Freed to Set Free
Did I ever tell you about how I came to be a Christian? The story of what happened in my life that took me from the place of doubt to the place of belief? In one 24 hour period, Jesus set me free from bondage to a way of life that I could not escape on my own. I want to tell you about that in a few minutes because it’s a pretty good example of the scriptures we’re looking at today—scriptures about being set free from every form of bondage, so that we can then help other people be set free, too.
December 29, 2013
Galatians 5:1; 13-18, Freed to Set Free
Pastor Patti Ricotta, Brewster Baptist Church
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There are all kinds of ways we can be enslaved, controlled, or just restrained from living the abundant life God created us to live. Even Christians who have walked with the Lord for a long time can be a slave to things like fear, gossip or a critical spirit.
Christians find themselves falling into alcohol abuse, drug dependency, or other addictions. Even food can become a drug of choice. We can become enslaved by sex, a co-dependent relationships, greed. Even self-criticism, self-centeredness or a chronically bad attitude is a prison.
We could spend the rest of the day adding to the list and we still might not mention the thing that has become the anchor, chained to your soul.
What is that thing? What is the thing that confines you, weighs you down, makes you feel shacked with no power to be set free, or at least not enough power to stay free? Are you holding a negative picture of yourself? Too many times we define ourselves by a negative trait that looms over us, casting the beautiful person God made us to be into the shadows. Is there something you would love to be gone from your life, but you’ve given up hope that change is possible? These are real questions, not rhetorical questions. Is God trying to bring something to your mind right now? Don’t fight it. Let it come to mind because whatever God wants to bring up, may well be the very thing he is ready to help you purge from your life.
I believe with all my heart that 2014 is going to be an amazing year of getting free for you and for me! But we have to know what we are in bondage to, and we have to be willing to face it with God. There are at least 3 things that make me feel strongly about this. One thing is that I have been sensing in my own prayer life that God has preparing 2014 as the “Year of the Lord’s favor” for those at BBC who are ready to be set free by embracing more of God’s life into our own lives. I could be wrong. But I’m not the only one who feels this way. Isn’t this what God has been speaking to us through people like our church consultant, Bill Easum. Becoming free from old destructive patterns and powers, creates room to embrace new constructive powers. God’s power!
But the most important thing that gives me confidence in God’s “2014 Freedom Movement” here at BBC, is scripture. God has always been about setting his people free. He used Moses set the Israelites free from slavery in Egypt. Jesus died to set the world free from sin—the worse bondage of all—and when he sets us free, he empowers us to help others find freedom in Christ as well. We are “freed to set others free!”
Paul explains it well in Galatians 5. Listen to what he says.
“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. 13 You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. 14 For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. 16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.”
That first verse is one of the most power in scripture, “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.” Some scholars say that this is the central message of the Christian life. It is the key verse to the entire book of Galatians and it was the message that fueled Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. But what does it mean? “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”
The scholar Ben Witherington III explains that Paul was quoting a familiar rite of passage formula used in the legal emancipation of slaves. There is an inscription found at Delphi from the first century that reads: “For freedom, Apollo the Pythian (that is one of the Olympian gods) bought from Sosibus of Amphissa a female slave whose name is Nicaea… [in] The purchase, however, Nicaea has committed unto Apollo for freedom.” Notice how the phrase “for freedom” appears at both the beginning and end of the pagan inscription.
Paul is drawing on a concept that his listeners would recognize as being part of the sacred and legal redemption of slaves. The slave pays money into the temple treasury of a god or goddess, and because the slave as a slave could not initiate or negotiate a legal contract the god in question then purchased the slave out of bondage. At that time the slave became the property of the god and now was bound to serve that god.
Do you see what Paul was doing? The slave is powerless, so the deity does what the slave could not do. Paul is saying that Christ is the God who redeems us from slavery to the world; something only a god could do. After being redeemed, the slave belongs to the god. But giving up slavery to the world for slavery to Christ is the only perfect freedom. Following Christ is what truly sets us free.
But how do we do that? How do we follow Christ in ways that will free us from the things enslave us? Here are a few suggestions:
- Prayer is the very first step.
Did you know that prayer is a “shame free zone?” We can talk to Jesus about anything, no matter what it is, and he will not make us feel ashamed. He will comfort us and begin to give us ideas about how to deal with your situation.
- Ask God to give you a picture of what life will look like when you were free. He already knows what it will look like for you, and a vision to move toward is a powerful thing.
- Ask God to give you Bible verses that will give you strength. Write them down, put them on your computer, refrigerator, mirror. Put them in your phone so you can pull them up wherever you are in times of temptation. I’ve just done that, and I’ve made the commitment to actually read them.
- Ask God to give you friends who can encourage you, or who are going through the same thing so that you can encourage each other to move forward.
- Ask God to give you a plan for what to do when temptation comes, and then do it.
I do not want to be simplistic here. I know that there are addictions that have a cruel hold on people. But I have seen God use programs like Celebrate Recovery, Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous to help people. Pastor Mary is going to start a Celebrate Recovery group here at BBC in 2014, so recovering with your brothers and sisters in Christ will be an amazing thing.
I believe that another thing that helps us get free from bondage is to hear other people’s stories. That’s why I want to tell you mine.
When I was about 17 years old. I was in a group of 30 kids that I had grown up with since kindergarten. From the time of middle school on, we got together every weekend at someone’s home and the parents provided games and snacks. We went by the very creative name, “The Group.” My three closest girlfriends were in this group and we did everything together. I loved my friends and I loved The Group.
