Amen. 1 Peter chapter 2 is the text for this morning's sermon. 1 Peter chapter 2, verse 16 in particular, although we'll be starting with verse 13 to understand the context. In the hope of Christ's coming and His kingdom, we've been contemplating the Spirit's prophetic word calling us to be just people. How do we respond to this well? It's not just enough to mount a crusade for justice in this world, because we find that there are a lot of crusades for justice, and a lot of them go wrong. What is actually God's justice? How do we live in that in light of who God is, in light of Jesus Christ, in light of what he's accomplished in the sending of his spirit? This is what we've been considering together, both, pardon me, in church, in the family, and now in society at large. Last Lord's Day, we considered taking to heart God's instruction. If you want a just society with Jesus at its heart, you must be subject. That's simply the way God's reality works. Subordinate yourself in all the good ways God has designed, because that's actually in keeping with his kingdom. That's how his good authority is worked out in this world. But I want to add to that today, with some meditations from what Peter's instructions to us are. And as we do this, I do want to approach this carefully and thoughtfully, because what I am going to be saying here today is deeply countercultural. And I realize it takes a lot for us to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we can demonstrate God's goodwill. So let us listen well and press into the truth together. I want to begin today with an illustration on the issue of justice and freedom from a children's book, a fairly recent children's book called, That's Not Fair, Getting to Know Your Rights and Freedoms. I choose a children's book because often what we teach to children, we condense the main points, and we often even teach what's considered not to be particularly controversial. This is what we all accept, right, as a society together. Here's what we read. in that's not fair, getting to know your rights and freedoms. In a democracy, freedom of religion means that we are all allowed to believe in any faith we choose or in no faith at all. Not only that, we get to practice and express our religions the way we believe they should be practiced. But what if someone says that another person's religion doesn't make sense? Should that matter? If it does, who should decide which religions make sense and which don't? Good questions. Sometimes, it continues, however, there may be very good reason for freedom of religion to be limited. For instance, if a religion included the practice of human sacrifice, do you think there should be a law against that? Well, there is such a law, thank goodness. But if we put too many limits on our freedom, we risk losing that freedom altogether. That's why we need to decide which rules are fair and which ones aren't. I would submit to you that that's conventional wisdom in our society today. That's pretty much accepted across the board as this is how we work together. This is what freedom means and this is what religious liberty means in particular. Pardon me. I would ask us to, although I think that consensus is trying to hold on to some good things, to think more deeply about the way God calls us to true freedom. We all know we want justice, and in order to have a just society, we need freedom. Justice is connected with freedom, as even in this little excerpt I just read. But I would submit to you that if we teach children this idea of freedom that I've just read to you, we are actually teaching them falsehoods, lies. And when we listen to what God teaches us about freedom, then we'll be able to pursue a just society with Jesus at its heart. In 1 Peter chapter 2, as the scripture is teaching us how to live as strangers in exiles, how to live in this present world as people who are followers of Christ, it says, be subject, the same exact command we considered last week, be ordered under for the Lord's sake, be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution. whether it be to the emperor, the king as higher, as supreme, or to the governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. honor everyone, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the emperor. In verse 16, we are given this instruction, live as people who are free. In fact, I want to sharpen that command here this morning and cause it to weigh heavily upon us by simply paying attention to the force of this, you might say, in the original. In our English translations, pardon me, we break up a lengthy, complex sentence here in the original. And so as verse 16 begins, we will sometimes see it translated as, live as people who are free, in the English Standard Version, or the New American Standard, for example, says, act like free people. And this is true. This is what the scriptures are communicating to us. But I think it's good for us to notice that the actual subject of this long sentence is that very first command in verse 13, be subject. And now when we get to verse 16, that's still the command that's governing all of this. So what is he saying? Be subject as free. So there's the instruction. You are to submit yourselves as free people. Now, right away when we hear that, that strikes us as a little bit of a paradox. Okay, wait