word comes from Isaiah chapter 61 verse 1 and if you are using a pew Bible it is on page 918. The spirit of the Lord God is upon me. Because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor, he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. Let's pray. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord. My soul shall be joyful in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness. As a bridegroom decks himself with ornaments, as a bride adorns herself with her jewels, for as the earth brings forth its bud, and the garden causes the things that are sunlit to spring forth, So the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations. In your name we pray, amen. Amen. So I thought these few weeks before I leave, and depending on where we get, maybe even after I get back, we'd look at this idea of Christianity and liberty. Part of it is because of my preparation and reading for the War Between the States class that I'm teaching to the children brings me back again to considering these issues of liberty since liberty was so tightly tied up with what was going on. It is interesting if you look in the Psalter Hymnal, the beginning where you have the index of tunes, they have those categories. And it's interesting that they have two categories there that have to do with liberty, one category which has more tunes in it and more songs is called spiritual liberty. Right below it is another segment or section that's known as civil liberty, which I think has three or four or five songs. And so obviously, even if we consider our hymn book, there is a theme of liberty that they find in song. And I want us to take that up for these next few weeks. And I want us especially to try to see the relationship, the nexus point between this idea of spiritual liberty and this idea of civil liberty. And the reason I want to do so is that so often it's the case that there are those who want to well-intentioned as they might be, they want to push the spiritual freedom. We have freedom in Christ and we're going to be looking at that reality and that issue in these next few weeks. We have a freedom from our sin and we have, therefore, acceptance with the Father. We are free from the dominion of sin, which we'll be looking at a little bit. Sin no longer is our master, and so there's what they call the spiritual freedom. We're no longer underneath a dictator of sin, Satan, and self. And that's pushed often in the church, but what's pushed less often, at least in our age and epoch, is the epoch. is this idea of civil liberty and the connection between this idea of spiritual liberty and civil liberty. It's my premise, what I hope one thing to establish not only today but in the weeks that follow, is that a people who have spiritual liberty will be naturally a people that long for and earnestly desire and will not be satisfied until they achieve civil liberty. And indeed, the people who do not have civil liberty are a people, though exceptions might be characteristic of their culture, are a people who do not have spiritual freedom. And so we come to this passage in Isaiah 61, and we see that here in Isaiah 61, in this messianic passage, the servant of the Lord is spoken of as one who preaches good tidings to the poor, one who is sent to heal the brokenhearted, one who is to proclaim liberty to the captives, and here there might be an offhand reference to the day of Jubilee in the Old Testament Israel calendar where the slaves were set free, and also the Messianic work of opening the prison to those who are bound. We hear this passage again quoted by our benevolent Savior in the book of Luke, whereupon reading this passage and entering into His official ministry, Our Savior says, upon reading this passage, or quoting this passage, and He began to say unto them, this day the Scripture is fulfilled in your ears. And so, whatever the people understood about their Messiah, they understood that He was somebody who was going to heal the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, and He was somebody who was going to open the prisons to those who are in bondage. And from here forward Jesus begins to put on a display of preaching good tidings to the poor throughout the Gospel of Luke. Indeed immediately it's demonstrated in that same chapter, chapter 3. There he heals the brokenhearted, he proclaims liberty to the captives, he has a healing ministry, he casts out demons, he opens the prisons to those who are bound to their sin. The Gospel tells the story then that the King and the Kingdom had come and the effects of that was liberation or liberty in its grandest meaning. All the healings that we find scattered throughout the Gospels are to be proclaiming this idea that liberty has arrived in Jesus Christ. The fullness of the kingdom has dawned. It's not only that the king has come, but he's brought the kingdom with him. And this kingdom is characterized, as we have said, preaching tidings of the poor. healing the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. Indeed, when John the Baptist eventually comes to Christ himself, almost in a quasi-despondent kind of mindset, he sends emissaries to Christ to ask, are you the one or is there another? And Christ refers to this kind of work that's quoted here in Isaiah 61. He says, go tell John. And what does he tell them to tell John? That these things that are here, listed, are indeed coming to pass. And why? So that John might know that the Messiah is among them. That the kingdom has