S24P8 – The work of the Spirit: liberating
2 Cor. 3:17
Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is , there is liberty.
We are born into bondage. One does not need to look about the world for very long to see that this is the case. Pressures come from all sides to conform to standards that deviate from the standard of God. The world will tell us that we should live a certain way or chase a certain ideal because that is what people do. Our flesh will prompt us to entertain sinful desires for the sake of momentary and false pleasure. The devil will tell us to give in to temptation because we are only entertaining that which we naturally feel. Even our friends and family might convince us that going down a path of sin is no big deal because it is more important to follow your heart or live your own life than to conform to antiquated and culturally irrelevant morals. These are all things that try to keep us prisoners of sin. But through God’s Holy Spirit we can experience true freedom from that which only serves to separate us from him.
When we become children of God it is only natural to seek freedom from the bondage of this world. That is one reason why we are so excited to spend eternity with God in an existence devoid of all evil. It is not that we do not value the natural creation God has given us or the people He loves so much. It is not that we do not appreciate the lives that God has given us to live on this Earth to glorify him. The issue is one of understanding how evil sin is and how terrible it’s oppression can be. When one understands this, the desire to be free from this bondage becomes overwhelming. Not only do we desire this freedom for ourselves, but we also desire this freedom for the millions upon millions who are bound and do not even know it. Through the Holy Spirit we can experience this freedom now. This does not mean that we are not exposed to the sin and evil that remain in this world while we are here, but it does mean that we can be free from their confines.
The freedom that we receive from God’s Holy Spirit is the great exhale that we seek in this world. We thank God that this condition is only temporary and that we have gained an eternal freedom from bondage that starts even now. We can live in this world of sin and yet be free of it. It has no control or jurisdiction over us. We have given ourselves to God, and we now belong to him. We are slaves to righteousness because we have been set free from sin. Evil is not our master, and we need not give in to it. No matter what we come up against in this world we know that our freedom through the Holy Spirit is not only something that we look forward to in the future but is something that exists even today. Father, remind us of the freedom that we have through your Holy Spirit, and help us walk in that freedom when we are faced with those things which try to bind us.