True Freedom

By Tim Maurice

It is for freedom’s sake that Christ made us free.  If we find the light of fellowship, we can be freed from the distortions of our own darkness. This is true freedom.

The freedom to walk in the light and find the will of God is available to all who confess Christ. What then are the impediments? If we are honest, we will have to admit that the right to hold onto our own assessments of life is a right we desperately do not want to relinquish. It is the last kingdom we feel we have. There we can still retreat to the exclusion of all other voices. There it is that our own decrees reign supreme—our judgments, our ideas, our perceptions of God.

But  it is not to that kind of castle that we are supposed to retreat. The name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous run into it and are safe. Our only safety comes from running quickly, we might almost say recklessly, into the kingdom of light. Our own darkness is too strong to be fought alone, for its roots are the very tissue of our consciousness. That is why redemption is not only a moral cleansing; it involves, as Paul said, the renewing of our minds. We must re-learn how to see with the eyes of love; to read people with a mind reborn. Otherwise, all we do is adapt the understanding of God into our inherited mindset.

‘It is for freedom’s sake that Christ has made us free.’ We can all be free from the need to be vindicated in this life. There is only one who was justified in all that he did; only one who justifies all men; only one who is worthy to call himself and his actions ‘good’. We, on the other hand, cannot produce a jot of goodness.

The only good is God. This is the shaft of light that must pierce our darkness. To acknowledge that Christ is my Saviour is not the same as laying aside my own view of life. The two should coincide. Very often they don’t. Which is another way of saying that it takes us a long time to learn humility.

For it is humility – the complete abasement of our own assessments and thought processes – that opens the way to freedom. Even Christ, Who was God in the flesh, had to humble Himself. How did He do it? The Bible says that He ‘emptied himself ’ (Phil 2:7). He divested Himself of all personal rights. He only thought and said what the Father thought and said. Here is the sum of all fellowship and all light. The Son of God, sinless as He was, did not try to shine with the light of His own glory. He was motivated completely by the desire to reveal the glory of another.

This was the illumination necessary for Peter’s reconciliation. ‘When you were younger,’ Christ said to him, ‘you used to gird yourself and walk wherever you wished.’ When we are immature Christians, this is the way we walk—loaded with good intentions, but walking nevertheless according to our own lights. But then we are called to depart from living this way. Jesus went on to say to Peter what we all must hear: ‘But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish.’

At some point we must grow up. The sign of maturity as a Christian is that we have relinquished the pursuit of our own life, having become content to reveal only the life of Christ. Jesus may have been talking of the manner of Peter’s death; but His message reaches far beyond that physical death. We must all die to self completely and place ourselves in the hands of others—of Christ and of our brothers and sisters. Christ gave Himself into the hands of the Father and the Holy Spirit. The light of fellowship, which dispels our darkness, is the complete antidote to the insatiable demands of our inner, carnal mechanism.

This is freedom indeed. And this is light. By this will all men know that we are disciples of the living God.

Excerpt from ‘The Problem of Goodness’ by Tim Maurice
The full booklet may be obtained from VisionOne.org.au