come. That the king is here. And so we find, undergirding all of this, that the idea of Christianity is entangled and enmeshed with this idea of liberty. The Old Testament had typologically anticipated this theme as over and over again it demonstrates their bondage to sin as being bondage to political structures. Indeed, God announces Himself to His people by reminding them that it was He who brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, of enslavement. It was not only that they were personally and spiritually set free, we might say, not only that they now had a redemptive story told in their sacrifices that reminded them of their own liberty, but it was also that they were made as a people to be what? Free. They were conversant and familiar with liberty. And so it's not just the New Testament that hearkens this phrase, this theme, motif of liberty, it's the Old Testament as well. And now when the promised Messiah arrives, he takes up the theme of delivering people from their bondage to sin, or as the Psalter puts it, from their spiritual slavery. Indeed, it's not too much to say that our being delivered from the bondage of sin, so that sin shall not have dominion over us, as Paul phrases it, as God's people is the core of who we are. We have been set free by what James calls the royal law of liberty, which is another way of just saying the gospel. We're no longer defined by our sins, by our bondage, by our enslavement, we are defined by our redemption, which is liberty in Christ Jesus. We're no longer held by our past bondage, because where the Spirit of the Lord is, as the Scripture says, there is what? There is liberty. We are the people who, because of Christ paying for our sins, because of being renewed daily by the Spirit of the living God, we are defined by our saying, no, to sin and yes to Jesus Christ. That is, my friends, as we'll see as the weeks unwind, that saying no to sin and yes to Christ is the essence of liberty, both spiritual and civil. Those outside of Christ, to the contrary, remain dead in their sins and trespasses, and remained enslaved and in bondage, and remaining in their bondage Their desire is to make everyone else captive, to make captive everything they touch, to share in the same bondage that they suffer. Those people who are still dead in their sins and trespasses, apart from Christ and without Christ, those who know not Christ, are an enslaved people, and an enslaved people always in turn seek to enslave everything they touch. Enslaved parents create enslaved families. Enslaved elders create enslaved churches. Wherever men are in bondage, personally and individually, there they will create social order structure, family order structures, church order structures, that are characterized by bondage. If I might say, it's by way of a small rabbit trail. This is why we need to guard ourselves in terms of who we bind ourselves to in relationships. We have to understand that those that are outside of Christ, while I'm not saying that we should not talk to them, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have some kind of acquaintance with them, we should understand that in as much as they're in bondage, they're going to want to bring us in bondage if our relationship develops. It's just the character and nature of the beast. The non-Christian cannot know liberty. He will say he knows liberty, but what he's calling liberty is just some form of licentiousness or libertinism that indeed, in fact, owns him and so has him in bondage. You understand it's the difference between the Christian and the non-Christian. It's bondage or not being in bondage. The Christian, though not perfect, not walking on water, so to speak, he still has the capacity because of the Holy Spirit dwelling in him to not be ruled by his vices. to not be enslaved with the chains of sin. The unbeliever, those who are outside of Christ, they have no capacity to say no to their vices. And so they are in bondage to that sin. They know no spiritual liberty, and they can know no true civil liberty as well. If you love freedom and liberty, then you should daily pray that we return to the early foundations of Christian nationalism, a nation swearing oaths of fealty and loyalty to Jesus Christ as the true King above all lesser magistrates. All this explains why the current diminishment of our public order of liberty will never be reversed until people once again become familiar with the real source of their bondage. no amount of public rallies, no amount of activism, no amount of raising public awareness, no amount of getting out to vote, as good and proper as those things are in their place, will deliver to a people liberty who understand not the simple truths of redemption. Who understand not the simple truths of creation, fall, and redemption. Our bondage as it exists as a people is not ultimately found in the state, although the state is the greatest of jail keepers. Our enslavement as a people is ultimately found in our attraction and attachment to our own rebellion against the only source of liberty. As a people, we hate Christ, and so we remain in our houses of bondage. So the ultimate solution to our civil order implosion that we see all around us is not to get control of the government. The ultimate solution to our civil order decline is for the populace to be loose of their bondage, and that can only be done by proclaiming the gospel, the gospel liberty to those who are in their bondage to sin. Once released from sin