Transcript

Let’s go to John 8 tonight. John 8. Talk about true freedom which is what the Lord is talking about to these Jews who, very interestingly the text says, believed in him and then he challenges if their belief is genuine which leads us to assume and understand that not everything that calls itself belief is saving belief. Not everyone that follows after Christ is a true follower of Christ and there is a reason to test ourselves and look more carefully. Of course, the Jews were steeped in so much tradition and they put their hopes in all of these external things and Jesus teaches to try to break through those things and get them to an understanding of true saving faith and really to get them out of a lifestyle of teaching and preaching of error and a deceptive message that was leading many astray. He even said to the religious leaders, “You are blind guides of the blind.” In effect, “You can’t see the forest for the trees. You have all the religious trappings, you have Moses and the prophets and you have the temple and this priest and the sacrificial systems but you don’t have the truth.” And he hits on that strongly here.

Look at it with me, if you will, John 8, beginning in verse 31,

31 So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 33 They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone

Let me just pause right there. They were enslaved right now to Rome. That’s part of the deception of religion. Karl Marx didn’t have much right but he was right when he said religion is the opiate of society. Religion can intoxicate you to the reality of what you really need to know and that’s what had happened here. These guys were so steeped in their heritage, of being Abraham’s, God’s chosen one to build the nation, as being Abraham’s descendents and they said, “We’ve never been enslaved to anyone.” Well, they were enslaved right now. So anyway they said,

We have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that You say, ‘You will become free’?” 34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. 36 So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

There was a black slave years ago who lived in a shack of a place and his master would come by his shack regularly and he noticed the joy and he noticed the peace, the black slave would have and it was intriguing to the master. He came by one day and he called his name, I believe his name was Jeb. I don’t remember the particular name from the story but he said, “Tell me something, you don’t have anything and you work hard all day long and look at this house and there are cracks in the walls, there are holes in the ceiling. It’s barely holding together, how can you have such a song in your heart?” And he looked at his earthly master, it wasn’t his true master, he looked at his earthly master and said, “Well, I don’t have a house but I do have a home. I don’t have a house, but I do have a home.”

Well, in converse analogy, that’s where the Jews were. They had the house, the house of Israel, the house of Judaism; they had Moses; they were the descendents of Abraham; they had the prophets; they had the written Scriptures; they had the sacrificial systems; they dotted the “i’s” and they crossed the “t’s”; they brought their wave offerings and their guilt offerings and their sin offerings; they observed the Passovers and the feast of Tabernacles and they did everything they could possibly do outwardly. They had the house, but they didn’t the home. They had the shell. They had the structure but they didn’t have the heart. They had the facade but they didn’t have the reality and this is part of what the Lord is trying to get through to them and I thought the brilliance and the wisdom of the word of God. That is a perfect parallel to people today. It matters not what Christian denominational label you put on the outside, every single one of them, every one of us, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Assembly of God, independent, charismatic, Baptist, whatever you want to put on the outside, every one of them has a substantial number of people within their system that clings to the house but they’ve never found the home. They cling to the structure but they’ve never found the Christ. And you think about the Bible sometimes, if you’ve never had a thought like this, I’m going to tell you you’re a liar and that is you think, “Is this really God’s word? I mean, I know it is,” but, you know, those doubts come through your minds. When you see something like this and you realize only God could have written something that was perfectly applicable to the people of that day 2,000 years ago and perfectly applicable to where people are today. God knew the hearts and the tendencies of men, that they would get attached to the shell, to the systems, to the structures, and miss the reality.

Well, Jesus talks a lot about freedom here and I want to use that as our foundation. You might just call this real freedom. First of all, I. what freedom is not. Let’s look at what freedom is not. We see this in verse 33, “They answered him, ‘We are Abraham’s descendents.'” In other words, they were kind of looking at Jesus now, they are believing him and I don’t know all that that means in this context. The text says they believed him. It didn’t mean they believed on him. They believed him that he was maybe teaching the truth; that he was sent from God; that he was a prophet. They believed something. They were warming to him, I guess you could say, but they have not forsaken their old religion. That’s why they say, “Wait a minute, you’re a prophet sent to Israel. You’re a Jew also. We are Abraham’s descendents. What else do we need?”

