Is Freedom Really Free?

Can you pay for a gift, and still call it a gift? Join Josh Laack as he examines what it means to accept the gift of God offered to us in Jesus.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.

Good morning, Calvary. Kyle Söderblom prayed that we would be able to rest in the the freedom in Christ, that we would be able to ponder that. And God answered that prayer really fast, because that’s what we’re going to do this morning together. Over the past couple of weeks, Pastor Kyle has been approaching the idea of the Pharisees insisting on works based salvation, insisting on following the law, and not only the following the law, but following even the extra little things that they added in an attempt to answer questions that they had about how to live out the law. And in contrast to that, Jesus is working with the Pharisees and working with all of those who are following Him to show that he is the authority over all creation, over everything that has been made and given to us, including over the gift of the law. And it was given to the Israelites, not so that they could work, not so that they could earn something. The law was given to the Israelites so that they could glorify God who had already chosen them for free, not of their own works. And many of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law seem to believe that it was their diligent following of the law and every little aspect that they had even added to it. That was what resulted in God’s mercy, what resulted in their salvation. In other words, it couldn’t be free.

And, you know, 2000 years after Christ, I think we as a church still struggle with this. I think we still get caught up in this trap. We’re so good at doing good things as the church. And I’m not saying that’s bad, but we’re so good at doing good things that we fail to keep the correct order. We fail to keep the correct purpose for good works. It’s almost like we’re jaded as a people against the idea of something being truly free. As I was preparing to write this message, I was pondering where this idea of us being jaded comes from. Why are we jaded against things that sound or are offered to us for free? Then I got a phone call and they wanted to let me know that my car warranty had expired. That was that was nice of them. Or how many of you have gotten an email that goes like this? Dear sir or Madam, It has come attention of peoples here that you inherited much free money in the amount of $42 million us. These monies are currently waiting for your acceptance in Swiss bank account. This is third time we have attempted to hear from you on this important item. There are only two things you need to give us in order to receive these free monies. First, we need you to give us bank account number and pin for transfer of money. Second, we need you to send us check in amount of taxes and transfer fee.

So to be able to give you whole amount free. These taxes and fee are only 5000 us. Please respond at earliest convenience. Swiss Bank manager John Smith Junior. These phone calls, these emails, things like this are just constant in our world today. There are things that are offered to us all promising things for free. And yet when we accept them, when we get involved in them, it turns out that the cost is a lot higher than they initially offer it to us. And yet the idea of of our being jaded against freedom goes even further in this country. We have this pride in what we are able to accomplish as a nation. And I see this in this idiom that we often use, that I have used, where we say in this country, freedom isn’t free. What? That doesn’t make any sense. And we say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. We think these things we we believe that something that’s free really is too good to be true. Yet I don’t know about you, but I miss the innocence of youth. Do you remember going as a child to a parade and they would throw out free candy and you would run out into the street and you would grab as much of that free candy as you could and you would run back to your place and you’d wait for the next person to go by in the parade that had some candy.

And not once did I think as a kid, I wonder what this candy is costing me. I wonder what they’re trying to get from me by giving me this free K. No, I was excited for free stuff. I was excited to just get something and I believed it was free just because they thought I was awesome. And yet somewhere along the way of growing up, somewhere along the way of turning into an adult, I lost that innocence. I lost that exuberance for things that were free for good. Things we hear free and we doubt if it could really be free. And I think the place that affects us the most today is in the church and what God offers through His son Jesus. When the Bible tells us this is a free gift, it sounds too good to be true and it sounds too good to be true because we know what is going on in the innermost part of our hearts. And so it couldn’t possibly be for free. It can’t be true. There has to be a cost. And when we begin to recognize that this is something we need, even after we accept it, I think sometimes we begin to think I need an insurance policy. What if it isn’t really free? And so, yes, I accept what Christ has done, but I’m going to I’m going to go back and I’m going to do these works and I’m going to be a good person just in case, just in case God’s freedom isn’t really free.