a second. How does that go together, right? I'm supposed to be subject, but I'm supposed to be free. That's the command, be free people. Be subject as free people. This is how you be subject, as free people. I think for any red-blooded American here today, that makes us go, hmm, I need to ponder this instruction from God. And I think that's exactly right that we should. It strikes us as a paradox, but I think it's just this paradox that should push us into living in true freedom. We need to consider this because there's always the reality of slavery masquerading as freedom. And this is the first point I wanna draw your attention to today. There's always the reality in sinful human history of slavery masquerading as freedom, saying, hey, this is freedom, when it actually isn't. What the world offers as freedom is what the Bible calls slavery. And let me show you a couple lies from Satan about freedom that I think are very prevalent in our day. Here's a lie. I am living as a free man if I am not dependent on someone else. I am a free man if I am not dependent on anyone else. Now, this might be closest to the freedom the way the Romans thought about it, say, in the days that Peter was writing these words. That would have been a very common Roman way of describing freedom. If you're not dependent on anyone else, then you are a free man. Pardon me. We see that contrast, by the way, the scripture picks up how commonly people thought of that kind of a contrast. by often using that contrast of slave and free, right? Like Galatians 3.28, there is neither Jew nor Greek. That's how the Jews defined the world, right? There's Jews and there's Greeks. What's the next contrast? There's neither slave nor free. That's how the Romans defined the world. You're a free man or you're a slave. This is the way society works. Now, we have to remember that In this time, the time the New Testament was written, slavery was simply ubiquitous in the Roman Empire. In the capital itself, perhaps a majority of the population were slaves. It was just, this is how society worked, right? But in the Roman world, a slave might even be somebody with great power. It might be somebody who wielded a lot of authority. He might even live a life of comparative ease and luxury compared to, say, the peasants out there in the countryside trying to straight buy a living on the land. He could be a very, very important person in the world, which is why it's not unknown, we have records of this in antiquity, people would choose to be slaves. Because I'm much better off in life, in my position as a slave, than I ever would be if I got kicked out, so to speak, and had to make it on my own. And that shows us that this Roman conception of being a slave was not so much about your economic position in life or even your social position per se, but what made somebody a slave was that he was dependent on someone else. At the end of the day, the slave might have all kinds of, he might have 100 people working under him, and he's a very important person. But if somebody else could say, that's not what I want, you do what I want, you're dependent on me, you're a slave. That was the basic idea. Dependent on the will of someone else. Now that idea has definitely come through the ages, in various forms. In fact, it's even been used in the modern world, say, against monarchs. Pardon me. To be under a monarch, it was sometimes argued, is to be under the will of somebody else, and therefore to be a slave. You want to get rid of that position. You don't want to be in that position of being dependent upon somebody else's will. Sometimes it was used against, well, in our language today we might call big business, right? The big business tycoons controlled so much of resources and economy and things like that that you're reduced to being a wage slave. You have to do what they want or you're stuck, right? So we try to do other things like maybe labor unions to counteract the power of the big businesses. This was an idea at work in the modern world. Sometimes it was even used against husbands. If a wife is dependent upon the will of her husband, at the end of the day, she's a slave. That's what it means to be a slave, to be dependent on the will of somebody else. And if you're in that position, That's bad. You don't want to be in that kind of a position, especially us modern Americans, right? You need to get out from that position. You need to have some kind of independence where you're not dependent upon the will of somebody else. Maybe it's by establishing your own financial independence. So yes, we can have a marriage here, but the wife needs to make sure she has her own income so that she's not just dependent on whatever her husband says. That's slavery. but I actually am submitting to you today that that whole way of understanding freedom that is not being dependent upon somebody else's will is not true. A sister lie from Satan about freedom could be stated this way. I am living as a free man if I am not interfered with by someone else, right? Here's what defines my freedom. Nobody can interfere with what I want to do, what I'm trying to do. In extreme form, it's a freedom that might just look like, leave me alone. This is freedom. Leave me alone. Don't interfere with what I'm doing, and then I am free. That's the idea. The