How can we experience true freedom in Christ?

If there be one thing more than another that marks Christianity, it is that which is brought before us in the words of our Lord in the eighth chapter of John's Gospel, and in the writings of the Spirit of God in 2 Corinthians 3 — namely, that the saint of God today is called to freedom, divine freedom, divine liberty; and that is why I say that I believe the Assembly of God is a free Church. There is not the smallest touch of bondage about it, viewed according to Scripture. If you are not yet in the liberty of the Spirit of God, individually and collectively, I hope you soon may be, because, according to Scripture, if you are not free in your soul before God — if you are not standing fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free (Gal. 5:1), you are not breathing Christian atmosphere.

How simple are the Lord's words to the Jews, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). First of all, the soul, individually, by the reception of the truth revealed in Christ, is set in perfect freedom before God. Freedom from what? Everything that would hinder your heart and soul thoroughly enjoying God. "The servant abides not in the house for ever: but the Son abides ever" (John 8:35). The servant is in bondage; the Son is in liberty. There is the contrast; and who is the Son? The blessed Lord Himself; and what does He do? The moment He takes you into association with Himself, of course on the ground of death and resurrection, you are in the same atmosphere as He is, and therefore when He says, "the Son abides ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed" (ver. 36), He indicates the abiding liberty into which His grace brings us, that we may enjoy the rich portion He shares with us. I like to admit, honestly and openly, that I am a Free Churchman. You say, The Free Church of Scotland? No, nor of any other land; the Free Church of God — of Scripture. I am also a thoroughly Established Churchman; and greatly rejoice further to be a member of the United Church. The Established-United-Free Church is the Church of Scripture, and membership of anything but that is foreign to its teaching. God's Assembly is established, united, and free, and I should be ashamed to own that I was a member of aught else. All Christians are united to Christ and to each other, are in the liberty of sonship before God individually, and are brought by God into the most wonderful liberty collectively, His saints, all together, forming the temple of God. Now see how other scriptures present it.

In Romans 6 the apostle says of believers in Christ, Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness" (ver. 18). There is yet sin in the believer, but he is set free from its domination. He has learned what it is to have died with Christ, and to be alive in Him, in all the freedom of resurrection. This liberty, however, is never known till I have the sense that I am dead with Christ, and also am risen with Him. What is true of Christ, the believer is to apprehend — by faith for himself, and take account of as true of himself.

"Christ has set us free in freedom." (New Trans.) This is not the liberty of the flesh, for Christ has done it. The freedom which the Christian enjoys is His freedom. The believer has not to attain it, but to stand fast in it. To be entangled in a yoke of bondage is to give up Christ's liberty. To circumcise the flesh is to admit that one is in the flesh and not in Christ, for we cannot mingle the two. To be circumcised was to bring upon themselves the whole claim of the law, and to be deprived of profit from Christ, for they were then seeking for justification by law. It was giving up grace. It is well to be clear as to this, for nothing is more specious than the doctrine that we are indeed pardoned through the work of Christ, but that the flesh is to be kept in order by legal effort. This is only to give a place to the flesh, and to gratify it by being occupied with it, but by the same sacrifice of Christ wherein atonement for our guilt was made, God condemned sin in the flesh, and now justification and liberty are in Christ raised from the dead. "Christ has set us free in freedom."

The words you quote are in John 8, and of course freedom from sin is an absolute necessity for the enjoyment of sonship freedom. "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin"; from such bondage only grace and truth can set us free. But "if the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." He makes us free with the freedom of the house, we have access to the Father who loves us as He loves His Son, and His Son shares His own place and relationship before the Father with those upon whom His choice and favour thus rests. It is inconceivable apart from sovereign grace, but it is the revelation of God's thoughts of love towards us. If we want to know the greatness and blessedness of this freedom we must learn it as set forth in Christ, the beloved Son, but we could not know it at all apart from the Spirit of the Son. He has come into our hearts that it might not be a mere dogma but a living and blessed reality.