And so we try to add the works of the law back in on top of what God is giving us for free. And this is where many of the Pharisees were. As Jesus mentioned, they took the law of God and they not only tried to follow it to gain God’s mercy, but they added all kinds of little regulations to it. They added everything they could think of in an attempt to make it simpler to understand, and I think actually made it more complicated. But they they tried to live this way and they tried to require it. Of all the people, these are all of the things you have to do every day in order to be in God’s good graces. I think we’re tempted to accept the free gift and to go backwards. I think we’re tempted to add in our works and I think we’re tempted because we don’t believe we really deserve what God offers for free. The point I want to explore with you today is this God’s gift through Christ is free, but a gift is no longer a gift. If we try to pay for it, it’s actually not a gift If you pay for it, it’s not grace if it’s owed to us, we cannot both accept grace as a gift and try to pay for it.

Can you imagine if you came to a wedding with a gift for the new young bride and groom that you had picked out because you wanted to help them get started on their new journey? And they opened this gift and they say, Wow, thank you. This is amazing. What do we owe you? You’d be offended. But wait a minute. No, I want to help you. I want to offer you this this wonderful gift to get started on your journey by trying to pay for it. They’re making a mockery of your gift. They’re saying you’re not a gift giver. You’re a glorified delivery service. We shouldn’t do that to people. And we can’t do that to God. We can’t make a mockery of his free gift. And yet the Galatian Church does exactly that. They started out with with the faith of Christ in front of them, and then troublemakers creep in among them and begin to confuse them, begin to convince them that they need an insurance policy, that they need to add back in works in order to truly be worth what God is doing. They’re trying to keep the grace, but they’re trying to add the law back just in case. And Paul, his whole letter to the Galatians is seeking to stop this, to convince them that this is not the right way to go, to convince them of the same thing that you and I should be convinced of how we are to respond to God’s free gift.

Galatians five, verse one for freedom in Christ has for freedom. Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery. What a novel concept. The whole purpose of freedom get this is to be free. That’s what freedom is all about. Freedom is to be free. It’s not to accept freedom and then immediately put ourselves back into debt again. The shadow that debt casts over us. The weight that you and I carry in our sin up until the point of Christ and accepting Christ, that’s gone. It’s taken away from us. God has paid the entire debt. And if we try to pay him back, we are taking that whole debt that has just been paid for us and putting it back on our shoulders. Why on earth would we pick up slavery again? We’ve just been given freedom. The yoke of sin and the burden of the law has been lifted from our shoulders. Stand firm, Paul says. Don’t put it back on. Don’t try to go back to the yoke that we were under before the law. To those of us who have Christ is a yoke of slavery. It was intended to be regulations put into place by which God’s people were to demonstrate how they were free and how they belonged to him.

And instead the people used the law to try to buy God’s favor. And I think that’s how many of us use good works today. And unfortunately, I hate to break this to you, but God’s favor. God’s mercy costs more than we can afford. Our only hope is for it to be a free gift because we have no chance on our own, no way to pay the cost of what it would be to earn God’s mercy and God’s favor. Yet we take this gift, this free gift from God through Christ, and we make a mockery of it by turning around and trying to earn what has already been given to us. That’s not standing firm in our freedom. That’s submitting again to a yoke of slavery that Christ just took from us. He carried it for us. And we can’t do this. I don’t even mean we shouldn’t. I mean we can’t do this. Listen to verse two. Paul says, Look, I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. Circumcision is a sign of the earthly law. So basically, if we are convinced that we must keep the regulations of the law in order to earn any part of the grace of God, then we don’t have grace from God at all. Christ’s gift to us is rejected if it’s not a gift. If we try to write a check for our wedding present, it is no longer a gift.