It reminded me of when some of the Mormons come to my door. They don’t come to my door anymore, at least I haven’t been there maybe when they come in a long time. And when they came the last time, I told them about being convicted of my sin and coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and seeing my life change and I have a new trust and joy and treasuring of Christ and I sin every day but my only hope is in Christ and that if they would give me any works then I’m going to be an utter failure. If they tell me anything I have to perform, I know I can’t perform it. It must be Christ and Christ alone to save me. And after I got through about 15 minutes of that I said, “Now, what are you going to give me I don’t have? I mean, you want me to go to Utah? Get my wife to go out there and have a marriage ceremony in the sacred temple by one of the apostles or something? What can you add to that?”

That’s sort of what these fellows are saying but from a false perspective. They are saying to Jesus, “We are Abraham’s descendants.” That’s it. I mean, that’s as good as it gets, doesn’t it, as far as wanting to please got to be right with God. That’s where their hope was. Then they said, “We’ve never been enslaved to anyone,” which is really bizarre. Then they ask, “How is it you say you will become free? What kind of freedom, Jesus, are you talking about? We have the truth of God. We have the law of God. We have the prophets of God. What more can there be?”

Well, let me give you three thoughts here, two that jump straight out of the text and one that’s obvious from the balance of Scripture teaching. Number 1: freedom is not having a right religious lineage. Freedom is not having a right religious lineage. These guys, again, thought, “We are of the line of Abraham. We are of the lineage of David. We have to be on track with God.” I mean, their proudest boast among the ancient Jews, especially was, “We are off Sarah, we are not of Hagar.” There you have the whole Arab Israeli conflict right there. The Arabs descendents of Hagar and the Jews descendents of Sarah. The wife of promise who miraculously had Isaac and here we have the whole descendents of Israel coming from their seed and they say, “We are of Sarah. We are of the lineage of Abraham.”

I thought, how applicable that is today. There are a good number of folks in our churches today who somehow have been dulled into a delusion that their great-grandparents loved God and their grandparents loved God and mom and dad were faithful, we’ve always been in church, and they’re just kind of halfway lackadaisical about it. I mean, they go and they’re going through the motions and they’re dotting a few “i’s” and they’re crossing a few “t’s” and they go on youth events and the participate in the ministries and somehow without really being a thought through thing, there is this notion that, “We’re just okay with God. We’re just kind of tied in because it’s a family lineage.” A rich heritage of religious commitment. And Jesus just blows that out of the water. Later on he is going to tell them, “No, do you know what you are? Your father is Satan.” That’s a cutting thing. Talk about a piercing thing. Talk about not pulling a punch. Jesus is going to say, “Yeah, let me tell you who you are descendents of, your father is Satan.” And that’s what God would say to any of you who have not come to Christ. And some of you young people here, you have to yourself come to Christ. You cannot lean on or look to your mom or your dad or a grandmother or a granddad and say somehow it’s just going to work out. You must seek God. You must know the weight of your sin and see your need and place your faith in Jesus Christ.

So don’t look to a right religious lineage, but secondly, another thing freedom is not: freedom is not a rich religious tradition. A rich religious tradition. And, again, they had the tradition of all traditions, they had the very writings of Moses. Not only did they have the writings of Moses, others could come into the Jewish tradition who were not Jews but they were actually of the lineage of Moses. They knew the Levitical law and they were dedicated to try to keep it. As a matter of fact, the Pharisees went so far as to add 300+ additional laws onto the written laws of Scripture, trying to show how devoted they were to their heritage. And once again, what an application to our day. You pick the denomination, go from Roman Catholicism to evangelical Baptists and you have people who are deluded into an understanding or to a conclusion, is better, that, “I have done what you’re supposed to do.”

