give you the freedom that your heart is longing for.

Yes, it can teach you the words of Scripture, but it can't make you love Scripture.

It can bring you to church, but yet it can't actually allow you to abide in God's word and cherish it as your life.

Are you a true disciple of Christ who abides in his word?

Or do you consider yourself a Christian simply because the faith has been passed down to your family and you're the next in line?

Where have you made your home?

Is it in the scriptures?

Where you go to it daily as your sustenance and as your life?

Or is it among the other lesser fleeting things that this world puts before us?

If someone observed your life this past month without knowing anything about your testimony, would they conclude that God's truth is your life?

Or is it just somewhere that you visit every now and then and maybe talk about once in a while?

What would it look like for us to make our home in God's word?

Well, maybe it's as simple as this week we open up God's word before we turn on our phones.

And his truth sets the tone for our day rather than our inbox or our calendar.

Or maybe it's memorizing a verse this week that we go back to over and over when the worry and the anxiety and stress and doubt rises and temptation knocks at our door, and we reach for God's word rather than reaching for alcohol or food or a screen.

We must make this our home.

That's the only way we'll find true and lasting freedom.

But secondly, Jesus sets us free to acknowledge our past enslavement to sin.

The men in verse 33, who are insulted by Jesus' comment, they answer with a claim that doesn't even add up historically.

They say, we are offspring of Abraham and we've never been enslaved to anyone.

Now, mind you, this is the Feast of Tabernacles that commemorates the Israelites being brought out of slavery in Egypt.

And they also were in exile in Babylon as well.

And while this conversation is going on, they're still under Roman occupation.

They've been on slavery more in their history than been free.

But notice, Jesus doesn't bother to show the absurdity of their comment.

He goes straight past that comment to a deeper reality in verse 34.

Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

He's not interested in arguing their politics or their genealogy.

He's diagnosing a deeper, more serious condition of the soul that transcends both birth and heritage.

Here Jesus is exposing that sin is the ultimate enemy of freedom.

Puritan pastor John Owen, who spent much of his ministry trying to help believers to see their sin and own it and deal with it, he puts the stakes this way: he says, be killing sin, or it will be killing you.

That's precisely the diagnosis that Jesus is giving these men, whether they want it or not.

Now imagine you go to the doctor this week after having taken a scan of your body, and the doctor pulls up the scan and it shows a cancerous tumor.

And instead of looking at the scan, you tell the doctor, and I'm sorry, sorry, Doc, that's impossible.

My family's never had that disease in our history.

Now, family history is a real information and it's real, but it tells you nothing about the results of the scan.

You can have a spotless family history and still be sick.

Ancestral lineage isn't a diagnosis, but that's exactly what these men were trying to prove.

No, no, no, sorry, Jesus.

We're offspring of Abraham, we're good.

We've got a clean bill of ancestral health.

But Jesus is naming what is on the scan, which is a heart that is helplessly enslaved to sin.

Remember Truman?

He was sincerely convinced that he was free while the dome sat over his entire life.

That were these men.

They weren't lying when they said they were free.

They really thought they were free.

But the most dangerous slavery is the kind that doesn't feel like slavery at all.

Before we can be honest about the diagnosis of our own hearts, we may need help actually seeing the reality of our heart scan.

So let me ask you, I want you to think about a sin or sins that you keep returning to, even though you have resolved to stop going back to that same sin.

What does that tell you about your ability and power to overcome sin if you keep going back to it?

Where do you find yourself measuring your heart against other people's failures rather than against God's righteous holy standard?

And when you're confronted with sin, what is your initial response?

Is it to minimize it?

To be defensive, justify it?

Or is it to own it before a holy God?

See, we often do the same thing these men are doing.

We can rest on our Christian upbringing as if exposure to the gospel is equivalent to surrendering to the gospel.

And we can boil what it means down to follow Christ to our outward morality and our obedience, thinking that this makes us acceptable before a holy God.

