Free Spirit

Spirituality Column #2
November 14, 2006
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Free Spirit
By Bob Walters

Freedom is a wonderful thing.

Americans are so thoroughly washed in it we are mostly free from even thinking of it. Freedom defines who and what we are all the way into our hearts, where there is that reputed “spiritual hole the exact size and shape of God” we yearn to fill.

We proudly trace freedom – a fairly new invention in the total history of mankind – to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and principled actions of patriots throughout the years. But it’s older than that.

As a God-given, universal constant for mankind, Freedom comes from the Bible, specifically out of the New Testament, and exactly in the person of Jesus Christ. The spiritual freedom we internalize as Americans is mentioned in no other religious book except the New Testament. Read Galatians 5 and see if you can relate.

Why is our freedom important to God? So we can “freely” love God … if we want to. Get it? Freedom, not obedience, is the most important ingredient in true love, and God knows it.

Love, then, is why God gave us freedom. It wasn’t to enable us to run wild, unencumbered by responsibility (1 Corinthians 12:23). Freedom is a divine mechanism to glorify God, yet our relentlessly self-affirming American culture mistakenly connects divine “freedom” to “inalienable rights,” a humanistic mechanism to glorify – uh oh – ourselves, not God.

The founding documents of the United States reflect the 18th century’s deep religious roots and cultural understanding of Christian principles like freedom, and also the same period’s consuming passion for individual rights emanating from the Enlightenment and its Humanist philosophers (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, et al) who championed the primacy of man over God.

Bummer … “Freedom” is in the Bible. “Rights” isn’t.

Divine freedom is a gift from God. Human rights we gave to ourselves.

I think those human, individual rights are the reason that the hardest part of freedom sometimes is to remember that God gave it to everyone.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that responsible freedom is harder than blind obedience.