And this leads us to the second of the privileges alluded to, as connected with the "Son of God." He gives liberty as well as life. "If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." (John 8:36.) These are the two great aspects of blessing which characterise Jesus as the Son of God. He imparts not only life but liberty too. Not that they have always or necessarily gone together. For a man might have spiritual life and yet be in grievous bondage, as one observes too often. This is also what we read of in Rom. 7. A person who is converted has life, but may be withal the most miserable of men as regards his own experience. "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" In Rom. 8 we have the answer of grace. "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free [or delivered me] from the law of sin and death." Liberty now goes with the life of the Son of God, for He is the risen Lord who died for me and discharged me from all the claims of law, and of every other thing or one which might else arrest my blessing. The servant does not abide ever in the house, he might have notice to quit; but there is no such thing as the son's leaving the house. And it is thus as sons God puts us in His house, in the place of full and holy liberty.

(V. 25). At once the answer comes, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord". The secret of deliverance is found in living "by faith, the faith of the Son of God who loved me, and gave Himself for me". Deliverance is not found by relying upon our prayers, our knowledge of Scripture, or our devotedness, but in looking to the Son of God. In the presence of the flesh, of the world, and of the devil — enemies that are much stronger than ourselves, we look to One who is stronger than all our enemies. The flesh is too strong for us, but the Son can make us free (John 8:36); the world is too strong for us, but the Son has overcome the world (John 16:33); Satan is too strong for us, but the Son of God was manifested to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). In looking to Him we look to One who is with us, and loves us, and can support us. We come to the truth experimentally, that in the beginning of the chapter, is stated doctrinally, — the truth that we are "married to another, even to Him that is risen from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit to God."

Verse 2. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” We have seen the terrible law, or power of sin; have we not also known and felt it? But what new law, or power, or principle, is this? Is it the power of my new nature as born of God? No; though, as such, I did delight in the law of God; but that did not make me free from the law of sin, as we have seen. But this does — the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. This is God the Holy Ghost dwelling in us; it is not now death, but the Spirit of life. Thus, as we have seen, we have a justified life. Now we have power — the law of the Spirit of life. Elsewhere we learn that the life we now have is eternal, and the Spirit is eternal. Thus the power we have is eternal. We have seen that the flesh, or sin, is still in us — that which is born of the flesh; but here is deliverance from its power: made free from the law of sin and death; made free by infinite, eternal power, the law of the Spirit of life. It is not “will” do, but, “has made me free.” So terrible is our depraved old sinful nature, that, though born of God, and I delighted in the law of God, longed to keep it; yet the law of sin in my members brought me into captivity. Has it not been so? But now we are made free from its power, by a greater power — the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. Oh, for more simple faith in the word of God; yea, and also in the Holy Ghost dwelling in us! This verse sums up the whole of chapter 6. It is the principle of reckoning ourselves dead to sin, and alive to God in Jesus Christ, applied by the power of the Spirit.

Let us carefully notice the absolute finality of this verse. It is no attainment of experience or of spirituality that made Paul feel free from the law of sin and death. Nor did he merely feel free: such was not the question. Feelings must not be trusted here: we must have established facts, not feelings. And such we have here — “The law of the Spirit, of life in Christ Jesus, hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” Blessed, unchangeable truth — applicable to every saint of God, though indeed not realized by all. But be this as it may, it stands in all its noble grandeur, always the same, ready to be appropriated by the faith of all who take it as it stands. “Hath made me free”: this is rest indeed. It is nothing to be grasped at nor sought with the strivings of human labor, experience, or feelings: freedom is accomplished through Christ Jesus — the Spirit of God also attesting it in the soul.

Faith, in Romans 6, takes up the judgment of God in Colossians 3, and I reckon myself dead to sin, and alive to God; not in Adam, but in Jesus Christ our Lord. Hence, while "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," this liberty has a double aspect - conscious liberty in the light before God as in Christ, and a son; and liberty from the law of sin in the flesh. I have got into the new place in Christ, in that I have died to the old thing - Adam - and am alive in Christ. Had I to die, or to get free, by my own victory, I should not succeed, but I have found the need of a deliverer, as unable myself to set aside flesh, and have by grace found one - in, by faith, having died and risen with Christ. I have not to die; I reckon myself dead, because by the Holy Ghost Christ who died is in me as my life. The Holy Ghost gives me adoption, and the consciousness of being in Christ a son. It does give me faith as to having died with Christ; but it cannot give me the consciousness that the flesh is not there, but that I am not a debtor to it, nor that I am living after the Spirit when I am not. I know the conflict exists, that the flesh lusts against the Spirit, but that, the Spirit being there, I am not under the law. There I was captive to the law of sin. In the Spirit I am not; on the contrary, Christ's grace is sufficient for me, His strength made perfect in weakness. I am at liberty, because the sin I have discovered in my flesh has been condemned in the cross of Christ, and that was in death; so that for faith I am crucified with Him, and got into the new place of man before God, after the cross, and in resurrection, past sin, Satan's power, death and judgment. That place is liberty - liberty before God and from the law of sin. I am dead to it, having died with Christ. Romans does not go farther than death in this doctrine, and Christ being our life. In Colossians, resurrection with Him is introduced; and we are dead also to the world.

