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This verse is taken from:
Galatians 5. 1-4
“search the scriptures” John 5:39
We live in an age when men, women, and young people are seeking liberation. ‘Do your own thing’, is the cry of the age. Authority is being challenged as the individual follows the desires of his own heart. Anything goes, and self-centeredness is at the root of it. But, according to the Bible, that is not real freedom at all. The Lord Jesus said, ‘Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin’, John 8. 34. As children of God we know and believe that only the Lord Jesus can make us free, John 8. 36, and that is one of the great wonders of Christianity. But it is worth asking ourselves a serious question. Do we truly know anything about Christian liberty, or are we stuck in our ‘comfort zone’ of a set of traditional rules and regulations which have little foundation in scripture?
Paul exhorts us to ‘Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage’, v. 1. Christ has emancipated His people to enjoy freedom of conscience, freedom from a legal system that we couldn’t keep and freedom from the depressing awareness that personally we cannot measure up to God’s standards. In Christ we do measure up for we have been ‘accepted in the beloved’, Eph. 1. 6.
In these opening verses, Paul is teaching that when we trust the Lord Jesus we lose one yoke and gain another, Matt. 11. 28-30. The yoke of sin and law is hard but the yoke of Christ is easy, kind, and gracious. This liberty is not something to be frightened of, for we are now under grace, Rom. 6. 14, and we have, and should bow to, the indwelling Holy Spirit to lead us and keep us in God’s will.
Of course, that does not mean that we have licence to do as we please. We are not at liberty to fulfil the desires of the flesh, Gal. 5. 13, nor have we the right to ‘walk all over’ our fellow believers. Rather, we are called ‘by love (to) serve one another’ and to ‘walk in the Spirit’, Gal. 5. 13,16. Christian freedom is not disobedience but the desire and the delight to do God’s will as revealed in the scriptures.
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