Free Spirit

By Tim Hall

Tim Hall is an elder on session at Community Church and one of the featured blog writers for Peak Reflections. Tim’s messages help us think theologically about our faith.

The Freedom of the Spirit

The last time I saw my friend Don, he was winking at me out the rear-view mirror of his Harley-Davidson as he headed north on Kansas Highway 7, waist-length blond hair whipping behind him—the very image of freedom. Don threw himself into everything and pretty much did whatever he pleased. He worked hard, played hard, rode hard, and partied hard. He enjoyed many female admirers. He experimented with a wide range of illegal substances and dealt in a number of them. He seemed a free spirit and, by some measures, a man’s man.

Less evident to many of Don’s friends were the chains he forged from his choices: increasing addictions, entanglements with shady and ruthless people, and deepening fear, desperation, and depression. About a month after that fall day in 1976 when I watched him ride off, word came that Don’s body had been found in an apartment a couple of hundred miles away, victim of a shotgun blast. The police ruled it suicide. Some who knew him best suspected a setup—he’d become drawn too deeply into a drug smuggling ring.

Don’s tragic death repeats a pattern commonly found in human experience. Too often, our apparently free choices lead to an ironic enslavement of our appetites and will. A man makes one visit to a porn site and finds himself driven back to the page every time he logs onto the internet. A first year college student tests her newfound independence by overindulging at a keg party and finds herself a victim of date rape. A young couple grasps for the good life and finds themselves torn apart as they moonlight to keep up credit card and mortgage payments. Our wills, bound as they are in service to our corrupt desires, turn out not to be as free as we like to believe. Indeed, the Bible declares that we are born “slaves to sin” (Rom. 6:16-20, cf. chs 1-3).

The Holy Spirit, by contrast, is freedom himself. Jesus compared the Spirit’s activity to the wind, which “blows wherever it pleases” (John 3:8). The apostle Paul declared, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (II Cor. 3:17). The Spirit freely lavishes on all Creation the gifts of the Father and Son and returns all splendor and glory back to the Father and Son in an eternal song of love.

The Spirit also freely ministers the Father’s promise of life to humankind through his Son, fulfilling Jesus’ declaration that “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). Jesus shared our humanity “so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who are held in slavery by their fear of death” (Heb. 2:14-15). Through the work of regeneration or New Birth, the Spirit makes this benefit of Jesus’ victory over death a reality in our lives, the truest thing about us. The Spirit frees us from fear. The Spirit frees us from spiritual death. The Spirit frees us from bondage to our own corrupt appetites and desires. The Spirit frees us from the condemnation passed upon all humankind by the holy and righteous laws of God.

So what does the Spirit set us free for? Certainly neither to indulge ourselves once again in the very choices that bound us in the first place (see Rom. 6:15-23; Gal. 5:13-21), nor to lock ourselves into a box of rules as if our own efforts could make us worthy of God’s love (Rom. 7-8; Gal. 5:1-12). Rather, we are set free to become what God intended at Creation: glorious, perfect, beautiful, radically free children of God Himself.

Contrary to how our culture defines and lives it, true freedom is not merely doing whatever we want. Our common experience exposes the irony of that notion in the shattered lives and tragic ends of those who live by it. The freedom given by God’s Spirit is the empowerment, in the words of the great St. Augustine, to “love God and do as you please.” As we learn to live out the new life implanted in us by the Spirit, the love of God transforms our desires to echo his own heart. In so doing, our choices and behaviors come freely to reflect the beauty, truth, and goodness that come to constitute in us the image of God as we see it in Jesus Christ.