Freedom: Don't You Know?

Scriptural Text: Luke 4:18

Definition: freedom: The state of liberty that results from not being oppressed or in bondage.

Scripture stresses that human beings lack freedom on account of sin, but that faith in Jesus Christ brings freedom from the power of sin and the law.

Many people think that freedom is the license to do whatever a person wants, but true freedom is the ability to do what is right. It takes obedience in order to have true freedom. I can sit at a piano and be at liberty to play any keys that I want, but I don’t have freedom, because I can’t play anything but noise. I have no freedom to play Bach, or even “Chopsticks.” Why? Because it takes years of practice and obedience to lesson plans to be truly free at the piano. Then, and only then, does one have the freedom to play any piece of music.

The same is true of freedom in living. To be truly free, we must have the power and ability to be obedient.530

In the Bible, freedom means to be liberated from captivity. The captivity can be physical or spiritual.

An example of physical freedom is found in the book of Exodus. God promised to deliver his people from slavery in Egypt under Pharaoh (Exodus 6:6).

Through Moses, he freed his people and provided a way out, leading them to the Promised Land.

From then on, Israel was to live as God’s covenant people and regularly to celebrate its freedom. In the year of Jubilee, after each seventh Sabbath year, a grand celebration took place.The leaders were to “proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” (Leviticus 25:10). Property was restored, servants were set free, and God’s rest was proclaimed.

This physical liberty became a defining picture of a deeper spiritual liberty. The deeper captivity—a bondage to sin, fear, decay, and death—is revealed clearly in the New Testament.

Jesus said he was sent to “proclaim freedom for the prisoners” (Luke 4:18), and “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). He boldly declared that “everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (John 8:34), adding that “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

Therefore, because of Christ—through his truth and his atoning work on the cross—we are set free from sin. We are also set free for God, to live lives pleasing to him (Romans 6:22; Revelation 5:1).

Don’t You Know? (Luke 4:18, John 8:32, 34, 36)

However, there are many people who don’t know that they have a way to freedom, and many don’t know that they have freedom. Case in point for the later,

Because of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, slaves throughout the United States were legally free as early as the first day of 1863. But what was legally true did not become a reality for most of the slaves until much later. The vast majority of the African-American population had never known anything in America but slavery. Shelby Foote, author of an acclaimed three-volume history of the Civil War (The Civil War: A Narrative), described the phenomenon of slaves who were free but did not know it:

“The word spread from Capitol Hill out across the city, down into the valleys and fields of Virginia and the Carolinas, and even into the plantations of Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama. “Slavery Legally Abolished!” read the headlines, and yet something amazing took place. The greater majority of the slaves in the South went right on living as though they were not emancipated. That continued throughout the Reconstruction Period.

The Negro remained locked in a caste system of “race etiquette” as rigid as any had known in formal bondage. Every slave could repeat, with equal validity, what an Alabama slave had mumbled when asked what he thought of the Great Emancipator whose proclamation had gone into effect. “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout Abraham Lincoln ‘cept they say he sot us free. And I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that neither.” (cited by Swindoll, p. 525)”

What was a tragedy to begin with—that human beings were made the subjects of masters who kept them in cruel bondage—was made doubly so by the slaves’ lack of knowledge and understanding that they had been set free by an emancipator.

If a person with the power, authority, and willingness to set the captives free does so, it makes little difference to the captives until they know that their freedom has been decreed—and know what it means to live in that freedom.

Proclaiming freedom in Christ from sin is precisely Paul’s burden in Romans 6. Don’t you know that when you were baptized, you were baptized into Jesus Christ’s death (6:3)? Don’t you know that you were crucified with him (6:6)? Don’t you know that Christ is no longer under the mastery of sin, and neither are you (6:9)? Don’t you know that whoever you offer yourselves to, you will be enslaved to (6:16)?

All the slaves freed by Lincoln had to do was to offer themselves to “freedom” as their new master and they would have been free indeed.

All the believer in Christ needs to do to be free from the mastery of sin is offer himself or herself to God as a slave of righteousness.

The African-American slaves were free from bondage and did not know it. Many Christian believers have been freed from the mastery of sin but do not know it.

Paul’s message in Romans 6 is to declare that,

The gospel of Jesus Christ is an emancipation proclamation from the mastery of sin.(Romans 6)

So send I you to take to souls in bondage

The word of truth that sets the captive free,

To break the bonds of sin, to loose death’s fetters

So send I you, to bring the lost to me.

—E. Margaret Clarkson, “So Send I You,” 1954

Therefore (4:17-19) Note six things.

1. Jesus stood to read the Scripture because of His reverence for the Scripture. (Luke 4:16).

Thought 1. There should always be reverence for the Scripture, both in hearing and in reading it (cp. Neh. 8:5).

2. The Messiah was to be anointed by the Spirit (Luke 4:18). The Messiah was to be both called and equipped by the Spirit (cp. Luke 3:21-22).

Thought 1. When God calls, He anoints; He equips the messenger with His Spirit. The Holy Spirit goes with the messenger wherever God sends him.

3. The Messiah was to preach the gospel, means to evangelize. Note the Messiah was to preach to two classes of people.

a. He was to preach to the poor. The "poor" means not only poor in material possessions, but poor in spirit (see Deeper Study #2—Matthew 5:3).

Matthew 5:3 (NKJV) 3“Blessed are the poor in spirit, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

b. He was to preach deliverance to the captives (aichmalotois). This is a picture of prisoners of war. (See note, Redemption—• Ephes. 1:7.)

4. The Messiah was to minister(Service). A threefold ministry was mentioned.

a. He was to heal the brokenhearted. Note that He was not only to help the brokenhearted, He was to heal the brokenhearted, those who were...

• crushed by grief • shattered• opposed• cut off• blemished by sin• violated by sin• infected• diseased• weakened• subdued• injured• bankrupt

b. He was to give sight to the blind, not only to those who were spiritually blind, but to those who were blind physically.

c. He was to set at liberty those who were bruised. He was to set free those who were physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually bruised—those who were...

• disabled• injured• wounded• hurting• afflicted• battered

5. The Messiah was to preach the age of salvation. The term "acceptable year" means the era, the age or day of salvation (cp. 2 Cor. 6:2). It means that the age of the Messiah had come.

Here and Now or Never