and rebellion to God and His Christ as known on a wide enough scale, then the natural consequence, soon enough, will be the destruction of the fall of the Illuminati New World Order that currently has the capitals of the world in their grasp. And so if we're to find civil liberty, then spiritual liberty must rise once again. There must be a heralding of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. There must be the articulation of the connection of the nexus between the civil liberty that so many people still seem to want and the idea of spiritual liberty, that we can only have civil liberty as we are increasingly dead to our own sins and trespasses and find life in Jesus Christ. It's a temptation to think that social order disequilibrium that we're currently enmeshed in can be resolved by getting people to think just the right way. But people who are dead in their sins and trespasses cannot think politically just the right way until they're converted. And conversion only happens in the context of speaking of a holy God who has just wrath, sparing only those who understand the bondage of sin and guilt that they intimately know and are familiar with and are trying daily to escape from in their own power, can only be escaped by faith alone in Christ alone. If there is any hope for restoration of civil freedom, it will only be because people who are spiritually free, like ourselves, begin to understand the nexus, the relationship between spiritual freedom and civil liberty. We only understand that the ultimate cure underneath all of this is articulating the fullness of biblical Christianity. Converted people will understand the relationship between spiritual freedom and civil freedom, will look for their their pulpits to ring with this truth as it did with the black-robed regiment once upon a time. Now, there was a group who understood this nexus in relationship that I'm talking about. converted people who own only Jesus Christ as their ultimate King, who have been spiritually set free and understand the implications of that reality, will not abide with a Pharaoh, or a Nebuchadnezzar, a Nero, or a Charles I, or the latest Republicrat in office. So we have scads of scads of unconverted crying out for freedom and liberty, but it's only the finished work of Jesus Christ who can provide what everyone wants. Only the Christian who has been set free from his bondage of sin by the finished work of Christ on the cross can talk sanely about freedom and liberty and independence. and how all that means a freedom to obey Christ, which they never could do before, a liberty to walk in righteousness, which they could never do before, and an independence from bondage, which was characteristic of their life outside of Christ. There's no social order, we would say, that liberty can long be maintained in by a people who have abjured Jesus Christ and forsworn Christianity. No social order freedom is to be had by a church which disconnects the lifeline between freedom from sin and freedom from wicked government and magistrates. So what we say here as we try to continue to draw this connection between spiritual liberty and civil liberty is that social order liberty is the God-given inheritance bequeathed to a people set free from sin and gathered and resolved to incarnate that liberty in all their social order institutions. The freedom we have in Christ And here I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'll allow myself to do that. The freedom that we have in Christ is to incarnate that into every area of life. And so we've been set free from the drudgery of sin and the chains of Satan. And we bring that freedom and we perfume our families with it. And we perfume our churches with it. And we perfume our local governments and our communities with it. We perfume those little platoons where God has put us most immediately with the freedom that we have in Christ. And that freedom grows up how? Organically. It's not a top-down, it grows up organically. So the spiritual freedom that we have starts to do what? It starts to get into everything that we put our hands to. We can't help but that spiritual freedom translating into civil liberty. But it all starts with the doctrines of the Christian faith. It all starts with God is big and holy. and man is small and sinful. It all begins with the idea of man seeing a necessity to find an access to God, to find peace with God. You see, it begins at the spiritual liberty level before it can be translated later into the civil liberty or civil freedom later. We've lost this one over here. We don't seem to realize that it can only be regained by this one over here, because we have scads of people in the church today who want to suggest that somehow you can have spiritual freedom, but dare not get into this over here. Indeed, it's even the pious position, it is even the Christian position that your spiritual freedom stay where? here, only on an individual and personal basis. Never that it should leak out into any other realm. But my friends, I would say that that defies the whole idea of Christ bringing liberty in its fullest sense. Only Christianity can provide the contours of liberty because only Christianity provides the definitional guardrails for the meaning of liberty. You see, the liberty that the Christian owns is what's called a regulated liberty. Have you heard that phrase before? A regulated liberty. Liberty has to be regulated because if it's just liberty without being regulated, then it's