If we seek to pay God back with good works, then Christ is of no advantage to us. It doesn’t bring us hope. It doesn’t alter our trajectory if we do not accept the full freedom that is offered to us in Christ. It is for what it is for freedom that you have been set free. We cannot be both slaves of the law and free in Christ. They’re opposite concepts. One means we don’t have the yoke of slavery over us, and the other one means we do have the yoke of slavery over us. We cannot have it both ways. It just doesn’t work that way. Paul clarifies it this way I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You know, in order to buy something, you have to pay the whole price for it. Try this sometime. Go into a store, pick out a $100 outfit, give them a dollar and try to walk out with it. Somebody is going to come up to you and say, I’d like to see your receipt, please. Did you pay the whole cost? No. You only paid a dollar. It’s worth 100. If you want to buy it, you will pay the full cost in order to walk out with it. If you want to try to buy God’s favor there too, you must pay the whole cost, the entire thing.

And what does God’s favor cost? What does it cost to become a chosen child of God? If we were to earn it on our own? It costs absolute perfection in keeping every single part of the true law. Not the manmade parts, not the manmade understanding. It costs absolute perfection in keeping every bit of the intention behind why God has given us each and every little dot and tittle of the law. Wow. This is not about keeping the pieces that we understand to the best of our ability. This is not about some concept of how we understand what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves. This is doing every piece of God’s law as God would do it perfectly, not just in action, but in thought and in being. This means doing everything for your whole life in every moment, as if you were God, too. It means essentially, in order to earn God’s favor, we need to be God. That’s the the level to which we need to work if we’re going to earn salvation. And I don’t have to tell you, that’s not possible. We can’t do it. We can’t do it simply because we’re not God. And I definitely do not and cannot behave as God does in every situation, in any situation, even if for some reason I was able to grasp what it was that God wanted in any given situation and I was able to actually do that.

If I am under a debt, if I am a slave to the law. It doesn’t matter what I do because what I do is going to pay off that debt. My motivation is corrupt from the very moment I try to do anything because I’m not free. I am a slave. So we simply cannot, as fallen human beings earn freedom. We simply cannot do anything as God would have us do it in our own strength. And therefore we are very short on the cost of what it is to earn salvation. It’s no wonder Paul is so frustrated with the Galatian church. They they had it. They had the freedom freely offered to them. They were freed to be free. For free. I love what he says in chapter three, verse one. O foolish Galatians who has bewitched you. It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. They saw the cost that God had already paid for their freedom. Not a simple little cost, an exorbitant cost, and a cost that demonstrates even further why we cannot do it on our own. Why none of us can afford this. Not one person here or anywhere can die for their own sins and come back to life. Nobody can afford the penalty that is owed. And this is foolish for the Galatians and it’s foolish for us in attempting to add back in any of the law, even just circumcision, They are adding back in the whole debt, the whole law, the whole bill is in their name once again, even though it’s already been paid for.

They should have known that this is not how God’s grace was intended for them. And why should they have known this? Because of how it was offered. Paul says, Let me ask you only this Did you receive the spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Just one question. How was this offered to you? How did God present His gift of mercy through Christ to you? Clearly, this was a gift that they wanted, and it was one. It’s one that we want as well. But we can’t take a gift in the way we want to get it. The only way to get a gift is in the way the giver chooses to give it. And the Galatians know the answer to what Paul is asking, why he asked it. They didn’t do any works in order to hear about Christ’s mercy. They didn’t do any works to gain what Christ is offering to them. So if they go back on this, then what happens? What happens to freedom? What happens to grace that is bought? What happens to a gift when you try to pay for it? Back to Galatians five, verse four You are severed from Christ you who would be justified by the law.