As a matter of fact, there was a trite statement floating around for a while in some evangelistic circles, “Have you done the deal?” Folks, getting saved isn’t doing the deal. It’s far more than doing the deal. There are going to be a lot of people in hell who have done the deal and who have met with the priest and who have partaken of the wafer and the Jews or who took the Baptist preacher’s hand at the end of the sawdust trail and a thousand other things that might be okay but those are not saving acts. Those are not saving rituals. Those are not redeeming works. You cannot put your trust in rich religious traditions. Maybe somewhere back there in some of these ancient denominational histories, they begin to practice certain things and there was never the intention of the people to begin to look to those things, yet they began doing them and then they did them in another generation, and another generation, and another generation, and it became more and more unbiblical and more and more leaning on the works and the rituals and the traditions of men and they’ll even fight you over them because they’re holding so fervently, “We’re doing the right things.” Folks, doing the right things never saved a soul, only Christ can save a soul. And these Jews had all of that.

Then because, I’m telling you, I’m just saying this, I haven’t been alive all that long, 52 years, and I know a little bit about history. I enjoy reading history and studying history, but I don’t think you could put a country on the downgrade any faster than this country is on the downgrade morally and spiritually. I mean, I know, you may think I pick on our president, while I respect the office of the president, listen to me, when a man stands in the office, the highest office in the land, and promotes and encourages and celebrates what God calls wickedness, it just lowers the moral standard for the whole country. I know what it was like to be a lost young man and struggling with my conscience and I always looked for some authority figure to give me permission to give into the wickedness of my heart. I’m telling you, this president by his outward, willful proclamations of endorsing and blessing sheer ungodly wickedness, has done more to corrupt and destroy this country possibly than all the presidents who lived before him.

Now, I’m not saying that his own lifestyle has more actual immoralities. Friends, look, parents, you’ve got to stand and say things are wrong. Your children need to hear it. Pastors need to stand and say, “Things are wrong.” The conscience of our youth needs to hear that, and for our president to undermine and tear down and denigrate the moral foundations of our nation with this promotion of immoralities, put a person on the platform at the convention and her whole speech was basically, “I want to fornicate and you ought to pay for it.” That is sheer wickedness and it just destroys. You can work and work and work to build some semblance of moral fabric and the argument might be, “Well, everybody fails and everybody struggles and everybody lusts and nobody is perfect.” No, they’re not but you don’t throw in the towel. You don’t just give your lives and give your families and give your country to wickedness. You keep fighting, amen? When you sin, what do you do? You repent and fight some more and thank God for grace, amen? I’m telling you, there’s a difference between the child of God who may fail his God and who may sin against his God, but he’s humble about it and he’s broken about it and he’s ashamed of it and he’s not proud of it, and contrast that to this whole new progressive movement that’s taken over our land of glorying in things we ought to be ashamed of. That’s why having a sound church is more important than ever. Your children need to go to church where if a man abandons his marriage vows and the elders of the church lovingly work with him and pray with him and reach out to him but he adamantly refuses to try to restore that marriage, your children need to see that that man is brought before the church and dismissed.

They need to see these things are important. Why do you think we’re losing our young people in our churches? The only way we can get young people in churches today is to put on the most goofy, wild, worldly nonsense. Go to the big metropolitan areas and go to the so-called evangelical churches who have great crowds of young people and it is the most watered down, worldly, quasi-Christian mess you’ve ever seen. Why? Because they are sold out to it. They’re saying it doesn’t mean anything anyway. We watched our dads and our granddads, they never stood on anything. Nobody was ever disciplined for sin. It just doesn’t matter anymore. So if you don’t entertain me and keep my flesh kind of amused, I’m out of here. I’m chasing a rabbit and I didn’t mean to get on this rabbit.