the kind of liberty that a goldfish finds once he finally gets out of the bowl. Liberty that's not regulated becomes the kind of regulated if it's achieved by a railroad train that finally is free of its tracks. And so the liberty and freedom that Christians articulate and desire and find throughout Scripture is the idea of a regulated liberty. And where does that regulation come from? God's law word. And this is why it's such an abomination to hear much of the church saying that the Old Testament law is not applicable, or that the magistrate is not responsible at all to the first table. And so the liberty that we advocate for is not the liberty of the non-Christian. The non-Christian wants a liberty on his own terms. He wants what we would call autonomous liberty. He wants liberty absolutized. He wants liberty in order to snuggle into every ugly crevice and every dirty nook of his vices. He wants a liberty that's as expansive as it can possibly be so that he can continue to do this to God. And so when the pagan has the word liberty on his lips, please understand, it's something very different than when the Christian has the word freedom, because he's talking about liberty entered into autonomously, defined by himself. And we're talking about liberty as regulated by God's law word. Now again, we add here what we shouldn't need to add, but add because there'll be those who want to cast bricks. This law that we're regulated by, we're not talking about the law in terms of using it as climbing into God's heaven in order to gain or curry an uncertain favor. This is law as a guide to life. This is law as God has given it to us in order for us to know how it is that we can please God. It's law that answers Francis Schaeffer's question. How then shall we live? Only by regulated liberty. When licentiousness or libertinism is given its head, when it refuses to be regulated so as to be genuine liberty, the result eventually is tyranny, since no social order can operate successfully upon the principle of licentiousness. Political tyranny always arises without Christianity because it's only by political tyranny that the previous licentiousness can be turned into some kind, albeit wicked, social order. So if you allow licentious liberty to be given its head, so that each man does what? What is right in his own eyes, the consequences that you have, anarchism and mayhem, and the result of anarchism and mayhem is some strong leader rising up, taking away all liberty. And so that now what's characteristic is tyranny. And so if that's true, then it's in a wicked government's interest to do all that it can to promote what within this population? Anarchy. Licentiousness. Because by promoting it over here, that makes them more what? Necessary. It's job security. And we don't have time to do this, but if you traced out the 20th century history of how the government has enacted laws, you'll see that more and more it's been to the end of licentiousness, with the end consequence being the government gets what? Tyranny. But again, we can never stop this until until the gospel of Jesus Christ goes forward, and it gains traction in men's hearts, and they see themselves as sinners, and they look for a spiritual freedom that is in defiance of all the vices that they have that are controlling their lives. And right now, it doesn't look like we're very close to that. All of this means, at the very least, that should one desire liberty, then one must be a Christian. Only by bowing to Christ and his lawward can one find genuine liberty, as well as a final rescue from the personal and individualized sensuousness that defines sin and characterizes the heart of the sin and rebellion to Jesus Christ. If liberty is desired, it's only to be found both in its social order reality, as expressed in deliverance from tyranny, and in its personal individual spiritual reality, as expressed in deliverance from tyranny of sin, in the atoning work of Jesus Christ as both King and Savior. This is why we are so important. By we, I mean the church. Because it's only the church that has an answer for a person's misery. It's only the church that has an answer for a man treating his wife badly and putting her into despair along with his three little and four little children. It's only the church that has the answer to tyrants who grow larger and larger on the scene. It's only the church, because the church has the same message for both. Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. Paul says in Romans 6.22, Again, I say in Christ as individuals, we have been set free from sin. This is an eternal reality that cannot be reversed. But the problem is now, in many cases, that we don't know who we are. We've been set free from sin, but we don't understand that there are implications from being personally set free from sin and then how that works itself out in all the stuffings of life. We have forgotten that we were a people that were made, created for liberty, biblically defined, for regulated liberty. Ironically enough, once we're in Christ, the liberty is defined as being slaves to God, as Paul says in Romans 6.22. We have become slaves to God. But that kind of slavery is, ironically enough, true freedom, is it not? It is a slavery to be and to do what we were created to be and do. It is the freedom of operating consistent with what it means to be genuinely human. Bondage to sin dehumanizes us, turns us into orcs in the painted visage of Dorian Gray. Keep this in mind the next time