Freedom and Service
Set fee to serve! The very idea is a paradox. Surely if a man is free he no longer has to serve? On the other hand, if he is in service to a master, how can he be really free? These conflicting concepts are resolved in Scripture. The paradoxical problem is solved in the exemplary life and obedience of Jesus.
The unregenerate mind has a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of freedom. The average person believes that an unlimited ability to please himself constitutes freedom. But this unrestricted licence for self-indulgence is just another kind of bondage, resulting ultimately in compulsive or obsessive behaviour. Taken to its logical conclusion, such an ungoverned lifestyle on a wide scale would issue finally be in social chaos.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be free. God does not want anyone to live a miserable inhibited existence of fear and anxiety. He wants us to be free. But our true freedom viewed from God's perspective is the right to live voluntarily within the orbit of his will and purpose. The boundaries he has set are not in order to limit the happiness of mankind but to define the way of optimum spiritual and social welfare for all people.
There is, of course, a snag. People are born with a bias towards wrong. So it cuts across human nature to have to live within God's laws. In his great love, God provided a way in which people could acquire a new nature that would enable them to serve him willingly with perfect freedom. The transformation is effected by the new birth wrought by the Holy Spirit when someone believes the gospel, repents and accepts Christ as Saviour and Lord. The subsequent daily work of the Spirit in that newly regenerated person will gradually produce a life that becomes more and more like the life of Jesus.
Regenerated persons have two natures: the new life which is the gift of God when they are saved, and their old nature which they must learn to crucify and subdue. In the history of humanity, only two men have existed without an old sin-biased nature. Adam, before the fall, and the Lord Jesus Christ who was holy, harmless and undefiled and separate from sinners.
Jesus is the example for all believers as the Apostle Peter has reminded us, and we must learn to tread in his footsteps. His the model servant, perfect in his obedience to the Father - even when it meant a cruel and horrifying death on a cross. Yet Jesus was perfectly free from any bias toward sin, and from any kind of sinful impulse or tendency.
Jesus, being the perfect Son of God, had every right to be free to make his own decisions in life. But he used his freedom to obey the Father's will.
The Bible says: "Even Christ pleased not Himself." Nevertheless, he was free to please himself (and had he done so, he would not have chosen to do anything sinful). But he had an even higher concept of freedom than that.
Jesus voluntarily submitted himself continually to the Father. He lived an exemplary life of absolute dependence on the will of the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. The miracle of the perfect life of Jesus consisted not merely in his sovereign Godhood manifested in the flesh, but also in the daily demonstration of his Spirit-anointed sinless Manhood.
The Spirit enabled Jesus to serve the Father in absolute dependence. "Whatever I see the Father doing," said Jesus, "that's what I do." "And whatever I hear the Father saying, those are the words I speak."
This miraculous service of dependence was sustained and expressed in terms of prayer. Jesus, the God-man, lived a life of constant conscious fellowship with the Father, through prayer.
This is the wonder of it all! In the history of the human race, the man who was most free was the most dependant on God. Jesus achieved the most through a life of sacrificial service to God and mankind.
Christians are called to express their God-given freedom in the same way Jesus did.
- Frank Parker