don't fence me in, you might say, view of freedom. I decide for myself what I want to do or even who I want to be and any obstacle to my desire then necessarily reduces my freedom. If there's anything that thwarts my desire for what I want to do or what I want to be, if there's anything that impinges and forces me to do something differently than what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be, well then I'm not a free person. I can't be. I'm being forced to do all these things. I'm being forced to be somebody I don't want to be. Now, it used to be that these impediments to freedom were primarily considered bodily. Like, you can't be forced to do something through threat of bodily harm. You know, the old proverb, if someone sticks a gun to your head and says, You can either do this or this. Do you really have a choice in the matter? No, you're being forced, you're being coerced. You have to do what the guy with the gun says or you're gonna die, right? And this is not freedom. Okay, true enough. Now that whole idea has been gradually extended even to impediments to the will. not just impediments to my bodily action, but even impediments to what I want. Of course, a very obvious and extreme form of this in our own society today is what's gotten the name transgenderism. If there's something that says, I can't be what I want to be, then I am not a free person. And if there's something that says, well, you were just born that way, and you have to be the way you were born, you just put me in slavery. You just made me something, and what if I didn't agree to that? What if I didn't want that? Because after all, freedom is not being interfered with, being let to do what I want to do, right? Of course, all this presupposes that I am more free the more options I have. If freedom really is about being able to choose what I want to do, then the more options I have, the more free I am, right? If any options get foreclosed, then my freedom is reduced, right? So the whole goal then, even for a society, becomes multiply options, multiply opportunities, multiply various ways you can do and become whatever you want to be. And this is considered free. But I hope you notice here, even based on this series, this little series of applications from the profits, that these ways of being free, whether not being dependent or not being interfered with, they see the world in precisely the opposite way that the Lord made it. They see the world in precisely the opposite way, in exactly contrary to the way that the Lord is accomplishing his work of redemption in the world. These ways of being free imagine, and I believe this is an idolatrous imagination, that we are all, that what defines us is we are all independent, autonomous selves. We are buffered selves who simply are self-existent, and that we have to have space then to do our own thing, and that we then fundamentally compete with others for the good life. That's how the world works. That's the whole presupposition for these ideas of freedom. Pardon me. I would submit to you that that's actually a diabolical lie. It's a lie from the pit of hell. It's a beautiful deception from Satan that is one of those things like idolatry so often is, is the mirror image of reality. You ever notice how idolatry does that? It always plays off of something that's true. It wouldn't even attract us if it didn't. But it inverts it. It turns it upside down. It stands it on its head. And I think these lies, like all good lies, contain an element of truth, otherwise they wouldn't deceive anybody. But they all share that same original, alluring deception that Satan shared in the garden, you will be like God. And we love those words. We love things that promise us that. And when freedom is promised to us in those terms, we tend to go for it. But when we reach for freedom in idolatrous ways, it actually makes us abject slaves. The scripture here is calling us to a better way. And even this paradox, if you will, presented to us in our text is designed to shake us out of that easy assumption, that lie, that deception that Satan is foisting upon us. What we want here is freedom overcoming slavery. Instead of slavery masquerading as freedom, we want freedom overcoming slavery. And that's what God's calling gives us. What is a life of freedom if it's not these things? I would give you a simple statement today that I hope will resonate in your hearts and you can unpack. Freedom is participation in God. Freedom is participation in God. And in John chapter 8, we read that Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Jesus presented himself when he came to this world as the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through him. When we abide in His words, what He's revealing to us of God, then we'll know the truth. And that is living in true freedom. Living in that truth. Walking in the truth, the way the scripture puts it. So when He was talking to these Jews that, by the way, it says here in the text, had believed on Him. And we'll find out as the text goes on, they didn't really understand Him. But these who had believed in him, at least on some level, they replied, we are seed of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say you will become free? What a fascinating response. We're the descendants of Abraham. And God chose