The Bondage of Freedom Dr

The Bondage of Freedom
Dr. D. William McIvor
July 18, 2004
Presbyterian Church in Sudbury

So far in this Galatians series we’ve talked mostly about the pure grace of the gospel. Paul worried that the Galatian Christians were abandoning the gospel because they listened to those who said that in order to get grace you had to do other things first. Paul said No! Christ’s gospel is grace pure and simple.

But once we get the grace horse pulling the faith cart, the question still arises, how do we live? Now that we have things lined up the right way, now that we know that Christ’s grace is free for all, how do we live it out? Paul answers that in today’s text. We live grace out in a wondrous freedom. Let’s read what Paul has to say.

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.

Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.

What kind of person are you? In the text Paul seems to describe two kinds of people. One kind of person follows the “works of the flesh.” Fifteen different and obvious signs are listed. The other kind of person lives by the Spirit, receiving the gift or fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is singular but nine aspects of it are listed. Two different kinds of people. Which kind are you?

The Bible frequently seems to divide people into two kinds: righteous and unrighteous, sheep and goats, saved and lost, spiritual and carnal, faithful and disobedient, pious and godless. In fact, the Bible seems to have what some scholars call the Doctrine of the Two Ways. For example, Psalm 1, which serves as an introduction to the whole Psalter, clearly speaks about two ways, two different kinds of people.[1] Listen to Psalm 1.1-6.

Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;

but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.

The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.[2]

Two ways of living, two kinds of people: the Lord watches over the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked will perish.[3] What kind of person are we? And does the kind of person we are reveal the freedom for which Christ set us free?

Let’s work on this today by asking two questions. First, where are we on Paul’s lists? At first glance, List #1 doesn’t seem like it applies to us at all. We’re probably not fornicators or licentious. In fact, most of us would be hard pressed to even define what licentious means. According to Webster it means “morally unrestrained or wanton.” We think, Okay, good. We’re not that. We may know someone who goes carousing. Maybe we even did a little of that when we were younger. But for the most part we don’t do that stuff. Does this list really apply to us?

Yes, it does! We may not be morally unrestrained or a carouser. But what about “jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, and envy”? It may be too cynical to say that church people specialize in these. But we would be in denial to say that we are unfamiliar with them. And the damning thing about List #1 is that, as one writer said, it is “characterized by a biting viciousness that even animals don’t have, unless they are sick.”[4] We don’t like to think about being on List #1 but too often we are.

What about List #2, the fruit of the Spirit? Surely we try to be kind (until someone hurts us). Certainly we feel such gentleness and peace (until we get upset). We’re always patient (until we get frustrated). Besides how can we have joy and peace in a world of terror alerts and all the rest that is going on right now? But we are working on all of this and we have our groups and therapies and television shows and self-help books to guide us!

The problem is that Paul never suggests that List #2 is something we can work on. The fruit of the Spirit is a gift. It automatically blossoms and comes to fruition in a transformed life. Are love, joy, peace, and the rest growing in my life, day after day, more and more? Or in your life? Sometimes, yes. Too often, no.

The problem is that the works of the flesh and fruit of the Spirit are not two conditions that we can have. Paul speaks of them as two realities on which we can base our existence, two directions toward which we can move. We can live “according to the flesh” or “according to the Spirit.” To focus on one is death; to focus on the other is life and peace. But the honest fact is we’re on both lists, more on List #1 and less on List #2 than we ought or want to be.[5]

So we come to a second question this morning. How do we go on from here? We are trying to talk about freedom in Christ but we seem mired in lists — rules! Do this. Do that. Don’t do that … and for God’s sake, don’t do that! Doesn’t sound much like freedom.

But the point is that the lists are less moral checklists than compasses to indicate which direction were are heading in life. We can see the importance of this by going back to the beginning of today’s text. Paul wrote: “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (5.13-14)

We need to remember that the command to love the neighbor came from Leviticus 19.18. We usually only quote part of it but the full verse reads: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” The words “I am the Lord” serve a very important function in this verse. In effect, God is saying “because I am God who created both you and your neighbor, I have the right to instruct both of you on how to act.”[6]

The point is that in Christ we are free — to love and serve the neighbor as ourselves because God is the God of all. Paul never thought that humans are ever free in the absolute sense of doing whatever we please. We are either enslaved to the works of the flesh or the fruit of the Spirit.[7] In other words, our direction in life is either away from God or a way towards God. We are always in bondage to something or someone. Either we are in bondage to the way of the world or in bondage to Christ. Only bondage to Christ brings true freedom.

This is why an abiding heresy of American Christians, whether liberal, conservative, or middle-of-the-road, whether male or female, whether young or old, is that we tend to think of going to church as something that we’re supposed to get something out of. Sometimes people will even say that “I don’t go to church because I don’t get anything out of it” or “it isn’t convenient for me” or “I don’t like that minister.” But church is not, first of all, for us. It is for God and for the neighbor.

At my previous church, back before that church had an automatic answering machine, the phone would start to ring on Sunday mornings about an hour before the first service. Often I would answer those calls. The most common question was “what time are your worship services?” But a frequent question was also, “who is preaching today?” I was always tempted to ask back, “Does it make any difference who is preaching?” It shouldn’t.

Friends, I don’t say this with a harsh spirit for I am not your judge. But I am your pastor and God has called me to always speak the truth to you. The truth is this: you don’t come to church for what you get out of it. You come for two reasons. First, you come because God tells you to. Second, you come to church for other people, that is, in order to love your neighbor as yourselves. You need to be in church because someone else may need you here.[8] God needs you here and I certainly need you here. But lots of others need you too. It may do someone else good just to see your face or share a conversation with you over coffee or just to sit beside them. I can’t tell you how often something one of you says to me can bless my whole week with a touch of God’s grace. We come to church for God and for the neighbor and in that bondage of freedom we are blessed.

