Christian maturity, I think has more to do with understanding freedom in Christ than it does with anything else. Freedom in Christ means I’m free from sin, condemnation, and death. I’m free from every law but the law of the Spirit of life in Jesus Christ. I’m free from the judgment of others. I’m free from all fear. I’m free from all attachments to the ways of this world. The promises of God are freely mine. I am secure in my freedom. I am free from the endless search to find freedom in myself.
A prison, freedom’s opposite, is constricting. Guilt is constricting and so we either hide it or release it by confession. If forgiveness doesn’t find us, then guilt is returned. Death is a confinement. We can’t escape it. Judgment from others traps us in worries and fears that press in until we conform to their approval (which is still a prison, only less constricting), or we madden ourselves looking for an escape.
This world confines us to temporality and all of its secondary prisons just mentioned. Left to it, we endlessly search in vain for freedom from each and every prison until death comes, the one we know is inescapable. We’ve heard the stories before of people who seem to have freed themselves with money and the world’s great, temporal promises, but find themselves in a prison, still. Then, they give themselves over to the inescapable, hoping freedom is found on the other side. That, there, is one of the devil’s greatest lies.
From all of these things, in the Bible, Paul writes, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death” (Rom. 7:24)? It’s a question I believe we can find in every person that’s breathed the air of this world. Our lives exude this plea for help.
It’s the greater prison of sin and death that people found in Jesus Christ have been set free from. Answering his own question, Paul says, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 7:25)! “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:2). It’s this greater wall being knocked down that sets us free from all of the others.
It’s the promise that we have new life, eternal life, that crashes waves upon the now-weak foundations of guilt, judgement, and fear. What we could never do, Jesus did. He gave us the sort of freedom that sheds the anxiety and worries of this world with a deep exhale of peace that’s truly hard to comprehend. And it’s that initial freedom from sin and death that once broken, causes a domino effect for all of the secondary prisons to be broken too.
Freed from these things, Christians oddly but typical to human nature, fear freedom. We get comfortable, even in chaos. I think that’s because it’s familiar and familiarity means predictability. Predictability feels like safety to almost all of us. Habits are hard to break, even when they’re already broken.
That’s exactly what we do with the walls that Jesus has broken for us. We erect these fallen dominos, these prison walls, because stepping over them to something different, even freedom and life, is unfamiliar, even scary. But I suppose that’s where faith comes in. It’s trust in God, in Jesus Christ, that everything will be okay. We have to take that step onto the water.
God calls us to trust him, to move into maturity. The Israelites were set free from slavery in Egypt to enter the land given to them by God. Being free already but needing to take the final steps to live in that freedom in the land, Moses recalled, “Then I said to you, ‘Do not be shocked, nor fear them. The Lord your God who goes before you will Himself fight on your behalf, just as He did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness where you saw how the Lord your God carried you, just as a man carries his son, in all the way which you have walked until you came to this place.’ But for all this, you did not trust the Lord your God, who goes before you on your way, to seek out a place for you to encamp, in fire by night and cloud by day, to show you the way in which you should go” (Deut. 1:29-33).
The call to grow into maturity is the call to grow in faith, to live in the freedom already won for us by Jesus Christ. It’s something this series on Christian maturity and freedom will look at in its varying challenges. We’ll take a closer look at the prisons Jesus has broken down but we try too often to put back up. I encourage you to look at God’s faithfulness, to let him carry you over the rubble into freedom.
-Pastor Ben