But, brothers and sisters, it is just unthinkable to have a man in the office of president to promote that kind of wickedness. Say what you want to say about the Bush family, I’m not saying George Bush Senior or Junior was the greatest president in the world but at least there was a semblance of decency. There was a sense of morality and principle about moral issues. Everything wasn’t just financial. I’m talking about what freedom is not, that leads me to this: freedom is not lasciviousness or rebellion. That’s what we’re hearing today in this progressive culture. “I want to be free from the restraints of you holding me back. Don’t judge me. I want to do with my body what I want to do.” Look, people have never been able to do with their bodies what they wanted to do with their bodies. They have never been able to intoxicate their bodies and drive automobiles. They’ve never been able to take drugs and do certain things to their bodies. All that has always been against the law. And all this thing of, “We want to be free from all restraint. We want to be free from all authority. We want to be free from all of this holding us back and all these rules and these restrictions and these legalisms on our lives. We want to take drugs if we want to take drugs. We want to drink alcohol if we want to drink alcohol. We want to be sexually immoral if we want to be sexually immoral.” Now not only are we in just a few short years gone from saying homosexual marriage is not right and not good to saying, “Oh, that’s good.” Now we’ve got to go to bisexual and transgendered and all kinds of perverse things. And all of this comes under the banner, “I want to be free.” I’m telling you, that’s not freedom. Jesus says very clearly, “The one who commits sin is the slave to sin.”

Now why do you think these people march and yell and scream and lobby and get red in the face and shake their fist and want to commit their sin and they just don’t want to commit their sin, they want you to applaud their sin. Listen, tolerance today no longer means, “I have my view and I can speak it strongly and clearly and you can have your view and you can speak it strongly and clearly.” No, we’re no longer even able to challenge their view. That’s intolerant now. That’s another downgrade that we’re on in this country. And this whole idea of this rebellion is a form of freedom but, brothers and sisters, the freedom that our founding fathers wove into the fabric of this country is this: it’s not a freedom to do what you want, that was never their concept of freedom. Freedom wasn’t just to let the flesh run amok and do what it wanted. Read the early annals of like the Massachusetts Bay colony, read the early city ordinances of Providence, Rhode Island, the very first communities in America founded by the Puritan fathers. Read what they put. I’m telling you what they would do, they saw a couple of men halfway acting like they were homosexuals, do you know what happened? They put them on a boat and sent them back to England. They said, “You don’t understand, we left wickedness and perversion. We’re not doing this in this country.” Now, that might have been extreme but that was their heart. High moral principles. Freedom to them was not freedom to do what you want, listen, it was freedom to do what you ought. They looked at the word of God and said, “We want to be in a place where we can practice what the Scriptures teach, not what the state church requires us to believe and practice.” They wanted to be free to follow the Scriptures to honor God as God dictated them to live and to worship and to serve him.

So Jesus says, “You guys are not free. You have rich, the right religious lineage, you have a rich religious tradition and there are those who are just in all-out rebellion and all of you calling all of that your freedom,” he said, “You’re not free at all. A man who is in sin is in bondage. The man who sins proves he’s a man in bondage.” You see, our bondage and slavery comes not from some law imposed from without, our bondage and slavery comes from the wickedness within our hearts. Once you cross certain lines, it’s hard to come back across and as a culture and as a society and as individuals, cross one line after another line after another line into giving into their lust and their immoralities, then they become so bound in bondage and the guilt builds in their lives and they’re crying and looking for some preacher and many of them are doing it, some religious leader, some college professor, some civic authority or a president to stand up and say, “You’re okay. You’re okay.” Just dulling their conscience and digging deeper the hole and the abyss of lostness and despair and bondage that they are in.

Well, freedom is not those things: religious lineage, religious tradition, certainly not rebellion. Now, let’s look at what freedom is. Look at verse 34. What is freedom? Verse 34, “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I say to you everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.'” Well, what’s the implication then? Let me ask you, don’t raise your hand although we all know the answer: have you ever committed sin? Have you ever committed sin? Then you’re enslaved to sin. There is a slavery in every man’s heart and life and the only way to be free is to be outside of the influence of sin. Did you hear that? You are not free until you are away from the influence of sin.

