Counterfeit Freedom | 2 Peter 2:17-22

We remember that this weekend is much more than just a time to go to the lake or cookout with friends — it’s a time to remember that freedom requires sacrifice, and to show gratitude to the families of those who have lost loved ones fighting for this nation.

Today I’ll be continuing our series through the book of 2 Peter, and we’ll actually be talking about the concept of freedom and what it means for us.

Before we begin, let’s pray.

PRAY

SCRIPTURE READING: Invite people to stand, read scripture:

2 Peter 2:17-22 CSB

17 These people are springs without water, mists driven by a storm. The gloom of darkness has been reserved for them. 18 For by uttering boastful, empty words, they seduce, with fleshly desires and debauchery, people who have barely escaped from those who live in error. 19 They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption, since people are enslaved to whatever defeats them. 20 For if, having escaped the world’s impurity through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in these things and defeated, the last state is worse for them than the first. 21 For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy command delivered to them. 22 It has happened to them according to the true proverb: A dog returns to its own vomit,, and, “A washed sow returns to wallowing in the mud.”

“This is God’s Word. You can be seated.”

This morning I want to help you find true freedom in Jesus. I’m going to walk you through this passage and show you how counterfeit freedom begins with deception, leads to bondage, and results in destruction. Then, we’ll turn to see how true freedom begins with dependence, leads to submission, and results in love.

Counterfeit Freedom:

1. Counterfeit freedom begins with deception. (2 Pt 2:17-18)

How Peter described the false teachers previously: “They will bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them (2 Pt 2:1)” . . . “They will exploit you in their greed with their made-up stories (2 Pt 2:3)” . . . “Delighting in their deceptions (2 Pt 2:13)”

How he describes them here:

“Springs without water” — imagine a long journey across the hot Middle-Eastern desert, seeing a spring and being overcome with thirst, but getting there and discovering there’s no water

“Mists driven by a storm” — mists often were used in that climate to make weather predictions, and typically a mist meant warmer weather was behind it. A storm coming behind shows not just that they were deceptive, but that they were bringing destruction with them as well. Mists caused confusion due to low visibility

Humor break — Things that are deceptive, over-sell and under-deliver:

Movie sequels — they’re never as good as the first. Exception: Home Alone 2

Dallas Cowboys

Chick-fil-a grilled chicken

Some folks mentioned their spouses in various ways, so...

My example from Friday night: Eating dairy-free cheese — I’m actually angry about how bad it was!

Point: What they offer is just a mirage, an illusion. It’s deceptive: they cannot supply what they’re selling.

2. Counterfeit freedom leads to bondage. (2 Pt 2:19)

19 They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption, since people are enslaved to whatever defeats them.

What the false teachers are deceptively selling? Freedom. How do they do it?

“...by uttering boastful, empty words, they seduce, with fleshly desires and debauchery.” (v. 18)

(1) Spoke with assertive confidence that made the weak think they must have known what they were talking about.

(2) They appealed to sinful desires, arguing that it made no difference at all if we indulge our sexual appetites to the full.

They use the right “bait” — Jason pointed out last week that this word for “seduce” is a fishing term that refers to the bait you would use to catch a fish

They go after the heart — we have disordered desires. Things our bodies want that are out of place because of sin. These teachers prey on this and lure in unsuspecting victims.

They promise satisfaction for these heart-level desires, but cannot come through.

(3) They maintained that their teaching was the pathway to freedom, arguing that the gospel originally received is nothing other than bondage.

Freedom from — from the final judgment, which they say isn’t happening because Jesus isn’t coming back. “So eat, drink, sleep around, and be merry!”

This is the exact message we are being sold today.

Our culture has a sacred belief about freedom of choice.

“Absolute negative freedom” — meaning freedom without constraints

“As long as you don’t hurt anyone, you are free to do what you want.”

“The fewer limits or boundaries you have on your desires, choices, and actions, the freer you will be.”

This is an illusion. A deception.

The irony: they are themselves slaves to “corruption” — to a way of living that has them enslaved.

How is it possible that those who preach freedom so loudly are the ones who are enslaved?

This squares with other aspects of Scripture, consider Jesus’s words in John 8:

John 8:31–34 (CSB)

Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you continue in my word, you really are my disciples. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

“We are descendants of Abraham,” they answered him, “and we have never been enslaved to anyone. How can you say, ‘You will become free’?”

