New Morning Mercies #241

God’s grace calls you to submit. But it offers you true freedom like you’ve never known before.

I think we misunderstand both true freedom and debilitating bondage. Freedom that fills and satisfies your heart is never found in setting yourself up as your own authority. True freedom is not found in doing whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. True freedom is never found in putting yourself in the middle of your world and making it all about you. True freedom is not found in resisting the call to submit to any authority but your own. True freedom is never found in writing your own moral code. True freedom is not the result of finally getting your own way. When you attempt to do these things, you never enjoy freedom; you only end up in another form of bondage.

Why is this true? It’s true because you and I were born into a world of authority. First, there is the overarching authority of God. There is nothing that exists that does not sit under his sovereign and unshakable rule. If God created this world (and he did) and if he owns what he created (and he does), then you and I do not have autonomy (independence from his rule). This means that as his creatures, we were created to live in willing submission to his will for us. Hence, freedom is not found in spinning free of his authority. No, freedom is found in the willing submission of our hearts to his authority. Then there are all the levels of human authority that God put on earth to make his invisible authority visible. Personal freedom is not found in resisting human authority either. Freedom and authority are not enemies.

Here is the point: you and I always exist under some kind of authority. We either willingly submit to God’s rule and the authorities that he has placed in our lives or we set ourselves up as our own authorities and rule our lives as we see fit. But none of us is wise enough, strong enough, faithful enough, or righteous enough to rule ourselves well. We are no more hardwired to rule our own lives than a beagle is hardwired to live in a water-filled aquarium. Self-rule never leads anywhere good.

So the goal of grace is not to produce in you the ability to live independently. The agenda of grace is to transform you into a person who humbly recognizes your need for authority and celebrates the holy, loving, and benevolent authority of God. “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life” (Rom. 6:22). It is sin that makes me want to rule me and it is grace that draws me into the best slavery ever—the slavery that gives life, slavery to the Creator, the Savior King who knows what is best and gives what is best always.

For further study and encouragement: Romans 13:1–7