The central portion of the chapter, from verse 7, contains not only the remarkable allusion to Moses veiled and unveiled, but the contrast between the ministry of letter in the law with that of the Spirit. The parenthesis being closed, he forthwith recurs to that contrast of letter and spirit which preceded it. "Now the Lord is the spirit, but where the Spirit of the Lord [is, there is] liberty." (Ver. 17) Scarce any scripture shows more instructively than this the necessity of understanding the mind of God, in order even to present it correctly in form. For it is an utter mistake to give "the spirit" in the first clause a capital letter, which would imply the Holy Ghost to be meant; and where would be the sense, where so much as the orthodoxy, of identifying the Lord with the Holy Ghost? To me the meaning, without doubt, is that the Lord Jesus constitutes the spirit of the forms and figures and other communications of the old covenant. These, if taken in the letter, killed; if in the spirit, quickened. "The Lord" was their real scope; and now this comes out into the fullest evidence. Faith sees in Him contrast with Adam, analogy with Abel; the light of which shines even on Cain and Lamech. Yet more manifestly do we see types of Him in Joseph and Moses, and in that vast system of sacrifice and priesthood which, coming in by Moses, furnished those shadows so abundantly. Unbelief never laid hold of the coming One, faith always did; though it might not apprehend the bearing of all, nor perhaps fully of anything, till He actually died and rose. But "the Lord is the spirit," and the new testimony is so precise, that there is no excuse for misapprehending the old longer. "The true Light now shines," and "we who were once darkness are now light in the Lord." In the light we walk, and we ought to walk as children of it; and an immense help it is to our souls intelligently to apprehend the Lord in every part of the word. It is this which gives the deepest interest, and truest solemnity, and living power, to every part of the Old Testament. Thus only have we communion with the mind of God with positive and growing blessing to our own souls. Now that He is revealed, all is plain.

But there is more than this, for "where the Spirit of the Lord [is, there is] liberty." Here the truth requires that there should be a capital, for the apostle means not merely the true inner bearing of what was communicated of old, but the presence and power of the Holy Ghost now; and He is not a spirit of bondage unto fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind; not a spirit of bondage, but the Spirit of the Son, whom God had sent into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Hence the effect is liberty, not alone because it is the Son that makes us free, but the Spirit of life in Him risen from the dead, after the mighty work in which God, sending Jesus in the likeness of flesh of sin, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh. Thus all was condemned that could be condemned, and we by grace are delivered — free indeed. "Where the Spirit of the Lord [is, there is] liberty," as opposed to Gentile license as to Jewish bondage.

It is liberty to do the will of God, "for sin shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not under law, but under grace." Yet do we yield ourselves slaves for obedience; and having got our freedom from sin, and become slaves to God, we have our fruit unto holiness, and the end eternal life. We are no longer in the flesh, and are clear from the law, so that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in oldness of letter. "Where the Spirit of the Lord [is, there is] liberty." It is not yet the liberty of the glory of the children of God; it is the liberty of grace before glory dawns at Christ's coming.

In the seventeenth verse of the third chapter of 2nd Corinthians, we have another great truth in respect of the Spirit, "Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Bondage marks the soul under law; liberty is the portion of the one who possesses the Spirit. Are you in liberty? I find many dear children of God groaning, and moaning, and bowed down like bulrushes. Now this should not be, for "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Not merely are you to know, that you are forgiven, but you are to know, experimentally, that you are out of bondage. If you have the Holy Ghost dwelling in you, there is liberty to gaze on Christ in glory. "But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor. 3:17-18). It is the Holy Ghost having His own way in your heart. Upheld by grace, you are kept going through this world, in the liberty of the Holy Ghost, and the joy which the liberty of God alone can furnish.