Freedom: the Good Life We Were Born For by John C. Meyer

Freedom: the Good Life We Were Born For by John C. Meyer April 2, 2012

How many times have you heard someone mention it? How many people long to live it? How much would you pay to get it? The good news is we don’t have to do anything to earn it. Freedom is truly free to all who acknowledge the Source of it. I spent years living behind the bars of a barren and love-deprived existence sitting in my own self-righteous solitary confinement. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I would shrink back in fear over something I did wrong or engaged in an out-of-control fleshly outburst I had directed towards some lead foot driving in front of me who just couldn’t wait to get to work on time. I look back now and I think to myself “what a wonderful world” I lived in. It seemed as though every time I would sneeze out of timing I would once again find myself begging for forgiveness, so that the proverbial “golden hammer” in the sky wouldn’t come down and smash me to smithereens!

Ever been there? Well, perhaps I am one who has let my emotions get the best of me at times, but I remember being so enamored with a sense of sin consciousness that it seemed I was full of it (no pun intended). Every time I would see a person walk towards me I would begin to pick them apart with my “holy” meter, looking for some flaw that needed to be fixed. I mean heaven forbid I would walk into a Wal-Mart late at night and open my eyes and turn on the meter, ya know what I mean? I know! That’s how bad I was at times. It became the focal point of my existence as a Christian. Somehow I thought it was my “duty” to scan everyone to make sure they didn’t have any kind of flaws in their lives that would possibly keep them from living up to MY standard of righteousness.

Yes, I would make all the excuses too. I would shout scriptures in my mind trying to wrap some verse around the situation at the time trying to justify my judgments about the late night shopper walking around in shorts in the dead of winter. Boy! How sick have we become? I know you haven’t acted like this at all, but I certainly had my share of “inadequacy spewing” over the years. But thankfully times have changed, and so has my understanding about whom God really is and the extraordinary sacrifice he has given to all of mankind.

Two Worlds, One Freedom

The Apostle Paul alludes to an idea in Galatians that is not only a wild one but an irrefutable truth that if one discovers and embraces it they will never be the same. I like Paul, because he seems like the kind of guy I would have been hanging out with in the military. He’s the one who goes from trying to forge his own way straight through a system that just wouldn’t allow for much hard-headedness in holding fast to a belief structure that wouldn’t accommodate anyone else’s program, to a 180 degree turn in his delusion within a split second, once he realizes his stubbornness/ignorance was leading him down a path of destruction. Paul is the guy in basic training who challenges the drill sergeant as he begins to suggest that Paul is no longer in charge of his life, and that he is now owned by the military. But once Paul realizes that his mouth has gotten him an appointment with the cold pavement, sucking asphalt all night doing push-ups, he is quick to submit to the one who now owns his life (if ya know what I mean).

Paul, The Sent One, is caught between two worlds, the one he had left behind and continues to send signals of destructive mannerisms to his mind, and the new one he has now fully embraced as true freedom. He is so excited about this new found existence that he finds himself desperately warning those who would give any sign of leaving the new for the old. Paul challenges the church of Galatia warning them they are risking the very freedom they’ve experienced in an encounter with relationship rather than the binding rules of religion.

Gal 5: 1-6 (Message) “Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you. I am emphatic about this. The moment any one of you submits to circumcision or any other rule-keeping system, at that same moment Christ’s hard-won gift of freedom is squandered. I repeat my warning: The person who accepts the ways of circumcision trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law. 4-6I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.”

If anyone knew what rule keeping without relationship did to someone, it was Paul. He had been saturated in Law and because he was, it was The Law that drove him to act out on Law, which ultimately led to killing. You see, this is what rule keeping does to those who carry laws in their hearts without the relationship of love and mercy attached as the leaders in the group. When we engage in a lifestyle of continual judgment on what we see with what I call “Law Lids” (judging by outward appearance) then we will never look past the temporal into the eternal issue at hand. And that is the root issues in the heart of those we judge. Paul was a master at judging the temporal much like his fellow Pharisees of the day, but only until the time came when Freedom Himself stepped in front of his legalistic drive and blinded him with Love. It took three days to realize what had really happened to him and three days to drive the concept of Love as the true driving force deep down into his soul. When sight finally returned to Paul, I’m quite sure that judging by outward appearance began to take a back seat in his mind to the real matters of the heart whenever he would look at someone with his “new” set of spiritual eyeballs.

Those believers who were in Galatia were no less challenged with the same things we are faced with today, and that is the understanding and knowledge of the decision between two existences. On one hand many of us have left or are in the process of leaving a life in our minds that we have finally realized was crucified over 2,000 years ago and a life that is almost too good to be true. One that is filled with expectations that cannot possibly be met and one that is effortless as it’s walked out by realization. It’s either sin conscious living or Christ conscious freedom. One leads to death by slavery and the other is a life filled with the vast wonders of the wide open spaces of grace, which is in no way earned or deserved.

Paul says, “What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love”.  If you and I are to be honest with ourselves, we long for the true freedom that is expressed by and through Love, which is the unconditional kind. Freedom really only comes when we are ready to ask open ended questions where the answers may not fit what we have been trained by. This really isn’t a matter of theological debate; it’s a matter of having experienced a life in the dungeon of self-absorbed religion that will eventually have its day with an encounter of an extraordinary kind on a road called “De-Mask Us”.

Freedom equals the “one another’s” the world has been waiting to taste.

Living Loved,

John C. Meyer

livinginpurpose@gmail.com

www.unforcedliving.com

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