And we can compare ourselves to others instead of looking honestly at the darkness of our own hearts and how deep our sin runs.

Because as long as we're measuring ourselves against other sinners, then we don't have to face the reality of our own sin.

But we can't truly be met by God while we're hiding behind a mask of self-justification, still composing our own defense before God.

That's exactly what the Jews were doing.

They were giving a self-justifying defense.

What kind of mask are you hiding behind this morning?

Instead of acknowledging your enslavement to sin, apart from the redemptive and freeing work of the gospel.

Maybe it is your upbringing, your family lineage.

Maybe it's your church attendance or your good works or someone else's worse sin.

See, every one of these things is just a defense.

It's not confession, it's not owning our sin.

The real question is if we're willing to stop composing our own defense and let Jesus see us face to face.

Not the masks that we try to hide behind, but the real us.

Because he will graciously expose us to see our hearts rightly.

Why?

So that we can grasp the beauty and the magnitude of the gospel more fully.

Verse 35 here is a very pivotal verse in this passage.

Look at what Jesus says.

The slave does not remain in the house forever, the son remains forever.

Now, in that day, a hired hand could work in the house in his entire life, show up early to work and complete all his work and yet still hold no permanence in that house and no claim on it.

Because he's a hired hand.

But a son's place is different.

Because the son doesn't earn through performance.

The son is given by birth and by relationship to the Father.

This is why he can work freely and fail freely.

Not being concerned he's going to be let go like the hired hand.

So do you see what this means for us who are in Christ?

Our slavery to sin was never going to be fixed by us trying to work harder to keep the house rules.

Our sin problem can only be solved by becoming a son or a daughter of the Father.

And this is where our predicament lies.

We can't accomplish that on our own.

Only the Son can free us.

Because only the Son has permanent standing in the Father's house.

Do we see ourselves rightly this morning and see our need for this Savior?

Because we're sinners.

Thirdly, Jesus sets us free to embrace our place in the Father's family.

Verse 36 declares, If the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.

Now, Jesus here isn't simply describing sonship in the abstract.

He is claiming to be the Son, the one who alone remains in the Father's house forever by right.

Now, this conversation is going Go on, and we'll see how it unfolds the next two weeks, but all the way down to verse 59.

But Jesus will later go on and say, Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.

And that language intense is intentional.

He didn't say, I was.

He says, I am.

This is the name God gave Moses, if you'll remember, in the burning bush.

Jesus is telling these men, and he's telling you and me this morning, that if we want to be freed from our enslavement to sin, if we want to be brought into the Father's house, it must come through him, the divine Son of God.

The same Son who remains forever is the Son who, according to the rest of the gospel, laid down his infinite freedom for sinners like you and I.

Those who don't deserve it, so that through his perfect obedience, we, as the Apostle Paul says, might receive adoption as sons and daughters.

G.I.

Packer in his book Knowing God, he says that adoption is the highest privilege that the gospel affords.

Higher, he argues, even than justification.

Because he says justification is a courtroom verdict, but adoption is the Father's embrace.

So union with Christ doesn't just simply change our legal standing, though it does, but it changes whose house we live in and whose delight rests upon us.

The Father's love for the Son didn't start at the cross.

It's an eternal love.

A love that he announced from heaven at Jesus' baptism.

This is my son in whom I'm well pleased.

And so when we are united to the Son by faith, then we have the Father's delight.

It falls upon us.

We're not merely handed a new identity on paper.

We receive a new Father, a new name.

And we're no longer enslaved to our sin and the lies that our enemy wants to tell us.

Because our union with Christ, it remaps our whole relationship to God.

So that our flourishing and our peace are found in living according to this word.

But this is only possible because true freedom is not what our culture assumes that it is.

Because our culture assumes that freedom means throwing off any and every constraint, answering to no one, that we walk away from any relationship that's asking too much of us.

