The Trouble with Freedom

The trouble with freedom is that it puts the responsibility on the one who has the freedom to make the right choices, to use the freedom for good and not evil. To recognize the one who gave them the freedom and make the choices that honor the gift. God trusted us with freedom knowing that in our free will we could and would make the wrong decisions with that freedom.

CS Lewis wrote of his revelation concerning freedom in Mere Christianity;

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which is free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that work like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.”

Of course God knew what would happen: If they used their freedom for right we also could for wrong. Apparently He thought it was worth the risk! His provision of Jesus was to atone for the wrong decisions and to give us a path back to the right ones…but it is your choice!

The trouble with freedom is that the risk is, we may use the freedom, in the wrong way. But unlike God many of us in the church don’t understand why the risk was worth it. The risk of misused freedom seams to outweigh the prize of true freedom. So the result is that we get scared and we let fear enter. This can lead us to use our freedom incorrectly by not extending grace to the person who used theirs wrong.

The trouble with freedom is that asks me to extend the freedom I have been given to those who I may not think deserve it!

The trouble with freedom is I will be responsible for how I used it… not how you choose to use it…

The Value of freedom is that no matter how much I have chosen the wrong uses with it; “IT” is still there for me to use the right way today. Jesus’ mercy is new every day so it does not matter how you have chosen to use freedom yesterday or a minute ago, it matters what you choose to do with it NOW! What is your choice? With great freedom comes GREAT LOVE!

Mark is really an apostle at heart - someone who hears from heaven, connects and fathers people. Mark is excited about the "deck time" that the coming summer brings.