Christian freedom is utterly different from all that men call freedom. Our sinful nature makes us wish to be “free from God” -that delusion which makes men say that when they can do as they wish, when they ate free from all external authority, when they have tamed conscience, then they are free. In reality they are enslaved to passion, lust, anxiety, sin, death, hell. That freedom is always self-assertive, shadowed by self, and completely unsatisfactory when at last the appetites are jaded. Christian freedom also differs from political freedom -though both kinds are “bought with a price,” both are gifts, both carry responsibility. The minutemen, doughboys, and bomber crews did not die for the kingdom of God, and Jesus Christ did not die to preserve the “American way of life.” Political freedom frees man from the coercion of the state. But even in free societies there are jails and mental institutions, which seem to suggest that a free state cannot really free a man, least of all from himself. It can only give him the opportunity to find freedom.
Wayne Saffen wrote that a long time ago in a Concordia Journal. I like the line that freedom is always self assertive. I have the freedom to do this or that but you on the other hand have to be controlled. Interesting what human beings can come up with once their conscience is tamed……
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