You have fallen away from grace. Let me read that to you again. You are severed from Christ. You who would be justified by the law. You have fallen away from grace. It’s meaningless to you what Christ has done, what God has done through His son. The cross doesn’t cover you. Christ does not free you. You do not have grace if you are trying to be justified in your own strength. More than that, if you try to earn it, you never really had it. A gift is only a gift. If it’s a gift. I know, I know. That sounds kind of silly to say out loud, but I think we miss it in the church. You know, Kyle mentioned this last week, but I think it bears repeating. We get so caught up in doing good works for God and we begin to think a little more highly of ourselves. Than those around us who don’t do those same good works. We get some pride in the works that we do. Look at how often I read my Bible. Look how often I tithe. How often? I go to church. I volunteer. And on and on. And we begin to believe that maybe we are a little bit better than someone who believes differently than we do, than someone who supports a different political party, someone who doesn’t yet know God or someone who doesn’t attend church or even understand how lost they are.

If this is us, if this is how we approach God and His gift, then we too are still lost. We’re missing the point. The price to save us, to save you and me is the same as the price to save absolutely every other single person in the whole world. It’s nothing. Nothing on our side. Nothing from us. Because in our own strength, we have nothing of value to earn God’s mercy. Exactly the same as the person that you think less of because they don’t do something the way you do it. And if we believe we have value to earn grace in our own strength, then we’re actually worse off than those who just haven’t met Jesus yet. Because Paul says you are severed from Christ, you who try to be justified by the law, you have fallen away from grace. It was there in front of you for free and you’re turning it down. But that’s not what God’s hope is for us. That’s not what He wants from us. He wants us to turn to him, to trust him, to count on him, to have faith that he will do as he promises through Christ. Oh, we need to have faith. Well, that sounds like something we can do. That sounds like at least a little bit that we can do to get God’s grace to us. I can. I can bring the faith to the table for through the.

Oh, for through the spirit. By faith. We ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. It’s not even our own strength that lets us do this tiny little bit of faith that God says will do that. God will do as He says. Paul says, Our freedom in Christ is so free. That even the faith by which we wait is done through the strength of God, through His Holy Spirit within us. We wait for the realization of the gift of God, the hope that righteousness brings, which is life forever in His presence. And we do it by his strength to be delivered, by his strength, fulfilled in us, by his strength for free. For free. Is freedom really free? Yes, it is. And it can’t be more free than this. The passage that was read for us earlier in Ephesians two describes this process exactly as it’s meant to look listen again to what Paul told the Ephesian church. But God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace. You have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us, in Christ Jesus, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing.

It is the gift of God not a result of works so that no 1st May boast. He’s given us all of this freedom in his grace now. And Paul says he’s not even done. He has given us all this grace. Why? So that he might show us more grace, immeasurable grace in the coming ages as he displays his kindness toward us in Christ, Jesus. And all of this. All of it is a free gift. There is not one human being, at least not one who is only human, who has ever earned anything that God has given them, not one human being who can boast in their own ability, in their own strength or their own works. Only Jesus. He’s the only one who ever lived perfectly enough to earn God’s mercy. And he only was able to do it because he’s the only one who is also God. No one but God can live perfectly enough to live as God would live. He is our only hope. And he is our only hope. Only if we rely on him completely for the free gift that he offers. Freedom is for free in Christ. I was preaching at Homestead a little over a week ago. It’s a retirement community right down the road. And I was in Galatians one trying to keep my head in the same space as I was thinking about this message for the weekend.

And I got to this same part there as I often do when I preach or I begin to summarize what I’ve already given in application and I add to the application piece and I almost always ask this question, So what do we do about this? And at first glance it seemed like maybe the wrong question to ask after the sermon that I just gave. But is it is it the wrong question? Do we accept the free gift of God and then sit around and do nothing until Christ returns? That doesn’t seem quite right either. Paul isn’t telling us not to live here. He isn’t telling us that what we do doesn’t matter. In fact, he’s telling us that for the first time when we are free, what we do actually does matter. Everything a slave does goes to the one who owns the slave. Every bit of work that a slave puts in belongs to its master, to the one who holds the debt over them. That’s why slavery is so awful. It’s why we as Christians should stand up more than anyone against slavery in our world, because we understand what it means to be slaves to something and to be freed from it. The owner of a slave steals everything of value from that slave, no matter how much they work. They build nothing of value on their own.