Abraham. That means almost in a sense in their minds, by definition, we can't be slaves. We are obviously free people. Like, don't you understand the way God has worked in the world? Jesus had to show them, of course, they didn't understand the way God has worked in the world. Jesus answered, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever. The son remains forever. So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. Here's real freedom. Jesus, the Son of God, has come to say, I give you freedom. And this is where you will find it. You will find it in me. You will find it in my teaching. You will find it in walking in me. I think we could even say today, Jesus is the ultimate free man. He was the ultimate free man in his life on this earth. He is the ultimate free man today. And yet Jesus, the ultimate free man, the Bible tells us, subordinated himself to his parents, Luke chapter two. He was subject to them. And that did not compromise his freedom a bit. Not at all. He was perfectly free the whole time he was subordinated to his parents. Jesus as a man, subordinated himself to his Heavenly Father. He obeyed his Heavenly Father even to death. And it did not take away his freedom, not one bit. In fact, it established his freedom. It brought it into fruition. It made it real, in a sense, in the world, in action. His work established his freedom. This is where we need to look if we want to find what true freedom is. Jesus is the one who sets us free. Through his life, through his death, through his resurrection, his ascension, his resurrection reign at the right hand of the Father, he brings us into the freedom of the sons of God. You see, what he does is he unites us to God by his spirit. We've said freedom is participation in God, in the truth, in reality, sharing in that, living in that, that is ultimate freedom. And this is what Jesus gives us. This is what Jesus is the pioneer, the pathfinder for. This is what Jesus communicates to us, and this is what we are to live in as God's people. Be subject as free. This is reality. This is how you are to go about being subordinated to the authorities that God and his providence brings about. And so I would submit to you today that spiritual freedom Actual participation in God, actual right relationship with God, enjoying His blessing, enjoying communion with Him, actual participation in God is the foundation for all freedoms. Moral freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, economic freedom, social freedom, however you want to talk about it. Our spiritual freedom sets the standard for freedom in every area of life. If it doesn't measure up to this, it's actually not the real thing. It's a counterfeit. It's something else that actually isn't freedom. You see, it's our spiritual freedom that shows our proper relationship to God. And that's what's most important. What were we made for as human beings? We were made for a right relationship with God. And that's freedom. That sets the standard then for everything else. Pardon me. So let's talk about some of these other things. Moral freedom. Pardon me. Moral freedom, or we could say freedom is doing good. Freedom is doing good. By the way, did you see that even in what Peter wrote to us in the very text that we read earlier? This is the will of God that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorant of foolish people. Pardon me. Do good. Peter will say that over and over again in this book, by the way. As you suffer, even, in this world, do good. Do good. Do good. That's freedom. When you are doing good, you are a free man. Pardon me. Freedom is doing real good. It's not, and here let me correct a wrong thinking, freedom is not the capacity to do good, or freedom is not the opportunity to do good, freedom is doing good. It's not just, well, I'll give you a choice if you want to do good or not, therefore you're free. No, freedom is actually participating in what is right and true and good. That's when you're really free. So freedom is not the option to do good, if you want to, but it's actually accomplishing good. That's what freedom is. Pardon me. So, you have to be able to know what is good, intellectually, to live freely. You have to will what is good, volitionally. You have to do what is good, in action. And this is called wisdom. This is what the scriptures call us to. And therefore, living as free men is going to require of us the development of our character. In a sense, it's not something that can just be handed to you without your development, without your real character being involved. To be free does require discipleship, education. Why does God tell children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, right? Because he wants the children to be free. That's how you are free. Do you get that? That's not a contrary thing to freedom. That is freedom. This is the way it works. This is the real deal. It requires the development of ourselves. It requires education, the development of our minds. I hope here as God's people, we want freedom. We want to be the fullness of what it means to be alive in God. And that should lead us out into to exercise all of the powers God gives us to learn. to learn the scriptures, to meditate on them day and night, to learn the world around us, to learn ourselves, to learn our neighbors, to