There
was an elderly gentleman that I once knew.
He was a Centenarian and lived a very full life; a life which he very
much lived “his way” in the Sinatra sense.
He was a veteran of WWII and a successful entrepreneur. He liked to talk as long as you agreed with
him and even at his age his mind was a sharp as ever on the opinions that he
held. Whenever he and I had a chat he
usually picked the topic and as I was a minister he liked to talk about
religious matters. Unfortunately, his
knowledge of the topic did not venture past his childhood. He had more than a couple of stories to tell
about growing up in a strict Baptist home; stories that were mostly about
things you weren’t supposed to do on Sunday which he would sneak off and
do. When he became an adult he went to
war, went to work, and went to the clubhouse, but never to church. He could never get past the legalism and
moralism of the Christian religion that he had forced upon him growing up.
The
first few times I had the opportunity to chat with him on the matter I tried to
nudge him past his opinions which he formed in response to his strict religious
upbringing. On one of those occasions he
asked me what I believed happened to us when we die. I told him that all of that high-handed
Heaven and Hell stuff he was threatened with when he was young just isn’t
really in the Bible in that bully-pulpit kind of way. The Bible really doesn’t say much about
either. I went on to tell him that I really
couldn’t say much about what to expect other than when we die we will come face
to face with the greatest sense of being Loved that we have ever known and my
basis for that is the way I have glimpsed an experience or two of God in my
life in the here and now. Needless to
say, the subject got changed.
Speaking
for myself, I have to say that this man’s story breaks my heart. The Christian “religion” that he was bullied
with as a child is not what following Jesus is about. Following Jesus is not about a bunch of rules of conduct that you have to obey for fear of a wrathful God sentencing you to Hell if you
should walk in the way of the wicked or if you failed to believe that Jesus’
death was your Get-Out-of-Hell-Free card.
The Christian faith is about being set free from all that religious legalistic and moralistic hub-bub in order to live a new life led by the Spirit of God who
lives in us and transforms us. It breaks
my heart that this man had his faith destroyed by being spiritually bullied with a yoke of
law when he could have known love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
He could have been raised to want to know God and the love of God more
fully, but all he got was spiritually bullied.
Paul
writes, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves
be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”
The freedom he refers to is freedom from an old existence that is ruled
by sin and is undergirded by fear and leads to death – that twisted old
existence where good becomes evil and evil seems so good. Free from that old existence we are now free
to live in a new existence that Paul normally refers to as “ in Christ”.
At
the end of chapter 2 of Galatians Paul writes: “I have been
crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who
lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness of
the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” For us, this entails that we
too have been crucified with Christ Jesus and it is no longer we ourselves who
live but Christ Jesus living in and through us.
We have a new existence in Jesus Christ that leads to new life, a new
life that is ruled by him and made real in us by the Holy Spirit living in us
and leading us to faithfulness. This new
life doesn’t look like religious moralism.
Rather, it shows itself as faithfulness working through love – love for
one another and love for our neighbours.
The Holy Spirit points us to Christ Jesus and compels us to love as he
has loved us. The freedom for which
Christ has set us free becomes reality in loving service to others.
As we
give heed to the voice of the Holy Spirit, who from deep within us compels us
to love, to reconcile, to pray, to read the Scriptures regularly and to
meditate on them we find our new existence in Christ. We find ourselves being transformed, being
made new in that we become more and more compassionate, joyful, peaceful,
patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and more in control of ourselves – and
that, my friends, is true freedom. It is
like God is overwriting our old hard drive with the new programming of the new
human existence that is in Christ Jesus.
True freedom is found in heeding the voice of the Holy Spirit who
compels us to love. Amen.