First of all, you need to be truly free, you have to be unaccountable to the penalty of sin. You’re in an awful bondage if you are still bound under the guilt of the penalty of your sin. Would that not be an awful bondage to go to bed every night, lay your head on that pillow and be aware, “I am under the rightful wrath of a holy God and I’m guilty before him”? Wake up every morning and the first conscious thought of the day, “I am under the rightful wrath of a holy God and I’m guilty before him.” Until you are unaccountable to that penalty, you’re not free at all.

Flip over to Colossians 2, if you would. Colossians 2:13 and 14. I don’t know when’s the last time I preached this part of Colossians to you but I may have to go back and preach it pretty soon because it’s so powerfully and wonderfully rich. Colossians 2:13, “When you were dead,” that’s before your regeneration, “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive,” it’s the working of God in you that brings life into you. He made you alive, “together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions.” Look at verse 14, “having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” Now friend, that’s freedom. There is a certificate of debt, he says, that consists of decrees that are against you and you can look at it this way, the certificate that has all the commandments of God on it and after every one of those commandments it says, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, and it’s against you. And there’s nothing you can do. You’re a sinner. You’re fully guilty. But it says he has canceled that certificate out. He has taken it out of the way. Literally the phrase is the same thing as when John the Baptist said, “Here comes the Lamb of God that bears away the sin of the world.” Jesus took on his shoulders the great debt that that certificate announced and pronounced against you and he has borne it up on his shoulders and he has carried it out of the way and nailed it to the cross and the point is any time anyone, anywhere, at anytime would try to lay on you the guilt of your sins, you can look and see that the whole debt was taken at the cross. It’s been nailed to the cross and I bear it no more.

Well, you have to, first of all, be unaccountable to the penalty of sin if you are truly free. Is your faith in Jesus Christ? Is your rest and trust and reliance in Christ? Then you are unaccountable for the penalty of your sin. That may hit you about 2 o’clock in the morning and you’ll sit straight up in your bed and shout, “Hallelujah!” I wish I could, including Jeff Noblit, open up your skull and just infuse in there the rich, rich glory of that truth. I wish I could make you feel the weightiness of your offensiveness and guilt before God and the rich glories of full redemption in Jesus Christ.

Well, not only unaccountable to the penalty of sin, what freedom is is also being unaffected by the power of sin. Being unaffected by the power of sin. You are not fully free even though you are right now having become a believer in Christ, you are right now unaccountable to the penalty, you are still affected by the power. Now, you begin the day you’re saved with progressive sanctification whereby you are learning to deal with and overcome the power of sin and if you’re like Jeff Noblit, you’ll feel like, “Hotdog! Praise the Lord! I’ve got some victory in this area and I’ve got some victory in this area,” and God takes the blinders off my eyes and shows me four or five more areas I didn’t even know I had to deal with that I still have problems with, amen? The more victory I have, the more the Lord makes me to see there’s a whole lot more to work on. First of all, you can get proud about the victory you just got and that’s sin. I mean, our hearts are so deceptive.

So though we are finally, fully, always settled, unaccountable to the penalty of sin, we are even now today and until we get to heaven, being affected by the power of sin so we’re not fully free yet but we are on freedom’s road. We are in a freedom status. It’s settled for us but time will have to play out to get there because the last part of what freedom really is, not only unaccountable to the penalty of sin and unaffected by the power of sin, but lastly, you have to be unexposed to the presence of sin. We are not really free, fully free, until one day there is no longer even exposure to the presence of sin. Have you ever thought about that? I use the analogy of every day, there’s not an every day in heaven because there’s not day and night like we have here but every day in heaven you wake up and there’s not one tiny notion to displease your Lord all day long. Not one tiny desire to please yourself over honoring him all day long. Every moment of every day for all eternity, there will never be the presence of a heart to dishonor our Lord. That’s what heaven is, it’s finally serving Jesus perfectly. Now, it gets better than that. There will be no sin around you. The word “death” will never be brought up again. The word “sickness” never heard. The word “disease” never heard. The word “war” never uttered. The word “strife,” the word “division,” the word “heartache,” the word “depression,” all of those ugly words are the result of sin. The presence of sin will be gone.

