Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

It is especially critical at our cultural moment not to be driven by a selfish understanding of freedom, but by how the Bible defines freedom—which is, loving obedience to God’s commandments, especially the command to love one’s neighbor.

Biblically speaking, freedom is not defined by “my rights” (i.e. me getting what I want without inference from others), but by obedience to God’s commandments. Certainly, freedom, as defined by individual rights, may be helpful political ideology. Indeed, as a red-blooded American I certainly think so. However, this is not the most basic biblical understanding of freedom.

Listen to Psalm 119:44-45
“I will always obey your law,
for ever and ever.
I will walk about in freedom,
for I have sought out your precepts.”

Freedom is obedience to God’s commandments. Remember, God commanded Pharaoh to set the Children of Israel free. Why? In order that they might serve the Lord. Submission to God is freedom. And it was after the nation was delivered from slavery in Egypt that God gave them commandments. Why? So that they might fully realize the benefits of that freedom. Freedom is defined not by rights but by responsibility to obey God.

Now, if obedience to God’s commandments is true liberty, then what is the essence of what God commands? Love. The New Testament repeatedly reminds us that the law of God is summed up (or fulfilled) in one commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

That is true freedom.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh's heart is hardened; he refuses to let the people go. Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is going out to the water. Stand on the bank of the Nile to meet him, and take in your hand the staff that turned into a serpent. And you shall say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you, saying, “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.” But so far, you have not obeyed. Thus says the Lord, “By this you shall know that I am the Lord: behold, with the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water that is in the Nile, and it shall turn into blood. The fish in the Nile shall die, and the Nile will stink, and the Egyptians will grow weary of drinking water from the Nile.”’” And the Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, their canals, and their ponds, and all their pools of water, so that they may become blood, and there shall be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.’”

~ Exodus 7:14-19 (ESV)