Jesus responded, “Truly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.

Also consider Paul in Romans 8:

Romans 6:16 (CSB)

Don’t you know that if you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of that one you obey—either of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness?

The great church father Augustine explains how we can become enslaved even after making a free choice:

AUGUSTINE: “The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity. By these links, as it were, connected one to another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint.” Augustine, 64 OTRWSA

JAMES K.A. SMITH: “The first link in the chain that binds him was his own free choice.” 64 (Smith)

SMITH: “When we imagine freedom only as negative freedom—freedom from constraint, hands-off liberty to choose what I want—then our so-called freedom is actually inclined to captivity. When freedom is mere voluntariness, without further orientation or goals, then my choice is just another means by which I’m trying to look for satisfaction. Insofar as I keep choosing to try to find that satisfaction in finite, created things—whether it’s sex or adoration or beauty or power—I’m going to be caught in a cycle where I’m more and more disappointed in those things and more and more dependent on those things. I keep choosing things with diminishing returns, and when that becomes habitual, and eventually necessary, then I forfeit my ability to choose. The thing has me now.” 66

The irony here: freedom to do whatever you want leads to bondage. And bondage leads to destruction.

Apply it on the spot — speak to people struggling with addiction, or those in bed snoozing through the morning yearning to get up but feel powerless.

3. Counterfeit freedom results in destruction. (2 Pt 2:20-22)

20 For if, having escaped the world’s impurity through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in these things and defeated, the last state is worse for them than the first. 21 For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy command delivered to them. 22 It has happened to them according to the true proverb: A dog returns to its own vomit,, and, “A washed sow returns to wallowing in the mud.”

This appears to say that those who formerly had turned from their sins to Jesus had once again turned away, and are therefore in a worse state than before. Does this mean people can lose their salvation?

Commentaries go deeper on this than I can, but I take the view that what’s happened is that these teachers — and the ones they’re duping — had gone through the motions on the surface towards joining the church and following Christ.

For all that others could tell, these people were true believers.

However, at their heart, they were not true believers, because true believers persevere to the end.

Dog and pig: The dogs and pigs never changed their natures, even after walking away from their vomit / being washed. They were still a dog and a pig. Likewise, these people never really changed — they only had the appearance of change on the outside.

Sitting in a church doesn’t make you a Christian

Getting baptized doesn’t make you a Christian

Reading your Bible, joining a Bridge Group, volunteering to serve doesn’t make you a Christian

Just like sitting in your garage doesn’t make you a car. Sitting in McDonalds doesn’t make you a Big Mac.

Being a Christian is a fundamental heart change where you live in dependence on God, recognize that your sin prevents you from knowing him, and holding fast to the truth that through Jesus your sins are forgiven and you can know and glorify God!

1 John 2:19 (CSB)

They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. However, they went out so that it might be made clear that none of them belongs to us.

Peter is telling us something important: that there’s a greater level of judgment for those who know the command of Christ and walk away from it.

The very thing the false teachers deny — the final judgement and destruction on them for their false teaching — is promised to come upon them.

RECAP: Counterfeit freedom consists of deceit, bondage, and destruction. It is not freedom.

TRANSITION

How many of you can remember your first drive after you got your driver’s license?

Great American rite of passage: getting your driver’s license. Hitting the open road. Free at last.

The road has long been a symbol of freedom from constraints in our country. The irony is that even when you feel free on the road, you’re still following someone else; you’re still driving on a path that was created by others who’ve gone before you.

There is no such thing as absolute freedom from the constraints or authority of others.

SMITH: “When you’re swimming in a tiny aboveground pool at your cousin’s house and keep bumping up against the walls, you start wishing they weren’t there. But when, in your rambunctiousness, you succeed in knowing them down, you realize the pool didn’t get bigger; it just disappeared. You’re left in the soggy ruins. . . Freedom to be myself starts to feel like losing myself, dissolving, my own identity slipping between my fingers.” 62

Today some of you need to break out of the bondage of the counterfeit freedom you’ve settled for.

True Freedom:

1. True freedom begins with DEPENDENCE.

True freedom is not becoming more self-determined, but in becoming more self-denying.

The paradox of freedom: the more you pursue your own autonomy, the less free you will be; the more you deny yourself and depend on Christ, the more free you will be

Luke 9:23–24 (CSB)

Then he said to them all, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will save it.

