Freedom comes with responsibilities

When I was 12, I was trapped, and it was my fault. I was riding a three-wheeler ATV with some friends down a gravel road. The combination of inexperience, loose gravel and exhilaration caused the ATV to flip and land on top of me. The frame pinned my helmeted head to the ground while the hot engine seared my skin. The freedom of the open throttle became a snare.

Freedom without aim is a prison. Freedom can never be the absence of responsibility. Casting off of restraint. Freedom is living for a higher calling and a more excellent ideal. 1 Peter 2:17 says of freedom, "Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God." Freedom is from a curse and for a cause.

Gospel freedom delivers from the cursed tyranny of sin. The great division between God and man. The command to " Live as people who are free" opens the prison bars of enslavement to sin. The cruelty of sin no longer reigns in the life of free people.

Gospel freedom unleashes from the curse of imprisonment. There is a scene in Bunyan's "Pilgrims Progress," where the main character, Christian, is imprisoned with a man who hopelessly resides in the Cage of Despair. Rattled with guilt from the abuse of his freedom. He testifies that he is there from the sins he has committed. Christian, though remembers a key he was given a key called Promise that unbolts the cage and the door to the dungeon which it was secured. The man cannot believe the promises choosing to remain in the cage. Often we live in the prison of our own doing all the while the promise of freedom is in our possession.

Gospel freedom unleashes your purpose to serve. To give your life to a greater cause. To yield our lives to the creator who knows us intimately foresees our future, and desires a better life than we can imagine for ourselves. To be a servant of God is to live for a higher calling. To be a servant of God is to live as you have been created.

Freedom casts off the chains of death and guilt. Freedom is not without restraints. Like the boy who molested his freedom trapping him under a great weight, abused freedom will crush you. Gospel freedom releases from the curse to a cause.