really be drawn out by love for God and love for our neighbor, to be constantly developing in our intellectual abilities and our understandings. If you want to be free, that's what it's calling you to. You see, that's the opposite of a slave mentality. A slave mentality, just tell me what to do, right? Turn the brain off. I don't know what to do. Just tell me what to do. That's a common human response, especially when faced with overwhelming situations. We feel overwhelmed. We can run to slavery as a way of being safe, as a way of, well, good, there's this big, some kind of big entity out there, government, boss, somebody out there, even mom and dad, who's gonna make it all right for me and that I don't have to think. I don't have to bear the weight of responsibility. That's a slave mentality. And it's very common in human history. In fact, it's why Aristotle thought that and argued that slavery is just a natural part of human society. It's always going to be there. You're always going to have slaves because there are people who are slaves in their minds and they'll never be anything else. So we have masters and we have slaves and this is just the way it's going to work. And Christianity comes along and tells everybody, be subject as free. Wow, like you're actually supposed to exercise your intellect and your agency and you're supposed to think and you're supposed to do and you're supposed to act in this world. Yeah, that is what you're supposed to do. It requires that kind of development of us. It requires the training of our affections and our appetites. Pardon me, our desires. You can't offload your responsibility in the name of subjection, in other words. Be subject as free. Well, that's not my responsibility, that's so-and-so's responsibility. No, you take your responsibility in the relationship. This is why, for example, we talk about wives being subject to your own husbands, and we don't say, wives just means turning your brain off. to say, yes, sir, all the time, and you're doing the job. That's all that's asked of you, right? No, your husband didn't marry a robot. Now, unfortunately, in today's world, that's what people are trying to do, because they think that is a good relationship of some kind. But it's not. It's not a human relationship, much less a relationship of love. There's a pressing into God's goodness and truth together in our ordered relationships that we all need together. It's gonna require the development and the training of our appetites. Pardon me. And by the way, it's obvious that men without good character cannot be free men. To be a slave to your passions and desires is one of the deepest forms of slavery. because it's not, in a sense, imposed from without, it's within. That's some of the worst kind of slavery, to be enslaved to your sins. Pardon me. It leads us to destroy ourselves. That's what sin does. Sin enslaves us. Whenever you see, by the way, a human society that promises freedom but provides slavery, you're seeing this kind of dichotomy. For example, in our society today, we say pornography is free speech. Pornography is slavery to sin. That's destruction. And any society that calls that freedom is a lie. It's telling you lies. It does not offer you freedom. It offers you Satan's deception. We've got to press into what God means as free. Moral freedom then lays a foundation for political and economic freedom. When you have people who are spiritually free in Christ, who've been set free from sin, and who are developing the character of Christ in their lives, they are laying a good foundation for political and economic freedom. Political freedom, and talk about that for just a second here, and true freedom, We don't have to pit individual freedom against corporate freedom. I just said political freedom, that is our freedom together as a polis, as a state, as a society. And whenever you see individual freedom being pit against corporate freedom, you realize we don't understand freedom here. Something's gone wrong in our understanding. Because freedom is something we all share in together. It's a true common good. More of one person's freedom does not mean in Christ less of somebody else's freedom. If you think that way, you're already misdefining freedom. It's not a trade-off. It's something to press into together. And this is good. Jesus never thought that somehow his obedience to the Father was a trade-off on his freedom. Well, I gotta surrender my freedom. I guess I just won't be free anymore. No, this is how you be free together. This is how you actually participate in good together. It's wonderful, actually. And from this, we can also see, one of the principles we talked about earlier, that freedom requires authority. Authority is good. We love authority. Why do we love authority? Because all authority is from God. And God is sharing, He's authorizing, He's releasing, you might say, He's enabling our freedom to be what we are meant to be precisely through His authority, His instructions, His commands, His providence, His guidance. He's like saying, come alive, be all that you are meant to be. Do it by listening to what I say. I'm authorizing you to be alive. Do it. And we need that. Authority or freedom requires God's goodness being shared together in and through a multitude of other people. Freedom, by the way, in the