Denying yourself means you stop depending on yourself and your own ability to freely choose a life that leads to happiness

Denying yourself means depending on someone else to help you be free.

JAMES KA SMITH:

“Coming to the end of oneself is the way out of disordered freedom. And so the irony: my freedom of choice bings me to the point where I need someone else to give me a will that is actually free. And not merely free to choose—since that’s what got me here in the first place—but free to choose the good. If freedom is going to be more than mere freedom from, if freedom is the power of freedom for, then I have to trade autonomy for a different kind of dependence. Coming to the end of myself is the realization that I’m dependent on someone other than myself if I’m going to be truly free.” 66, OTRWSA

2. True freedom leads to SUBMISSION.

True freedom is found by choosing the right constraints.

Galatians 5:1 (CSB)

For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm, then, and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery.

You're going to submit to something. True freedom is using your free choice to choose constraints which will guide you to the ultimate GOOD.

TIM KELLER:

“Freedom is not, then, the absence of restrictions, but rather consists of finding the right, liberating restrictions. . . We must actively take tactical freedom losses in order to receive strategic freedom gains." 144, Preaching

Examples:

60 year old man who loves to eat fatty foods, but if he regularly uses his freedom to give into that desire, his life will be limited down the road. He must give up a lesser freedom (eating fatty foods) in order to gain a greater freedom (health and long life).

Musicians have to choose to give up lesser freedoms in order to gain greater ones, namely, the ability to play their instrument proficiently.

Athletes do this all the time. As a football player at Clemson, I had a strong desire to hang out with my friends late and do 2am Cookout trips and the like. I had to give up these freedoms for the greater freedom of performing better as an athlete.

We all make choices to do some things over other things based on the lens through which we see the world, our worldview. Nobody is absolutely free from limitations — we all, always choose some things over others, and are limited by our goals and vision of the good life. Absolute freedom is an illusion.

In other words, you already are submitting to something. The question is: is it something that holds you in bondage, or something that sets you free?

SMITH:

“Once you’ve realized you need someone not you, you look at constraint differently. What used to look like walls hemming you in start to look like scaffolding holding you together. If freedom used to look like the no-obligation bliss of self-actualization, once that unfettered freedom has become its own bondage you look at obligations as a restraint that gives you a purpose, a center, the rebar of identity.” 67

“I thought Christianity was about grace?”

THIS IS GRACE. It is the recognition that Jesus has died for your sins, covering your guilt and shame. It is the recognition that Jesus has resurrected from the grave, defeating the power of sin in your life. It is freedom from the PENALTY AND POWER OF SIN.

“Grace isn’t just forgiveness, a covering, an acquittal; it is an infusion, a transplant, a resurrection, a revolution of the will and wants. It’s the hand of a Higher Power that made you and loves you reaching into your soul with the gift of a new will. Grace is freedom. But the paradox (or irony)—especially to those of us conditioned by the myth of autonomy, who can imagine freedom only as freedom from—is that this gracious infusion of freedom comes wrapped in the gift of constraint, the gift of the law, a command that calls us into being.” 69-70

AUGUSTINE:

“The human will does not attain grace through its freedom, but rather attains its freedom through grace.” Augustine, 71

This freedom requires taking on “the way of righteousness” — the way of teaching Jesus prescribed. When you submit to his teachings in Scripture, you find freedom.

3. True freedom results in LOVE.

Band comes back out

True freedom is not the freedom to do whatever you want, it's freedom to serve and love others.

Galatians 5:13–14 (CSB)

For you were called to be free, brothers and sisters; only don’t use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love. For the whole law is fulfilled in one statement: Love your neighbor as yourself.

You are really free only when you are truly loved and are loving another.

The Gospel promises so much more than just freedom from constraint, like culture teaches.

The Gospel promises freedom from sin, and freedom for good! love! holiness! relationship with God!

Apply and Wrap

Quickly with band vamping, transitioning into worship:

You don't have to stay in the same pattern of sin or addiction!

You don't have to carry the shame of your sin!

You don't have to be controlled by what "they" say!

You don't have to be anxious about being perfect!

You can walk in freedom!

You can walk in grace!

You can walk in righteousness!

You can walk in love!

You can fight temptation!

“If the Son has set you free, then you are free indeed!”

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom!”

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