We’re already unaccountable to the penalty of sin. We’re already growing to overcome the power of sin. And one day we’ll be unexposed to even the presence of sin. That’s real freedom. Now, these Jews didn’t know anything about any of this. They were so deluded. They were so blinded. They were so bound up in doing works in the power of their fallen sin contaminated flesh, thinking that some way performing religious duties and the ability of their flesh made them acceptable before a holy God. What a blindness.

Well, what’s the source of this? Where does the power come from to be truly free as I’ve just described? Well, look at verse 36 of John again. John 8:36 he says, “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” That’s an interesting analogy there because they are in the house but they don’t know the Son who inherits the house. They don’t know the Son who has actually all the rights of inheritance of the owner of the house. You’ve got to be connected to the Son to have everything that God has. That’s the only way to have it. You have to realize that you have a sin issue; that you are a fallen wretch totally depraved, as the theologians might put it. Every aspect of your being is so marred and polluted by sin you can by no way, in any way, make yourself pleasing to God. You don’t even have the capacity to believe on Christ left to yourself. If God doesn’t act, you’re hopelessly lost.

Now, again, the most man-centered Arminian among us would agree that at least someone had to come and be used of God to pen the words of Scripture that I might know that Christ is my Savior. God had to take the initiative or you are lost forever. God has to send preachers to preach. God has to send the anointing of the Spirit. God has to send the regenerating power of the Spirit, that you have to know you are lost and know you are offensive and know you are judged and there is no way you can save yourself. Then you must realize that true freedom is only in the works and the merits of Jesus Christ. Have you come to that full rest, just that full rest? Ian Thomas, the preacher’s been gone a long long time. He preached in our area many, many years ago and he talked about a man one day who said, “I have done this, I have done this. I have wrestled. I have striven. I have tried. I have wept. I have prayed. I’ve sought God.” He said, “I just give up. I just give up.” Ian Thomas said, “Good, that’s where God wants you. That’s where God wants you.” I give up. I just resolve myself in Christ. “Christ, if you don’t do it all, my faith is in you, I am sunk.” I know I’m a sinner and Christ died for my sin.

Then thirdly you have to receive him. There must be that turning point of receiving him as your Lord and as your Savior. John 1:12 says, “To as many as received Him, He gave the right to become the children of God, even to those who would believe on His name.” Now, again, this is one of those words that down through 2,000 years of church history has been taken and massaged and manipulated and in far too many circles the receiving of Christ has been reduced to a little quick fix motion, a little hoop jump. If you want to receive Christ, they’ll say, “Raise your hand. If you want to receive Christ, then check the card. If you want to receive Christ, come to the front. If you want to receive Christ, repeat this prayer.” And there may not be anything wrong with any of that unless you don’t explain very thoroughly that that’s not what saves you. There was not some sort of mechanical motion that you did that is the magic potion to get the magic power to keep you out of hell. Listen, receiving Christ is not a ritual but it’s a new relationship. You receive Christ to form this totally new relationship. Now, when Pam and I stood in that other building on those steps up there and we expressed our marriage vows, we didn’t just do a ritual, a whole new relationship was established. I became a husband. I became a life partner. I became later on a father. Lots of dimensions to this brand-new relationship that was established. That’s what happens when you get saved. A brand-new relationship happens.