This is what all of our work comes to when we are under the debt, when we are slaves to the law. Every bit of work that we do, everything that we do goes to pay off that debt and adds nothing of value because it can never actually do that kindness to a neighbor. It’s not really doing that just to be kind. We’re doing that to try to earn God’s favor. Tithing, Church attendance, Bible study, Holy days, on and on. If we are slaves, all that does is go toward a debt we can never repay. But what if we didn’t have a debt? What if we weren’t slaves to the law? What happens then? Then everything we do counts. Everything we do counts if we’re free. The law cannot steal from us the value if we are not under it. Kindness can be done just to be kind. Tithing Not because we want to pay a debt, but because we want to be generous with what God has given us. Bible study and prayer and church because we want to know God better and to worship with our family. There’s no longer fear. So what we do can now finally, finally be done with the right motivation. Yet before we can get to this value, we have to be free. This is why Paul begins in Galatians five with stand firm. Do not submit to the yoke of slavery. Christ didn’t die so that we could remain slaves.

He paid it all at great cost so that we could have it at no cost. You know, I know many of your faces, a lot of your names. I’m a little shaky on some of those, but I don’t know what’s going on in any of the secret places of your heart. That’s between you and God. But if this morning, if you are still holding on to a debt that you can’t pay, if you are not resting in the freedom of Christ, now’s a really good time to set down that weight. You can let go of the question. Have I done enough to be good enough? The answer is no, and that’s okay. In Christ, he paid our cost. Freedom in Christ is really free. And it’s free for you. If you’re struggling to lay down that burden this morning or to understand what it is that Christ has done for you, don’t leave here without speaking to somebody, without asking someone how to lay down that burden. Talk to me. Talk to one of our pastors or one of the other elders or even just the person sitting next to you. We would love to be part of helping you to lay down a burden of slavery to the law. Now, once we are free, now what we do matters. How we live matters. And this is what the law was meant to be. God saved the Israelites from Egypt and from the desert, and he gave them the promised land all in his strength.

And they were meant to live with the law, not as slaves again, but to show the world how different they were, free in God. And instead they voluntarily went back to slavery in light of what Christ has done. We should want to show the world around us what it looks like to be free. What it looks like to not live under a burden of debt. And we should want to live that out, not to go backwards, not to earn anything, but because it brings value and it is done in the joy of our freedom, not in the fear of slavery. Here is how Paul says it in Galatians five, verse six. For in Christ, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything but only faith working through love. The law doesn’t free us. It used to own us. And it just doesn’t anymore. The things of the law have no power over us in the light of Christ. If you’re circumcised, great. If you’re uncircumcised, fine. Last week, we. We read from Colossians. Don’t let anyone judge you. If you want to celebrate a Sabbath to honor the Lord. Great. If you want to worship on Sunday, fine. If you want to worship on Wednesday, that’s fine. These are things of the law, not things that save us. That doesn’t count toward anything of lasting value.

Loving others. Not because we have to or out of fear, but just because we want to love them. That matters. That has value, not cost. And it has value because God has given us faith through His spirit to live free. He says it a little differently. At the end of the passage in Ephesians two, we read that God, who is rich in mercy, loved us, saved us from our sinful lives by his grace while we were still sinners against him. But why? For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. We are God’s good work. He saw us in His creation and he said, It is very good. We were very good the way God intended us to be. Our purpose then, why we were created and called good by God was so that we could be free in him, free in His mercy and in his grace, and free to do the things that he has made for us to do, to walk with meaning and with value in the things that God has for us. Brothers and sisters, let us stand firm in the freedom of Christ. But let us here at Calvary live out that freedom with passion for Christ and compassion for the people around us. The worship team is going to come and join us on stage again as we sing Living Hope and join me in a prayer.