“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”. Freedom!
A word I grew up hearing a lot. A concept I didn’t grasp until recently. Whenever I hear folk using the word they’re trying to make a point about what we can and can’t do. But what if freedom isn’t something we can truly use until we know the truth?
“Here is the patience of the saints”. Life offers us a lot of choices for everything we do. We made it that way because we all like what we like. The choices we’re faced with can vary widely for anything at all, even if people believe the same things. Good or bad depends on who we ask because everyone has a taste. But the choices we’re faced with everyday come with rules or laws. Sometimes strictly enforcing that particular freedom.
Freedom is a word that needs to be defined by each generation because freedom is never free to being with. I know about the cliché about the people that laid down their lives too. All of it will sound good until we examine all of it by the truth, which exposes everything we do.
Freedom of course, is our essential right and ability to choose in any circumstance. Some of the freedoms being offered really aren’t. But that’s another discussion. In life we are at times offered counterfeit freedom expressed in ways that benefit what someone wants to do. The limits of counterfeit freedoms usually show itself when we don’t want to fall in line with whatever that freedom is pointing to.
The biggest indicator of true freedom or the counterfeit is when we seek the knowledge of God, in truth. When we are truly free we are given the ability to disconnect from harmful practices of groups. But most of us have traded out ability to choose for the technologies of today.
True freedom allows everyone to choose their direction knowing that their choices are accepted for what it is, even if we don’t agree. Freedom does not impede the actions of one group or another by vices or legalities, but the actions of the conscience.
But God promises that when we know the truth, the truth would make us free. When we get the knowledge of God in our souls and come to maturity, we begin to see that a lot of what we don’t need to participate in a lot of society or even feel and for saying we disagree. The mockers can’t get us to change our minds by shaming those who have the truth, because no matter how much the counterfeit appeals to their senses they prefer the truth.
The truth is not always easy to stick with. But that is the power of freedom. We can suffer freely knowing we want to be around people, but we restrain from being around them because they do something we don’t and that is ok. Real freedom is not cliches or pressure to support. It isn’t found in going along, but having the ability to refuse or even turn against.
The truth, the knowledge of God has given many a believer the courage to stand up knowing that their freedom keeps them in line with a king the world refuses. The world is the people of earth in all nations on the earth.
The choices life offers when we believe God, and believe in Jesus, the son of God, is the freedom we exercise knowing that the people we do so with can turn against us. But our believe tethers us to the truth that God has spoken about everything, so we wait for the day he will come back for us and bring us into the earth without evil in it.
Our freedom allows us to see the truth about everything, because God created and gives us the ability to use what we have made, from what he created. Because we have the truth we have the power of life, knowing who we are because we have the truth. As we live this life in the presence of the creator of all life, our freedom is power to choose to abstain.
That’s right, we can freely refuse to do anything we don’t like, even under pressure or threat of death, because we know that once we die, nothing else will happen. We rest and wait for God at that point. Not only that but we have the power to resist our impulses even when it pulls at us hard.
Does not mean we’re perfect, but we are free to act however we want or restrain ourselves without having to worry, because God works things out for us. Our ultimate freedom is in the knowledge that God made everything and is sustaining and directing everything to work the way He says it should.
Freedom is not free. It was paid for by Jesus Christ (Yeshuah Messiah). But the freedom we get from knowing the Lord empowers us to make choices, knowing that if we ask anything he hears us and does it for us. As it is written “It is God who does everything for me”.