Now listen, two major aspects to this relationship: you have a new relationship as a sinner with a Savior. “I’m a sinner but now I have the Savior. I look to him totally and his finished work on the cross for my sin, guilt and my penalty, but he took it all for me.” Now listen, there is also a new relationship as a servant with a new Master, and it’s all the above. It’s not one or the other, it’s all the above. Now, I’ll be honest, when I, Jeff Noblit, was converted in my car driving back to Middle Tennessee State University as a 19-year- old college freshman, I didn’t understand a whole lot so I began to learn what it meant that I was a sinner with a new Savior. I didn’t know a whole lot of what it meant that I was a servant with a new Master. I knew I wanted him to be my Master. I wanted everybody to know he’s my new Master. I was not ashamed of him. I just didn’t know what it meant and to be honest, and I said it this morning, I made a lot of messes. I messed up a lot trying to follow my new Master. I didn’t know a lot about following or how to follow him and just to be quite honest, a lot of you Baptists who were ahead of me didn’t do a very good job of being a good example. Not you particularly but I’m just saying generically I looked around and thought, “Doggone, if what I’m seeing in the church is an example, I might as well have stayed out there where I was.”

That’s the source of real freedom: seeing your sin, looking to Jesus, and receiving him as a sinner that needs a Savior, as a servant that needs a new Master. It happens in a moment. It happens just like that. Then you begin knowing true freedom and, listen, you begin a new lifestyle of enjoying freedom from sin. Already you’re free from any accountability for the penalty of your sin but do you know what? You don’t enjoy that a lot yet. I remember a young lady who got saved, a young lady, she was probably in her later 20s and she was raised in a very harsh Church of Christ environment and I think she generally was converted. And she told us after months of attending here that every Sunday she would go home from our services and she would take the Lord’s supper at her house at home. She just wasn’t free yet. I mean, she was free but she didn’t enjoy all of her freedom yet. Still bound out, “Well, I’ve got to do this work and I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to jump through this hoop and this ritual and that ritual.” And a lot of people, you struggle with it but you’re beginning to appreciate your freedoms and then one day glorification comes and you enjoy the fullness of freedom.

Well, Jesus talked about how we appropriate the means, if you will, and walk in this freedom. I just use this, IV: what are the means to experience this freedom. I can’t but just touch on this and we’ll go on. Verses 31 and 32, he said, Jesus saying to those Jews who had believed him. That’s not a saving belief, I’m convinced, because he says some very harsh things to the same group a little bit later about their father being the devil. They are believing some things, haven’t come to saving faith yet, but he says, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine, then you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” So, first of all, he says, “You’ve got to continue in my word.” In other words, “The truth I’m giving you about who I am and what salvation really is and how you can be really free from sin, how you can really know forgiveness, all of these things, that’s my word. It’s basically biblical preaching and teaching. As you abide in the word, you will know the truth,” he says.” You’ll want to know more of it and you’ll know more of it and you’ll know more of it. He says, “And then the truth will set you free.” There will be more and more and more freedoms.

Let me ask a question: you’ve been under my preaching most of you for many years, would it not be true that even with my weak preaching, you would say what I have learned from the word has caused me to enjoy and appreciate my freedoms in Christ more today than 10 years ago or then 15 years ago more than 20 years ago. I hope that’s the case. If not, you all need to get rid of me and try a new one out. But that’s the truth we’re talking about and it’s true for me. It is absolutely amazing that for 33 years I have been preaching the word of God and every week God just blows me away with wonderful things that help me from the word of God. That help me enjoy, appreciate, joy in, stand on the freedoms and the glories that Christ has provided for us.

You shall know the truth and then that sets you free and you’re freer and freer and freer. I bet some of you are sitting here and you can remember back to the moment, maybe it was quiet time, maybe it was a small group Bible study, maybe it was the worship service in the church and there is some hangup, some stronghold of condemnation and guilt, some, the way you viewed something, some legalism you placed on yourself, and that day enough of the truth hammered it and knocked it out of your life and you just got free from it. Some of you have a black mark in your past, a sinful predicament of your past and it’s ugly and it’s dirty and guess what? Your family doesn’t care anymore. Your church family doesn’t care. God has cleansed it under the blood. It was you that was holding back. You were still in bondage but nobody else cared. It’s in the past. It’s under the blood, and all of a sudden one day the glorious preaching of Christ and the glories of Christ, the atonement of Christ, the sufficiency of Christ, the ever intercession of Christ, the perfection of Christ that he will save you and he will keep you and present you perfect to his Father, all those truths come out and bang, that stronghold is knocked out of your thinking and you get freer. And do you know what happens? Listen, listen, listen: you love him more. You love him more. You think, “My goodness, what a Savior. How kind he is. How precious he is. How wonderful he is to try to release me from that stronghold and that bondage and that condemnation and that guilt, that lack of freedom I was walking in.”