But by the time we were sophomores in high school, kids started introducing alcohol and drugs into our weekend parties. The parents seemed powerless to do anything about it. I didn’t like this and I did not want to do it, but I was powerless to stop it. I felt I needed my friends and I wanted to fit in, but things were getting worse and worse. I felt miserable.
One horrible, turned amazing night I was pushed to the edge. There was a sleepover at my friend Julie’s house. In one room kids were smoking pot, in another drinking alcohol, in another room LSD had just been introduced to The Group. It was 4:00 a.m. and I was standing alone in the dark living room trying to decide which room to go in. I knew I had choose one, or I would be labeled and shunned.
That was the first time in my life I remember saying a prayer and meaning it. I said, “God, if you are real, and you love me, you have to get me out of this house because I don’t have the courage to leave. And you have to replace my friends, because they will never speak to me again and I can’t live without friends.”
Would you believe it, the very next thing I remember is hearing myself breathing heavily. All of a sudden, I realized I had walked out of Julie’s house, down the steep stairs that led to the street, walked down the street and around the corner, and I was now half way up the hill that led to my house.
I didn’t remember leaving Julie’s house at all, but I remembered that prayer. I remembered telling God he was going to have to get me out of that house. I was pretty freaked out because…he did. I noticed that I was exactly half way home. I had a choice. I could either go back to Julie’s house and continue down that miserable road with my friends, or I could trust that this God who answered the first part of my prayer might answer the second part about replace my friends. I decided to go home.
About 3 hours later, my dad came into my room and woke me up. He didn’t ask why I had come home from the sleepover in the middle of the night. He just sweetly said to me, “Sweet pea, would you like to go to church with me this morning?” Now, my dad had given up on asking me to go to church with him 3 or 4 years earlier. I thought to myself, “Why is he asking me that today of all days.” I had an idea that it must have something to do with my prayer from the night before. I sprang out of bed and got ready to go.
When I got there to the Sunday school class, all the girls were talking about how their daddy’s had bought them a new car for their birthdays. I was a poor girl and I was wearing the same dress I had worn the last time I had gone to church 4 years ago. I said to myself, “This was a mistake. There is nobody here that would be a friend for me.” So I turned my back to them and started singing to quietly to myself to drown out their talking. It was the hit song, “Killing Me Softly” by Roberta Flack.
Then, with my back still turned to the others, a girl named Jen got up, walked across the room, and tapped me on the shoulder. She said, “Hey, you have a pretty voice. Sing that again.” And then she started singing in harmony with me. After we finished the song, she said in a kind and sincere voice, “Wow, you really have a pretty voice. You should join our youth choir.”
Here was this Christian girl I didn’t know, who noticed something special about me, and she made a point of telling me so. Her words spoke life to me.
And then I thought, “Youth choir?” I started thinking about the other half of my prayer that if God loved me he had to replace my 30 friends. I said, “How many kids are in your youth choir?” She said, “88.” I couldn’t believe it. That night God replaced my 30 friends (who really did never speak to me again) with 88 new Christian friends, just exactly as I had asked. Just like Eph 3:20 promises, “God had done for me immeasurably more than all I had asked or imagined!”
I was feeling down and dirty and lost and miserable. I had been enslaved in a yoke of bondage that I had accepted from the people I called my friends. But this ordinary teenage girl walked by the Spirit across that room, and give me a picture of myself as someone valuable.
You know, when Jen woke up that morning and put on her shoes, she had no idea that God was going to use her in less than an hour to set me free, and change the course of my life forever.
She has no idea that she was going to say something that would give me a new picture of myself that was so powerful I was able to take the old picture of myself, crumple it up and throw it away.
She had no idea that God was going to use her simple invitation to answer my prayer.
But she was a person who walked by the Spirit. She was always available to God. She had traded in slavery to the world, for slavery to God and God had used her as a Freedom Agent in my life!
Now, let me ask you: Who do you know that needs a tap on the shoulder, and a message of freedom from you? When you are a slave of Christ, instead of a slave to the world, your words have power to set people free. God has always been, and always will be in the Freedom business. Couldn’t today be the day God wants to set you free? Couldn’t today be the day God wants to make you part of his Freedom Movement?
Let’s pray:
Eternal Creator and Re-Creator,
From the very beginning of time, you made beautiful things out of the dust, just as the song says. But far too often the world makes us into mere shadows of the beautiful thing you created us to be. Like myself, like the people in the video, and like people in this room, we have all – at one time or another – need someone to come tap us on the shoulder and give us the good news that you are ready to set us free. Lord, I believe someone in the room right now feels you tapping him on the shoulder and whispering in his heart that you want to make him new. Give him the courage not to brush your hand away or drown out your voice. I believe there is someone here who has tried over and over again to get free from something, but she has never had the power to get completely free. She is afraid to even give it another try. I believe you are tapping her on the shoulder now and saying, “Let’s do it together. Stand firm and don’t let yourself be burdened again to that yoke of slavery. Hold on to me and I won’t let go.” To others you are saying, “Lace up your “walking in the Spirit” shoes and go give someone a new picture of who I made them to be. Speak to them kindly and sincerely as my Freedom Agent and let’s get this Freedom Movement started.” O Lord, May this truly be the year that we are “free to set others free” here at BBC. In Jesus name, Amen.