TRUE AND AUTHENTIC FREEDOM IN CHRIST
Jesus said, “If you hold on to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32)
But we may be wondering what is Christian freedom.
This freedom begins when we are freed from the awful bondage of having to win our salvation by obedience to the law – it includes freedom from guilt and from a guilty conscience, the wondrous joy of forgiveness, acceptance and access to God into His very presence.
However, we must not make the mistake to think that Christian freedom is freedom from all restrictions and restraints. Firstly, this freedom does not mean we can indulge our fallen, self-centred nature – our freedom in Christ is not to be used as a pretext for self-indulgence, gratifying the desires of the sinful nature (Gal. 5:13). I have interacted with young Christian adults who are in leadership in their church, who lived in sinful promiscuity; they claimed that since God has forgiven their past, present and future sins (taught by their pastor), they need not ask God for forgiveness as they are already forgiven in Christ, and they can continue to lead their apparent “life of freedom”. This is indeed a distorted understanding of true Christian freedom – we are not freed to sin habitually without confession and repentance, and we are not to continue in darkness and expect to fellowship with God who is light (1 John 1:5-7).

Christian freedom is not not freedom to exploit our neighbour. Rather, we are to serve one another in love. It is not freedom to ignore, neglect, or abuse our neighbours; rather we are commanded to love them, and through love to serve them.

But Christian freedom also is not freedom to disregard the law, for “the entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love our neighbour as yourself”. Freedom does not mean that if we love our neighbour, we can dispense with the law, but that we will fulfill it. This means that we cannot condone the sins of our neighbour by insisting that this is the manifestation of Christian love for our neighbour; true love may require the willingness to gently correct our neighbour who has strayed and ignored the law and command of God; it also means that we have to look to ourselves, as we seek, in love, to correct others, and not end up being judgmental and arrogant. Even the Lord Jesus not only correct the Pharisees, but He also rebuked them and pronounced ‘woes’ unto them.

And that brings us to the next aspect of Christian freedom: we are free not to be negatively affected when others are hostile towards us, for what truly matters to us is God’s approval even though men seek to humiliate us and to put us down, not even saying anything about ‘persecution’ and outright rejection and enmity
(Matty. 5:11-13). In fact, we are blessed and favoured by God in such circumstances, for the same treatment was received by God’s servants in the Old Testament context.

LOVE IS MORE THAN KINDNESS
There is certainly kindness in love. But love and kindness are not the ‘same thing’. Kindness consents readily to the removal of its object – we have come across people whose kindness to animals may lead them to kill the animals lest they should suffer. In that sense, kindness cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.
As Hebrews 12:8 points out, the legitimate sons who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished – for those we love, we would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes.
If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. In fact, God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic , most unexpected sense.
That explains why He may even allow us to suffer because He loves us deeply, so that we may become good like Him.

“He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His love for those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:10-12).
Perhaps, at this juncture, we can understand a little bit more why God allows Job to suffer – it is because He loves him deeply and expects him to rise to the highest occasion, despite the accusation of the devil.
Perhaps, we can understand also a little bit better why God allows us to go through difficult circumstances because He loves us and desires us not just to be free from the sufferings, but through the sufferings, to help us to become like Him and to bear the family likeness. Thanks be to God – His love is more than kindness – it is a love that gives His only begotten Son (John 3:16 – causing Him also to suffer tremendously) – it is a love that is willing to go through sufferings with us and for us such that we can rise to the highest occasion, and bear the image of His Son.

OUR HIGHEST CALLING AND ACTIVITY
“If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving – the election of man, from nonentity to be the beloved of God – and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things.For we are oly creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male; mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire; to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were,a solecism against the grammar of being”.

This quotation from C.S. Lewis reveals his deep understanding of what it is to experience the love of God in a true form; we must realise fully that it is God who takes the initiative to love us, although He needs and desires nothing; it is He who wooed us because we need to be needed – hence the pure giving from Him – the election of man, from nonentity to be His beloved – this is for our sakes.
To experience the love of God truly, we must acknowledge that He is God, and therefore the need on our part to surrender to His demand, and to conform to His desire, ultimately for our good good; but to demand that He meets our needs, our desires – it is indeed ridiculous and reveals our ignorance of how much He loves us and how He gives His love, exercises His mercy and grace so purely and unceasingly so that we may truly become like Him and to be in the wondrous fellowship of the holy Trinity!
This is our highest calling and activity as humans – made a reality by God’s sovereignty and His eternal plan of salvation!!