Untitled Sermon (10)

Am I Not Free?

John 8:30–36 ESV

As he was saying these things, many believed in him. So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed 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.” They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?” Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices 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.

The First Letter to the Corinthians a. Paul Enjoys Elite Apostolic Status and Freedom, 9:1–2

9:1–2 Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord? The first three rhetorical questions in v. 1 seem to reflect a sequential order going from each affirmation to its logically preceding basis: Paul must be at least as free (in Christ) as any other Christian would be (1a); since he is an apostle, after all (1b); and his apostleship (1b) is based upon his vision of Christ and commissioning by him (1c). The fourth rhetorical question, along with the contents of v. 2, provides further confirmation of Paul’s apostleship, seen in the Lord’s work through his ministry in establishing the Corinthian church (cf. Gal. 2:7–9).

The issues raised by the rhetorical questions are unlikely to have been disputed in Corinth, since Paul would not gain anything by asking rhetorical questions that might have been answered negatively by the Corinthians. The wording of the questions indicates that he expects the Corinthians to respond to each question in the affirmative,7 and that he expects the questions to be sufficient in themselves to establish his Christian freedom on the basis of his apostolic status.

The freedom to which Paul refers (Am I not free?) is not the legal status he discusses in 7:21, 22b and 12:13 but, in context, refers to freedom in Christ (cf. 9:19; 10:29; 7:22a; Gal. 2:4; 4:26–5:1), a divinely given freedom from the imposition of the norms of this world to live by the norms of the Spirit. In the previous verse (8:13) Paul declared that he would rather give up eating meat than let his eating practices cause a brother to fall. “Some of his auditors may well have thought, ‘Some freedom!’ ” Such a response would also be consistent with the extreme individualism so often found in modern Western thinking. But the freedom to which Christ has liberated us is not a freedom to do as we please, but a freedom to serve God and others in the newness and power of the Spirit (cf. chs. 12–14 and Gal. 5:13–26), a freedom to do as we ought. It is a freedom to live out the life of Christ in a community that glorifies God as it follows the sacrificial example of the Lord Jesus Christ.