absence of other people is not really even possible. If you do the old man stranded on a desert island, kind of imaginary setting, and a man stranded on a desert island, is he free? Well, in one sense, we could say, well, yeah, of course he's free. He doesn't have any laws to listen to, I mean, nobody else to worry about. He doesn't have to pay attention to anybody else or worry about any property laws or any zoning laws or any of these requirements that come about in human civilization. Yeah, he's free. But when we ask ourselves, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to glorify and enjoy God? Then somehow, suddenly, this person begins to look like he's in a whole lot of bondage. He can't do a lot of the things that were made to do. Because he wasn't made to be in that scenario, so to speak, right? It's good to be together and to share together. And that God's authority working in a multitude of ways in and through other people is actually what's authorizing us to be the fullness of what we are meant to be. And so spiritual freedom, moral freedom, political freedom, economic freedom. When we are laying up treasures in heaven, We are setting a course that leads to profound economic freedom. Economic freedom is not, scripturally speaking, about having lots of money or lots of stuff. Those who will be rich fall into temptation and a snare. If that's a driving force in your life, I want to be rich, you are actually not a free man, the Bible says. Jesus says, a man's life does not consist in the abundance of things that he possesses. So you have a lot of stuff. Does that make you free? Not remotely. In fact, it can become a very strong form of slavery and a burdening of you and what you're really meant for. See, these kinds of things are not economic freedom. Furthermore, freedom is not about multiplication of options or keeping our options open. That's what we think freedom is, even in business or in finances, right? Multiply more options means I'm freer than if I simply have to do one thing. Economic freedom in Christ looks a lot like the way of wisdom in Proverbs. It looks a lot like 1 Thessalonians 4. Now concerning brotherly love, you have no need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another. But we urge you, brothers, do this more and more and aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs and to work with your own hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one. And this is why the debt-based lifestyle in America is not freedom. It seems to promise us quick and easy money. But it's slavery. Our national, our federal government is massively enslaved by debt. Massively, like almost beyond human comprehension. That's not a characteristic of a free society, actually. That's a characteristic of a society that's slaves to its passions, that can't correct its course. And that's where we're at. But by the way, is it just the federal government that's doing this these days? Hmm, start looking at personal debt in our civilization, business debt in our civilization. And we begin to realize we're a people who wants to have things and wants to have things now on our terms. And we really don't care about what happens in the future as long as it serves our desires. I've actually even heard older people say about their debt, all my kids will have to deal with that. as if that's a life of love. That's a life of slavery. But that's the way our society is structured right now. We as people in Christ have the opportunity to show the world a different way. Be subject as free men. You don't have to go the way the world system tells you to go. Just because all the financial institutions are lined up to grease the skids to make it really easy to go that way, doesn't mean you have to go that way, because you're a free man. you can live in God's truth. Really, it doesn't matter how rich you are. That's not freedom. We want to live in Christ's freedom. And that leads me just last of all to mention here religious freedom. Religious freedom, going full circle back to where we started with our quote. Is it really true that freedom of religion means we are all allowed to believe in any faith we choose or in no faith at all? Is that actually true in God's world? Now, that's the way we like to say it, but is that the way God has actually established it to work? Is it really true that we get to practice and express our religion the way we believe they should be practiced. I hope you're hearing the blatant idolatry in that statement. I get to practice my religion the way Wait, I? Like I'm the God here? Oh, now we're seeing who's really coming up. I'm the God here. I get to define how I will practice my religion. And if there are forces in this world that bigger than me, yeah, maybe I'll offer some sacrifice to them to get them on good terms with me. But at the end of the day, I get to do what I want to do because I'm God. You will be like God. That statement is still echoing down through the centuries. Oh, but we limit it by saying, you get to do what you want to do as long as it doesn't harm somebody else. Okay, fair enough. I'm glad you don't want to harm other people. But do you see what I'm saying here? Is this actually an adequate thinking about freedom? Is this what God has called us to live in as God's people? Folks, what we're trying to see here is God has given us a vision of a kingdom that totally blows apart the idolatrous substitutes that this world offers us. And we as God's people have the opportunity, living by faith, walking in the spirit, to be seeking a kingdom, to be seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, to be seeking a city that has foundations, whose builder and designer is God, and to be living that way now. