How much freedom is too much? We like to imagine ourselves to be free but our freedom has limitations. We can't do whatever we want whenever we want because we live in a society where certain freedoms must be limited in order to protect other members of the same society. If we ever get to the place of complete freedom we will have arrived at anarchy, and I don't think any of us really want to experience such complete freedom. Yet, this is the freedom that our Creator gave to us.
Yahweh desires true love and love is not true if it is coerced, manipulated or forced. If you want to go out and murder someone he is not going to stop you, even though he has expressed how he is against it. His desire is for intimacy with you, to walk and talk with you, to be your support, helper, encourager, enabler, Father; but you have the freedom to completely reject him and run in the opposite direction. That is the risk of love.
Like everything else, there are always consequences to freedoms acted upon. Very few of us truly understand what we become without our Creator. We were created to be complete in fellowship with him. Without him we do not have what we need and there is a lack for proper understanding and perspective. When we reject him he leaves us to ourselves and that is never good:
Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 1:24-25)
We need our Creator. We need our Father. We need him and are dependent on him. True freedom is found in him through Jesus Christ; freedom to be everything he intended us to be. We have this mistaken notion that we give up our freedom when we follow Jesus Christ but the fact is we are slaves to our nature without Jesus. We can't do the things our spirit desires to do because our nature keeps us down, oppressed and limits our ability to grow as we were intended.
The world thinks it is free. People think they are doing what they want to do. They don't always understand their distorted desires but they know they can pursue them if they want. If only they knew that those desires are like a cancer eating away at their healthy tissue. They are being deformed, destroyed, and pushed toward death all the while thinking this is their choice, their freedom.
Our challenge is to not fall back into this deception while trying to reveal it to the people we meet. People don't want to hear it; they don't want to believe they have been deceived, that everything is a deformed image of the real beauty that Yahweh created. It is hard to tell a deaf man that he is deaf or to tell a blind man the colour of the sky. But nothing is impossible with Jesus; nothing!
Jesus came to free us up to make a choice because before him we had no choice; we were enslaved to our nature. He cast out demons so people were free to hear his message. He destroyed the power of sin over us so that we were free to hear and to choose. Love dictates that we must have the freedom to choose him or to reject him, and that is the choice that rests in front of all of us. The Church has sinned in the past by trying to force people to love Yahweh but thankfully that is no longer the problem. However, because the Church no longer tries to control people, we see in society the results of the choices that are being made. But this should also mean that the light is as light as the dark is dark. I hope you can understand.
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