That we define our own truth.

That we answer only to our own desires and no one else.

And we stay unattached so that no one can lay claim on us.

But as one pastor rightly notes, real freedom is not found in the absence of constraint.

It's found in choosing the right constraints.

That's exactly what Jesus is claiming in this passage.

Real freedom is only found in submitting to Him, not escaping every claim over your life.

Which is why the deepest freedom that our hearts are longing for is not found in ruling over our own lives, but is found in surrendering to the one who loves us and who welcomes us into his family.

And he rules over us not as a stranger, not as a tyrant, but as a loving, patient, compassionate Father.

And so that our obedience to this Father that may have once begun out of obligation over time and by his grace becomes something that we actually desire because we see the beauty of Christ and we see all that he's done for us that we cannot do for ourselves.

And so we long to honor him in gratitude.

That's the difference between a wage earner and an heir.

A wage earner is paid only for what he produces.

And so when that output falls, his standing is in jeopardy.

But an heir, their portion was never based on output in the first place.

It was based on the moment that they were born into the family.

See, adoption means that we have new custody, a new family, a new home, and a new father.

That's what verse 38 is describing when Jesus says he speaks what he has seen from his father, and he tells these men that they're speaking what they have heard from another father entirely.

See, in the end, there are only two voices that any of us can actually live by.

Jesus goes on later in this passage, in this converse, excuse me, in this conversation, to name who that father is very plainly.

It is the devil in verse 44.

But even here, before he actually says the word out loud, the choice is standing right before these men.

And spiritually speaking, every single person in this room is either a child of a father who only deceives and who has no power to bring us into permanent belonging and freedom.

Or we belong to a father who has adopted us through the work of his son.

Those are only two options.

Whose words actually govern our decisions, our anxieties, our late-night thoughts when no one else is around.

This reality reveals the home in which you are abiding.

So Truman's story ends with him at the edge of everything that he's ever known, his hand pressed against that fake sky.

Free, though, finally, but only to walk out into a world that he doesn't know, all alone.

Thanks be to God, that's not the end of our story.

Jesus doesn't just simply wake us up to truth and then say, I hope you can figure it out.

No, through his own obedience on earth and through laying down his life on a cross for sinners, he brings us as sons and daughters into the Father's house, where Jesus will later say, There are many rooms.

The truth of the gospel doesn't just set us free from something, it sets us free into someone's family, into someone's privilege, provision, delight, and love.

Furthermore, being brought into God's family never stays private very long.

Because when the gospel grips your heart, you know that you want others who are sitting outside of this home to be invited in.

And so through word and deed, we proclaim the gospel to those who are still lost.

But it also means that it evidences itself in the way that we love one another and we pray for one another by name.

And how we fellowship with one another around the table, and we open our homes and open our schedules to the lost so that they too can taste the goodness of our God.

Whose house are you living in this morning?

Are you laboring like a hired hand?

Or are you resting as a son, a daughter, safe, belonging for good?

Not because you worked for it, but because Christ did.

And as we abide in his truth more and more and make it our home, we will increasingly experience and understand the steadfast love of our Savior.

Whatever your week might hold this week, if you're in Christ, walk into it as a free son, a free daughter.

Not free to do whatever you want, but free at last to become who you were always meant to be in Christ and to enjoy him forever.

Let's pray.

Father, we do thank you for your word this morning.

Thank you for reminding us that true freedom is only found in knowing the Son.

Lord, where we've been holding on to lies, where we've been allowing sin to fester in our hearts, or we've been putting forth our own self-effort as if that would accomplish the impossible.

Lord, would you set us free indeed?

Lord, free us with the freedom only that you can give to us and help us to walk out of this place this morning, not as slaves, but as sons and daughters who are abiding in your truth.

Lord, make this living and active word our home.

Lord, we ask this in the matchless name of Jesus Christ, a great Savior for sinners like us.

Amen.