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We are citizens of heaven. And as the church, it's our calling to be subject as free. The Word of God commands it. That's how you work toward a just society with Jesus at its heart. You don't decide for yourself what you're gonna do or who you want to be. You don't say, leave me alone, that's being free. We introduce a principle that the world so desperately needs, and it's the love of Jesus Christ. It's been well said, and this goes back to ancient times, that what is free is cause of itself. What is free is cause of itself. Pardon me. There's truth in that. When it's arising from who we are, from even our love, and when that reality becomes lived in our lives, it begins to break apart all these false constructs that the world puts upon us. Again, to go back to what others have said before, whoever does a thing through love, does it of himself, because it's his own inclination that he's moved to act. And so, love is contrary to servility, being a slave. You know how God overcomes human slavery? He actually says, Love your neighbor. Like slaves, love your master. Masters, love your slaves. And suddenly this whole relationship gets transformed. It gets transfigured into something it never could have been in the flesh, as simply a power relationship or a struggle between competing agents. But it's to a beautiful participation in the truth together. Let me close by asking it the other way. Do you want to be a slave in a slave society? Well, then refuse to love. That's a good way to do it. Refuse to love. But if you love your neighbor truly in Christ, you will set in motion the power of the Spirit, the freedom of the Spirit, Christians, we've been living too long as slaves in our civilization. We've not lived in the freedom wherewith Christ has set us free. We need to be pressing into his truth, living in the reality of the spirit, not letting the elementary principles of this world set the horizons for our actions, but truly taking our agency from Christ and his indwelling spirit. And then we can be subject as free. If you would, Respond to this instruction in faith today. Would you confess that fundamental truth? Jesus is Lord. This is what sets us free. Let's do it together as his people. Jesus is Lord. Lord, we look to you now. We call upon your name because we know that it is you we need to set us free. That in an ultimate sense, there is no no human government, no human agency, no form of government, no plan we can devise that can set us free ultimately from our sin, but also then transform us into the kind of people you've made us to be in relationship to you. We also know, Lord, confessing that, that you've called us to live in light of that, and that as we are salt and light, We can see in this world aspects in our churches, in our families, and even, yes, in our societies at large, aspects of this good reality taking place. And we become a just people when we are no longer slaves to this world. Lord, open our minds. I pray that even this sermon today could spur us, light a fire in us to pursue this wisdom. Say, what would it look like to live in light of the kingdom of God? That's ultimate reality. We talk about being realists in politics. Yes, we are realists. We understand sin. but we also understand the salvation that is in Jesus Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit of God. And we are here as a church to demonstrate that that power is real and active in the world today. And we are to make disciples of all the nations. God, help us not to shrink back for lack of courage or lack of even ignorance of our own calling, but rather let us be the kind of people, let us have the kind of character of Jesus Christ to live as free people. Pardon me. and to carry that goodness into all of our relationships. What a profound calling, Lord. We need your grace for that. We need your changing of our minds to understand this truth. I pray for us as households here, that we would live out this truth well in our households, husbands, wives, parents, children, brothers and sisters. And that as that basic unit of human civilization, we would be training up free people in our households. I pray that as a church, we would be living as free people, understanding the goodness of being subject to one another in Christ, as we live in your truth, as we love one another and lay down our lives for one another and serve one another. And I pray that your church would show a skeptical world a different way of how we, that whether it's liberalism or conservatism based on this world cannot set us free, but Jesus Christ can. And I pray for the power of the gospel to go out in our society as men who are looking for hope, find this vision and see this opportunity and realize there is freedom. There is real freedom in Jesus Christ. Build up your church to your glory. Make many free men, Lord, we ask in Jesus' name, amen.