Christian Freedom – What kind of God?
Here at the first of the year we are working through a short series of messages related to the topic of Christian freedom. Last week we talked about how our American citizenship gives us amazing freedoms and rights but they are limited by other people’s freedom and rules of our free society. We also considered New Year’s resolutions and how they point to ways that we might identify places that we have made ourselves slaves to things in our lives. Loosing weight, debt, and all kinds of choices that we resolve to try to break bad habits – things that control us.. Some of those desires and habits limit our Christian freedom.
Weather you have put in on paper or not you probably have a list of life questions that you are always looking for answers too. Perhaps things that make you go hum…
I have a list of questions that you may be searching for the answer too and not even realize it.
Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to?
Can fat people go skinny-dipping?
Can you get cavities in your dentures if you use too much artificial sweetener?
Day light savings time - why are they saving it and where do they keep it?
Do fish get thirsty?
Do hummingbirds hum because they don’t know the words?
Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?
Why do irons have a setting for "permanent" press?
How can you tell when it is time to tune your bagpipes?
Did Noah keep his bees in archives?
Those are silly and fun questions that if we ever get and answer too them we will file it away into our minds and find some small personal satisfaction just for ourselves.
But there are bigger and more important questions that lie just under the surface of our minds and perhaps deep in our hearts.
Oddly enough most of us will never really sit down and search for the answer directly and most of us never feel free to speak them aloud. Therefore they are left open and unanswered.
- On top of our list of life questions I believe thinking people need to ask is about God and if He exist. It is surprising to me that many people never even consider the topic or just accepts what other people, parents or culture, tells them about God.
This is important for one simple reason: If God exists then that means He is in charge. If he is in charge it becomes important for us to know what God wants or doesn’t want from us the creation. Because, if He is in charge; we are not.
However, If God does not exist, then we are the ones in control over every decision and choice and opportunity. If there is no God, then we live only once and we might as well make the best of this life that we can. Because … when we die it is all over.
Can you see how your personal understanding of God can make a big difference in your personal freedom?
So this is where we are starting this morning. This message is for people that would say that they are Christians. People that have declared that they believe in the existence of God and as a result receive the gift of Christian freedom. Last week I pointed out that gift boils down to a simple choice. Choosing to live a life that tries to be righteous and good or choosing a life if sin – both limit freedom in different ways.
If you are not there(have not made any decisions about God) then this teaching is not going to be very helpful to you. Because, you don’t have the freedom as defined by Jesus and Paul and others in the Bible. But, we are glad you are hear and perhaps you can examine the basic question about God’s existence and your reaction for yourself today.
I suspect that the majority of people here this morning would say that they are Christians which admits the existence of God. That leads me to the next logical question…. What is God like?
The things we understand and believe about God control how freely we live our lives.
Almost all the things that we, Christians do to remain bound or imprisoned or limit our freedom ultimately is filtered through what “we believe” God is like.
If the non-believing world watched Christians to try to learn about God, they would most likely not come to the conclusion that faith in God offers believers any Freedom.
In fact they are likely to assume just the opposite; because of what Christians put themselves through. They might think that God is opposed to laughter and that He creates a maze of rules and regulations. They are likely to think that God is always serious and judgmental and harsh. Because that is how many Christians live.
Unfortunately, if people look at Christians to learn about God they will see more prisons and limitations than they would see freedom and joy.
Let me suggest that we are probably like snow flakes and that no two people are ever identical in our personal understanding of God. There are a lot of conditions that develop our internal knowledge. Family, friends, preachers, teachers, books , and even life experiences shape us is ways that we will never understand.
So what I am going to do is describe some general categories….and mentally you might picture your theology – knowledge of God – and see if they match what you think God is like. Let me give you a hint, these three descriptions are about limits and not about freedom.
-- The first category I will call the Santa Clause God, you might prefer to say, the dotting\spoiling father God.
My simplistic description of this view is that God loves us and wants to see us happy. God keeps a list of each person’s life - balancing the good and bad, naughty and nice.
Santa God offers reward and/or punishment when the list is reviewed.
Santa God is viewed all knowing, wise and good and yet can be stern and even vengeful.
Our role in this relationship with the Santa God is to be good more than bad in order to receive an eternal reward. This is an understanding that believes that we can bring our agenda to God and He must respond if we follow the rules.
If God fails to respond the way we want, we are free to break off the relationship and just stop believing.
This understanding of a Santa God limits freedom by forcing us to live within a prison sell with limits. There is a direct expectation of if I go to church, give to causes, and pray, God will respond positively.
We must be good for goodness sake if our request and dreams are to be satisfied. We bind ourselves to figuring out how to get God’s blessing.
-- The second general understanding is of a judgmental and potentially even an abusive God. He is a God that makes everything we enjoy either sinful, or fattening.
Judge God almost never says yes to our prayers and seems to enjoy messing up our plans, all of course for our own good. This God gives AIDS or STDs to the immoral and failure to those that step out of line.
This is the God of the lightening bolt that is constantly out to get you should fail to obey or fall into sin. This Judge God requires that we fear him and fear offending him….
We never seem to get comfortable or even really understand the rules of what might make Judge God angry.
Our relationship with this personality will never allow a believer to be free to dance, or laugh, or have joy because, we will never be willing to risk anything because of fear.
People that hold tightly to this understanding of a judgmental God stop trying to live and just accept misery.
They feel guilty about everything and think that starving people on the other side of the globe is their fault.
This understanding of Judgmental God means that the only hope that we can have in this life is that the next life is coming. Any hope or joy in this life make us venerable to more pain and disappointment and only after living in hell on earth will they will reach heaven where God will fix everything.
This understanding of God is based on fear. When bad things happen to us in life it just proves our understanding. When we see God as our judge we tend to want to stay out of sight and out of mind and avoid being in God’s presence.
