10-20-23-ENG.

"You have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again. " 

Romans 8:15 
YOU'RE FREE
 
Read It: Galatians 5:1 
We've got a great subject to end our study of the Holy Spirit with: His freedom. Slavery is not a very exciting position to be in, whether it's social, political, economic, or personal slavery. The Holy Spirit has come to make people free. The good news of the presence of the Spirit of God is that He is the Emancipator. His job is to set you free from those things that hold you in bondage. Today's text states a central truth about spiritual freedom. God did not set you free so you could become a slave again. He did not release you so that you could be bound by sin once more. In the case of the Galatian believers, some who followed Paul were trying to enslave the people to the old Jewish religious standards such as circumcision. This was serious stuff, as we'll see tomorrow, because it threatened the Galatians' faith in Christ and their dependence on Him alone for salvation. This wasn't a difference of opinion over the color of carpet in the sanctuary. tuary. It was a battle for the spiritual freedom Jesus Christ paid a heavy price to procure and Paul paid a heavy price to proclaim. Paul is so emphatic on the necessity of spiritual freedom that the way he states the truth almost sounds like a redundancy: "It was for freedom that Christ set us free." In other words, when He set you free, He intended you to stay free. So if you are a Christian and you are in slavery today, you have a fundamental damental misunderstanding of what happened at the Cross. Now I need to remind you that freedom never means being free to do what you want. Freedom means that God has liberated us to fulfill the purposes for which He saved us. Suppose a fish said, "I want to be free. Get me out of this water. I want to roam with the lions." So we "liberate" the fish from the river. He may be free of the water, but he will also be dead. Freedom for God's creation means fulfilling His purposes-and that includes you and me. Think About It If Christ set you free, why are you still wearing those chains on your mind or attitudes or actions or whatever is binding you?