you are tempted to sin defiantly. If you cannot pause To put off temptation, if you cannot pause not to be treasonous to the one you insist that you love, then have pity on yourself, knowing that the sin you find so desirous will only do what? Enslave you and make you ugly. So we see again, I hope we're seeing this nexus and relationship between spiritual liberty and civil liberty. Free people build free franchises and institutions. More than that, having tasted the liberty there is in Christ, they have no mind to be ruled by some tyrant as inconsistent with the revelation of God's word. Because of this, liberty has been a byword among the men of the West for centuries, if not millennium. Listen to that rabble in 1787, prior, running out to battle, crying out, no king, but King Jesus. By the way, they didn't create that on their own. They got that from Cromwell, who were also people who were hungering and thirsting for liberty, civil liberty. So we see that the thirst for liberty that has been such a hallmark of the West and now is in such drastic decline is what it is because the West has been largely a Christian people through the centuries. And all that's been bequeathed to us by our fathers, we have turned aside. It's not accidental that it has been a Christian people who came up with the Magna Carta. It's not accidental that it was a Christian people who came up with the Edict of Nantes, or the Declaration of Aberath, where they said, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honors that we are fighting, but for freedom. for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself." Apart from God's lawward providing the contour and borders so that liberty can be liberty, liberty becomes an undefinable, amorphous, and completely subjective, gelatinous mass that becomes its very opposite. Liberty without God's law where border becomes a suffocating and strangulating libertinism that is now selling itself as the liberty of drag queen story hour, or the liberty for our children to be mauled by medical perverts performing sex change operations on children, or the liberty to be offended at the inability to answer the question, what is a woman? We who know our history have seen where this anarchistic liberty that we're now living under eventually leads. It leads to some tyranny which will interpose itself in the place of God's law to provide the boundaries to keep the people from committing ethnocide in pursuit of liberty absolutized. As we said before, anarchistic liberty always leads to tyrannical absolutism. It leads to the liberty of Robespierre's guillotine, It leads to the liberty of Stalin's Gulag, of Mao's re-education camps, and my fellow members of the body of Christ here in this place. That is the arc of history that we are currently on, unless we're given reformation and renewal and repentance. There is no escaping it. And again I say unto you, the cure for all of this is the good news of Jesus Christ crucified. The cure for the tranny, the cure for the cultural Marxist, the cure for the treasonous clergy is the news that Jesus Christ can forgive their broken and ugly existence. That only in him can they find what they're so desperately searching for. That once again they can be a whole people If they would, in their weariness and status of being heavy laden, give up their search for liberty, they can only be found in the forgiveness of Jesus Christ. And then the structure that comes with living by every jot and tittle of God's law word, that alone can give liberty. That liberty that they've been living their lives for so long, longing for and seeking out in every soiled nook and every wretched cranny. Only Christ can provide both spiritual, individual, personal liberty as well as collective and social order liberty. And only by understanding that nexus, that connection between Christianity and liberty can we be wise in seeking out liberty once again. So there you have it, the 6,000 foot view. of where we're going the next few weeks. May God give us grace to understand the tight connection between spiritual liberty and civil liberty. Let's stand for a closing word of prayer. Father, perhaps more than anything, this is what we long for. This is what drives us to our knees in prayer for reformation. This is what fills us with both sadness and anger at the same time. This desire that people would find liberty in Jesus Christ, that they would give up their rebellion, that people might once again see that this movement towards autonomous liberty is an embracing of death, consistent with the scriptures teaching, all those who hate me love death. Oh, Father, we cry out for reformation and renewal. We cry out, Father, to be the people, the type of people who can be used by you to bring that in. We cry out for the capacity to understand, to have discernment and wisdom that know you would be able to speak these things in such a way that people can understand, both people dead in their sins and trespasses, and people in the church who know Him in a very strange way. And so, Father, we ask for reformation. It's not as if we deserve it. We understand that Your judgments against us are altogether just. But for Your mercy's sake, we pray, Father, that You'd give us reformation, help us to realize how late the hour is, and grant us grace to pray earnestly and to speak boldly, to champion Your cause at every turn. Do it for Your glory, we beg of Thee, O God, and we'll give You all the praise. In Christ's name we pray, amen.