Free in Christ

DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN

FREE IN CHRIST

John 8:31-38

31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."  33 They answered him, "We are Abraham's descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?" 34 Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. 35 Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know you are Abraham's descendants. Yet you are ready to kill me, because you have no room for my word. 38 I am telling you what I have seen in the Father's presence, and you do what you have heard from your father." 

NIV

We may or may not be descendants of Abraham, although we are not Jewish, or live in the Promised Land, in some sense we are his descendants. Just as we are a descendant of Adam in that all men come from the first man and are born with that original sin and we are also all descendants of Noah because he believed God, we are also descendants of Abraham because of his faith was counted to him as righteousness. That might be a stretch, but because we have faith  because we believe, we have been grafted into the natural olive tree, or Israel. The Apostle Paul, through the power of the Spirit, makes it clear that true Israel is those who have circumcised their heart, rather than in the flesh, which was the difference between Jew and gentile from the time of the promise and covenant God made with Abraham regarding circumcision. The other fact is that we also have to hold to the teaching of Jesus. What does that mean? The Greek word translated in this version as hold means to continue, or remain. As we will see later in this gospel, Jesus said that if we remain in him and he is us, we will bear much fruit, he says the same thing here, we must remain, continue, hold on to his teaching. This carries the idea of not straying from or adding on to his teaching. It is only his teaching which leads to the truth, the truth of God and because we know the truth, we have been set free. Of course, we were never slaves in the sense of slavery to men. Some people today may still be opposed, and maybe somewhere in the world today a form of slavery exists. But the fact we all are or have been slaves to sin. Jesus breaks those chains of sin which bind us. He sets us free from the bondage of sin. Does that mean we never sin once we have been set free? No, because we also know that we do still have sin in our lives. But, we are free from the bondage or total control of sin and its penalty of death. It is the bondage of death which sin holds for people. Jesus has set us free from death if we hold to his teaching. When we were in bondage to sin, we have no room in our heart for Jesus. All we could think about was to satisfy our own desires. Everything was about self, sin controlled our motivation, we were not concerned about Jesus or his truth, and in fact, we were in the dark. But now, we have room in our heart, in fact, he is supposed to fill our heart, so there is no room for self. The old self, the old nature is supposed to be dead and our new self, born of the Spirit is supposed to be whole and in Christ. We are not supposed to share Jesus and self in our hearts, but we cannot say we have fully like Christ, as we do still have sin. We do still have some of that old nature within us, we still want to have want we want, when we want it. Most of the time we do not think about self, but it creeps in without warning. However, we do want that room in our hearts for his word. We desire for his word to be in our heart, we want to do that which is good, but the bad is still there. However, what keeps us going is the fact we have been set free and we are no longer a slave to that sin, the bad and its penalty. We are free in Christ.