Without valuing, pursuing, and protecting our Christian Liberty, we are simply unable to fulfill and live into God’s design for the Church that Christ established and that the Spirit enables.
Our liberty is a theological contradistinction from our previous slavery, and if we exist as if we’re still enslaved, we have yet to experience the fullness of our new identity in Christ.
What is Christian Liberty?
Biblically:
Freedom from the slavery of sin and freedom to the service of Christ.
Scripture tells us specifically that we’ve been freed from the curse of the law, the servitude of ritual, the power of sin, the dominion of Satan, the corruption of the world, the fear of death, and the wrath to come.
Theologically:
Because we are free to serve Christ, we can do so with obedient hearts that are secure in Him and do not feel the need to tighten shackles that He has loosed.
Theologically, we are free to exercise wisdom, discernment, and personal preference in secondary, tertiary, and practical matters.
Practically:
In our lives, this liberty is exercised by refusing to mislabel condemnation as the Spirit’s conviction.
To exercise liberty, we must be aware that both lawlessness and legalism are spiritual laziness and we must reject both.
Communally:
In our communities, we must fiercely protect liberty.
To achieve this, we must be willing to dig to the bottom of what triggers us in the way that others exercise the liberty God has given them, knowing that our triggers are generally rooted in our own slavery.
We must have humility.
Liberty is ideally exercised when we have both the grace to accommodate the convictions of others and also the humility not to impose our convictions when not necessary.
We also must possess both the wisdom to know the difference and also the capacity for theological triage in order to know what issues are, indeed, issues of liberty.
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