Taking a year off.

Sweet liberty.  That's a concept that is at the height of our wishes for now and for the future.  We generally want nothing more than liberty, than freedom. The great nations of the world have enshrined freedom as essentailly the centerpiece of what

they're all about.  Countries live and die on the idea of freedom, of liberty, of the ability to make your own choices without being forced into something.  It's someting that countries, cities, people, sincerely believe in.

But freedom, she's hard.  Freedom is difficult, because once the shackles of requirements are gone,  you have to decide what you want to do with yourself and your time.  And honestly, that's harder than you might expect.

Think about this, when students finish high school, what do they do? Frequently, they take a year off, a year to drift, a year to float around.  For the first time since they can remember, they aren't being told where to go or what to do. For a change, with no job and no school, they are free to float around as much as they like, and have no direction built into their routines.

But here's the thing that happens in our lives, which is that we crave chains. We crave captivity, we want

someone to tell us what to do.  Think about how we are in our daily lives, think about how we are on our day to day, when we do all the things that we do.  We are people who move through the world, operating in a world in which we get people to tell us what to do, what to think, how to behave.  Even in a world of freedom, we seek a master, and we seek rules.  We want to have someone lock us down, and shackle us to a new master.  The story of the demons in the scriptures tells us that if you sweep demons out, and leave the space swept and garnished, then you will find yourself with seven worse than the one you just got rid of.  Because nature, and people, abhor vacuums.

You see, we as Christians are living with the horrible curse of liberty.  And liberty tells you that if you're going to do something, then that thing is up to you to do.  You are supposed to get to work in the way that Christ would have you do it. And the law of Christ gives you freedom, frees you from the requirements

of the law.  Christian freedom tells you that it isn't your obsevance of laws or lack thereof that will bring you heaven or hell, but faith in Christ.  And faith in Christ will essentially move you in one way or another.  No problem there.  But that means that the law of God is still there, so what do we do with those chains?

Well, my earlier mention of the student just out of high school is perfectly apt here.  I'll tell you why.  The mention of the student out of high school is a mention of a person who needs direction, who needs to be shown where to go and what to do.  Someone who doesn't have focus, who doesn't have anything to work through and so won't do much of anything.  Much like our confirmation graduates.  Well, Christians, through the refomation, climb this mountain and look around, and find the pure gospel of God, telling them that there is nothing left for anyone to do to earn their salvation.  There is nothing left to earn, no profit to be made through obedience, and now slavery to the law is gone.  You aren't going to earn your way into righteousness through what you do.  So now what? Do you just drift through life like teens drifting through Europe after high school.  You begin to figure out what this whole thing is all about.  And it isn't about keeping rules for the sake of keeping rules, it isn't about earning anything.  It's about something more than that.

One of the great gifts of the reformation was to say to us that we are freed from the law.  We aren't freed from the law in terms of the law ceasing to exist, it's still there.  But we were freed from the requirements of the law, the weight of the law, the burdens of the law, the crushing difficulties of the

law.  Think of it in terms of high school physics.  When you were in high school, you took physics ensure that you could learn, right/ But you probably also took physics to graduate.  You took the classes to get by.  And odds are, in a lot of your classes, you did what most of us did, which was to just get through, to co-operate and graduate. You moved through your classes, and scraped by to get by.  You did what you had to do to get through the classes and move through the motions.

But after you graduate, the lessons are still there.  You can still learn physics, but what happens if you don't get it right? Nothing.  You don't fail, you don't pass, because there isn't a course.  Those results driven experiences are gone.  Instead, you have been freed up to do something becuase it is what you want to do, perhaps for the first time ever. You can read novels without being graded on them, you can do math at your own pace without failing out of class. You can learn physics from the internet or from a professor, and not worry about if you are or are not passing the classes.  And this is wonderful, because of the freedom you have found to do what you want to do.

Christian freedom is like this.  Jesus took the burden of the law upon himself, and broke it on the tree.  He took that burden, that consequence, of all the sin of the world upon himself, and nailed it to himself on the cross.  And as he died, the final exam was delivered, and Jesus passed it on your behalf.  He took that requirement from you, and smashed it, leaving you free to do what God tells you to do without the threat of pass or fail.  Jesus frees you to do what is good and proper without the schedule, without the price attached to it.

And sadly enough, that is the only time that good deeds are ever really truly good.  Only if we're not doing it to pass, only if we're not doing it to scrape by. And this is the great gift of grace, the grace of God that he gives to us through Christ. That we are free from the weight of the law.  Grace, freedom, they were such a huge idea that it took Martin

Luther wrestling with the scriptures like Jacob wrestling with the angel, to see that there was grace hidden in these pages.  Beyond the traditions of men, beyond the new shackles that we had put up, beyond the weight of the structure we had built up, grace was there, freeing us for the first time from the weight and penalty of the law, and letting us see the law, and God for the first time.  And what did we see. For the first time, we saw what our Lord had wanted for the first time.  For us to love him free of rules, laws and threats.  Just love from him to us. And that freedom is the best kind of all, freed from rules and restrictions and free from being pushed and pulled.  We're just free to love and to be loved, for Jesus Christ has fulfilled the law and paid the complete price for our sins.

PJ.