Some of you are thinking, Bill, what if I miss just once in awhile. Is that okay? And, besides, some Sundays I just can’t come to church. I want to but I have this and this conflict and this conflict and … Stop! That’s the problem with lists and the problem with rules and laws. We immediately want to know what the exceptions are and are there any loopholes. But remember what Galatians is teaching us. It doesn’t start with rules. It always starts with grace. In Christ we are free. We don’t need a lawyer to deal with God. But what do we do with our freedom?

In all honesty, we all have struggles in life. If the truth were known, we would be amazed at how much we all agonize over the works of the flesh in our lives and how we long for but do not find sufficiently in ourselves the fruit of the Spirit. But being here is where all our struggles can stop for awhile. For here we are forgiven and we can forgive. Here we can point our lives towards God and open ourselves to the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control that only the Spirit can give.

If you take List #1 and compare it to List #2, at least one thing will be clear. The works of the flesh will produce hatred and conflict. The fruit of the Spirit will produce friendship and peace.

This is why Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher and theologian of a generation ago wrote his famous book I and Thou. In that book and in other writings he talked about friendship, with God and with each other. Buber wrote:

“I love you; not only for what you are but for what I am when I am with you. I love you; not only for what you have made of yourself but for what you are making of me. I love you for that part of me that you bring out. I love you for putting your hand into my heaped up heart and passing over all the foolish, weak things that you can’t help dimly seeing there and drawing out into the light all the beautiful belongings that no one else had looked quite far enough to find. I love you because you are helping me to make of the lumber of my life not a tavern but a temple; out of the works of my day not a reproach but a song. I love you because you have done more than any creed could have done to make me good, and more than any fate could have done to make me happy. You have done it without a touch, without a word, without a sign. This is what being a friend means after all.”[9]

What kind of person are you? What kind of person am I? The Lord would have us be friends, with God, with each other, and with all who touch our lives. When we are in bondage to Christ we are granted the freedom of friendship and in friendship we can begin to taste the fruit of the Spirit. Thanks be to God.

[1] Claus Westermann, The Living Psalms, trans. J. R. Porter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989) 293. “This expression of pious Wisdom was prefixed as a kind of introit to the Psalter at a time when it had become not only a hymn-book for use in worship but also a book of personal devotion. The whole Psalter was thus to be understood in the light of the fundamental post-exilic opposition between pious and godless, whose divinely ordained destiny is presented in this psalm.”

[2] Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament As Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979) 513. “Psalm 1 is generally classified as a ‘Torah Psalm’ and is akin to Psalms 19b and 119 in its praise of the law. The psalmist pronounces a blessing on the godly man who occupies himself day and night with the divine commandments. The parallels with Deuteronomy 30 and Joshua 1 reveal clearly that the commandments of Moses constitute the divine law on which the godly reflect. It is highly significant that the psalmist understands Israel’s prayer as a response to God’s prior speaking. Israel’s prayers are not simple spontaneous musings or uncontrolled aspirations, but rather an answer to God’s word which continues to address Israel in his Torah.”

[3] Bernhard W. Anderson, Out of the Depths: The Psalms Speak For Us Today (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), 221-222. “Some may regard this as an “achievement” psalm; the wise person who lives by the torah is successful, while the one who flouts it is a failure. But this simplistic view hardly does justice to the poem. Here the psalmist sharply contrasts two attitudes — or, as we would say today, two lifestyles. On the one hand, there are the persons who humbly acknowledge their dependence on God and seek to know God’s will by studying the Torah. They live by a personal relationship to God, striving constantly, and listening intently, for the word of God day and night. They may not be great persons, as the world measures greatness, but they are blessed by a serene sense of the God-given meaning of life. On the other hand, there are persons who care nothing about the religious tradition, who are determined to live out of their own resources, and who are scornful of the devout life. Such persons belong in the category of the “fool” who says in his heart (mind), “There is no God” (Psalms 10.4, 14.1), that is, the practical atheist who supposes that a person can live as he or she pleases and get away with it because God is not to be taken seriously. These people, says the psalmist, are like the chaff that the wind blows away during a threshing of the wheat, for their existence lacks deep rootage.”

[4] Kathleen Peterson, “Paul’s Lists,” The Abingdon Preaching Annual, 1998, Michael Duduit, ed., (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997) 242.

[5] Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, Vol. 1, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951) 239. “Man, and hence the Christian, too, lives his natural life ‘in flesh.’ But the crucial question is whether ‘in flesh’ only denotes the stage and the possibilities for a man’s life or the determinative norm for it — whether a man’s life ‘in flesh’ is also life ‘according to the flesh’ — or again, whether the sphere of the natural-earthly which is also that of the transitory and perishable, is the world out of which a man thinks he derives his life and by means of which he thinks he maintains it. This self-delusion is not merely an error but sin, because it is a turning away from the Creator, the giver of life, and a turning toward the creation — and to do that is to trust in one’s self as being able to procure life by the use of the earthly and through one’s own strength and accomplishment.”

[6] Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy: The Most Important People, Events, and Ideas of the Hebrew Bible (New York: William Morrow, 1997) 465-466. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin comments on this verse by saying that love for the neighbor “makes sense only within a religious context. Without God, all that exists in the world is the physical; from where then would come the basis for legislating moral obligations?”

[7] Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Gaventa, J. Clinton McCann, Jr., James D. Newsome, Texts For Preaching, Year C (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1994) 406-407.

[8] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) 203-204.

[9] Martin Buber as quoted in Evangel from Michael Hodgin, ed., Parables, Etc. 9.2 (1989): 5.