I recently heard a wonderful sermon on how God has given us freedom to be free from our sin. Think about it. Freedom to be free from our sin means that as a born-again Christian, we are free from the bondage of sin, and if we chose to follow Christ, He will draw closer as we draw closer. God makes the first move, we react to God’s will, to God’s love for us by saying – I am here Lord. There is a real possibility that we can be born again and then let our faith decrease, let the devil tell us we don’t deserve God’s mercy and love, and if you begin to believe those lies you find yourself closer to worse off than how you started; an ineffective Christian, put out to pasture, not sharing the gospel of eternal salvation. If the devil keeps you from telling others about Christ, if he keeps you from living a life that others see is different from this world in a good way, if he convinces you that you need to be forgiven again and again, then he will keep you from the ministry that God chose for you. Others will loose out on a chance to be born again; you may lose rewards that are God given to someone else instead. Yes, we will be rewarded in heaven and on earth for our works done on earth and God’s will is done, but the work may be done through another person, forfeited by you, when it could have been your works.
You see we do have a choice. The message I heard was this, we do have a choice. We can choose to sin, but for a born-again person, after sinning, God’s Spirit inside you will tell you that what you did was not what our heavenly Father would have you do. A sin causes harm to yourself and/or others and God does not want to see His children harmed. It quenches the Spirit, it grieves the Spirit as Paul wrote. Do not get confused about this. When we come to God through Jesus Christ, and we ask for forgiveness of our sin, and in our heart, we are sincere, and we believe and accept that Jesus died for all sin and our personal sin; God forgives us and replaces our sin with the righteousness of Christ. If we follow Him, that is we deny the fleshly sin that attacks us – we repent, God changes our heart as fast as we can manage that change. The next thing you know, you look back at your life and you wonder who that person was back then. You do not recognize the person you once were, and others see that you are not the person you were before, and they wonder what happened. The wonderful thing about freedom is that we have freedom to sin, but as a continuing follower of Christ, God creates in us new desires, new thoughts, new life. We will not desire to choose to sin as we did before God saved us. What kind of a quagmire is that? It is not a quagmire. We do not want to sin because we want to please our heavenly Father. We want to do good because doing good is closer to God. Jesus said that He wants to do the will of His father in heaven because it pleases Him. We are brothers and sisters of Jesus and as such we should do the same.
Do not be confused with the freedom we have in Christ. Do not make it hard to understand what Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians, Romans, Galatians, etc… Peter echoes Paul in 1 Peter. We have freedom but the closer we walk with Christ, the more we choose His life sin becomes less and less in our life. This is freedom, grace, love, and true fellowship with Christ Jesus.
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