I had a dog that thought of me like that once. He was a stray puppy that someone dumped out near our home. He would avoid me. If close he would stay just out of reach. If I was very insistent and soften my voice and almost begged I could pet him but he constantly looked sacred of me. I don’t think that I ever did anything to cause that. I believe that he learned this behavior before he was abandoned near our house. Before we started caring for him someone taught him that the man of the house is abusive and he never unlearned what someone else taught him.
I believe that way too many Christians view God like this. Their prayers are filled with regrets and reliving failures and very little acknowledgement of the blessings and the celebration of the good things in life.
-- Third many people think of God as being distant, perhaps on vacation. Generally we can’s directly please or displease Him. Everything is in life is predetermined…good and bad. Our lives are to be lived out living on bread and water of fulfilling our duty to remembering God as creator.
If God is distant, God made the rules of the universe and wondered off – this view robes people of passion. The prison is that no matter what we can’t and God can’t change anything….. Life is again just life with no hope in the hard times.
The prison here is the hopelessness and Apathy. This view was very common a couple of hundred years ago and is growing rapidly in our culture today. The helpless feelings that come form trying to worship the first two types of God often lead people into the third when God fails us or we feel that we have failed God.
These three descriptions are very different and we all probably have some mix of theses views in our personal understanding of what God is like. But you need to know something. These descriptions are not Biblical. The Bible tells us that He is the judge of all the earth and has ultimate power over every man’s eternal destiny.
The God of the Bible claims to be the one and only true God. He is revealed to us as being Creator of all that is, powerful, majestic, sovereign over all creation, loving, compassionate, patient, perfectly righteous, just, holy, and a God who is full of wrath or anger against all unrighteousness. These are only a few of the characteristics of the God of the Bible.
To paraphrase, the Bible describes God as being scary, as a person to be feared…respected. God is big, bigger and more powerful than we can comprehend. God is consistently described as being sovereign. The are plenty of places where he is described as being jealous and vengeful. But most importantly God is described as being our father.
C.S. Lewis the author of the “Chronicles of Narnia the lion the witch and the wardrobe” has a brief scene where Mr. Beaver describes Aslim the Lion (a representation of Christ/God).
He is asked if the Lion is safe?
’Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver...’Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe, but he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.
No one can really claim to know exactly what God is like. It will always be incomplete. The only dependable source come from what God has revealed about himself in scripture. Then it seems that we all have had certain attributes added into our thinking that were probably intended to help Christians to stay on the right track…however, the extra information, the false attributes’, the extra rules we end up being a new version of the law…updated by modern Pharisees.
The new law based on man’s limited understanding of God is how our freedom is limited.
I believe that many of us don’t believe in a God that would really allow us to be free.
In our scripture reading Paul talks about how teachers insisted and taught that circumcision was required by god and evidentially the Christians in the Gallatin church listened to the preachers and other converts and submitting to the LAW. I guess it seemed like good fire insurance. It seemed like a little elective surgery to make sure that they could be closer to God.
Paul says, starting in verse 7, “You were running a good race. Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth? That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. "A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough." I am confident in the Lord that you will take no other view. The one who is throwing you into confusion will pay the penalty, whoever he may be.
Paul address that the readers have been influenced by false information which is dramatically different than what he had taught them about their freedom in Christ. He stresses that they have been influenced away from the one that called them. That a little bad information – simple rules - has messed up the whole batch of dough.
Folks we desire to get closer to God so much that we place our selves into all kinds of righteous sounding bondage about what we have to do. In reality Jesus came to this world the help is understand that we are called to be free…we are called to respond to this freedom by deciding what we want to do….
According to Paul if the false teachers are correct then the act of Jesus on the cross is declared null and void. Oops, God decided that the whole incarnation thing just did not work out….
-- That can’t be true because scripture says that God is unchanging….
He will make good the promise of the Law for anyone that can keep it but, because that is impossible, He has also provided a path for the thinkers that examine His existence and allow the spirit to provide the grace, and faith and acceptance of mercy.
Paul continues a description of freedom:
13You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. 14The entire law is summed up in a single command: "Love your neighbor as yourself.” 15If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
People created in the image of God are called by God to embrace a special freedom. The acceptance of the adoption into God’s family gives us a freedom which appears to be dangerous. We don’t have to obey, or serve or give or love….. With God, with our faith in God through the cross….free means free….
But Paul encourages his readers to make a choice of how to use our freedom….
Do not use you freedom to indulge the sinful nature……..Wait…he does not say that they can’t indulge….and still be saved…but they should not indulge.
I believe that Christians freedom really means that we can be free….That as long as we have faith in God and trust Christ for the forgiveness of sins we can sit and be pew potatoes. We can indulge ourselves and still be forgiven of sins and go to heaven…
However, if we indulge ourselves and use our freedom our way we miss out. On a lot of things…a lot of joy, a lot of laughfter.
Paul encourages us to use our freedom serving one another in love. To keep the law with the simple rule of loving our neighbor as self. The secret to enjoying and getting the most out of the freedom that Jesus Christ secured for us it to love and to serve.
If we choose to use our freedom satisfying ourselves, Human nature will eventually twist our freedom to the point that our self-indulgence, our self control will consume our love for God…. His position as our creator, king, father, savior will slip away in our life and lead us to a deeper bondage to sins and failure and pain.
Paul tried to be clear in all of his teachings. He understands failures. He know disappointment and pain and he hope we will realize that Choosing to love like Jesus loves is the only way to really remain free.
This week I hope that you can examine how you are using your freedom in Christ. Are you laughing and joyful. Are you loving the people around you and showing them the freedom that Christ secured for mankind.
All Glory Be to God!