Now the legalist, the Armenian who teaches that you get your salvation, you can lose your salvation, they’d say, “Pastor, you start preaching that kind of stuff, you preach that kind of grace, man, people just do what they want. They won’t serve the Lord. They won’t come to church. They won’t be faithful. You’re just preaching to them it’s just grace, it doesn’t matter.” No, no, no, the regenerate of God who learn the glories of Christ in grace want to serve their God. The more you preach freedom, the more they want to serve him and honor him. That’s what a true church is. My goodness, what would we have if I kept you coming because I twisted your arm or beat you into some legalistic bondage of having to do things? Now, there’s always a place for parents and pastors to challenge the people and bring a word of caution. There’s a place for that. That’s not the foundation stone. The foundation stone is: I want to get you so in love with Christ that your joy and treasuring of him propels you to serve him.

The last thing very quickly, V: what happens to those who reject real freedom? What happens to those who keep looking to their right religious lineage? That keep looking to a rich religious tradition? That keep looking to rebellion? “I’m a progressive. Leave me alone. I don’t want anybody’s rules or authority. Don’t give me your laws or your morality. I want to be free to express myself and be what I want to be.” What happens to the persons who get diluted and fall into those lies of freedom and they reject Christ’s true freedom? Well, look at verse 35, he says, “The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever.” Now, if you’ve ever committed sin, he said in the earlier verse, you’re the slave of sin. So everyone is a slave of sin. And if you’re a slave, listen, the slave doesn’t get the inheritance. The son gets the inheritance. The slave may get in the house for a while but that’s just to serve the family. The son gets the inheritance. So if you want the inheritance, salvation, eternal life, that’s what that’s talking about, then you’d better get connected to the son. And if you’re not connected to the son, you’re getting thrown out of the house and then you don’t have the house or the home.

Then he tells them something very pointed, look at verse 38. We’ll go down through verse 44. He said, “I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father.” Jesus says, “Now, you Jews basically, we’ve got two different fathers. You’ve got a father and I’ve got a different Father.” Verse 39, “They answered and said to Him, ‘Abraham is our father.’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you are Abraham’s children, do the deeds of Abraham. 4But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do. You are doing the deeds of your father.’ They said to Him, ‘We were not born of fornication; we have one Father: God.’ Jesus said to them, ‘If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come on My own initiative, but He sent Me. Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word.'” Verse 44, piercing, “‘You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.'”

So Jesus said to these devoted men of right religious lineage and rich religious tradition who were in the house of Judaism, “You don’t know God at all. Satan is your father. You’ve believed a lie. You believe somehow that knowing God and being saved and having true freedom from sin is in doing works of righteousness, keeping rituals and sacrifices and systems of law. You have believed a lie. By the way, that shows that you’re of your father because he’s the father of lies. He’s a deceiver. You’ve been deceived.” So those who reject Christ end up with their true father, Satan and hell forever. Wow.

Don’t you love Jesus? He just shocks you all the time. I mean, he just lays things out that just kind of rattles your cage a little bit, but I’m telling you, he’s a wonderful Savior, and if you know him, then you are now knowing true freedom, and one day when you’re glorified, you’ll know it in the full. By the way, of all that the Father gives him, Jesus, here’s what he said, “I lose not one.” How do I know I’m going to keep this freedom, this salvation? You’re not going to keep it, he doesn’t lose any he gets. He’s not going to lose you. He’s not going to let go of you and if he has changed your heart, you’re not ever going to want to let go of him. Now, you might get a little loose on your grip, but you don’t want to really let go of him ever. Amen. That’s what true freedom is, Jesus says.

Let’s stand together in prayer, alright?