Editor's note: Enjoy today's devotion from The Stories We Live By: Seven Cultural Myths that Fail Us and the Story that Never Will by Timothy Keller and Michael Keller.
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You want to keep your options open, but it has not made you free. It has made your tired.
One of the main stories we are told is that freedom is the absence of limitations. We love this story for good reason. A love of freedom unchained slaves, toppled tyrants, and drove the civil rights movement. But look closer.
The novelist Françoise Sagan was once asked whether she had all the freedom she wanted. “Yes,” she said. “[But] I was obviously less free when I was in love with someone… but one is not in love all the time. Apart from that… I’m free.” Françoise saw that love binds us to others and so it restricts our freedom. As my father, Tim Keller, once said, “You can be free in the modern notion, or you can be in love, but you can’t have both.”
Today, half of American adults report measurable loneliness, and the number who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990. We got our freedom, and it has made us lonely.
The Corinthians had a slogan, and Paul quotes it back to them,
I have the right to do anything. — 1 Corinthians 10:23 NIV
Ours is nearly the same, “I can live as I please as long as I do no harm.” Paul says of himself,
Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. — 1 Corinthians 9:19 NIV
How can you be free and a slave at the same time?
Jesus said “everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (John 8:34 NIV). Becky Pippert shows what that slavery looks like. She says seek acceptance, and you are controlled by the people you want to please. Seek success, and you are a slave to your work. Sagan was right that love costs you your independence, but refusing love does not buy it back. It changes who owns you because you are always bound to something.
That means freedom was never just the absence of restrictions. My father loved to show his grandchildren a video of the trumpet player Rafael Méndez playing “Flight of the Bumblebee.” The notes come so fast they blended together. Nobody plays that way naturally. Méndez practiced hours a day for decades, until his lips and fingers moved as one. Binding himself to practice brought the freedom of trumpet playing.
- Every freedom worth having costs freedom to get.
So why don’t we simply bind ourselves to the right things? Those things that we normally bind ourselves to can be taken away. They are fragile and temporary. A friend of mine, a professing Christian, watched his job, his finances, and his relationships fall apart through no fault of his own. He said to me, “I thought I cared about Jesus’ love for me, but it turns out I cared about these other loves more. Now they are aren’t working. It wasn’t until Jesus was all I had that I realized Jesus was all I needed.”
We don’t realize what we’ve bound ourselves to until those things are taken away.
This became real to me after my father died. I had to preach on praise, but I did not feel like it. So I opened a funeral sermon Jonathan Edwards preached in 1741 at his uncle’s burial. Edwards addresses his widow and children saying, as much as you miss your father’s wisdom and tenderness, and care, “In the blessed Jesus, your father’s Lord and Redeemer, you may have much more than all those things. Your father’s virtues that made him so great a blessing to you, were but the image of what is in Christ.” This hit me like a ton of bricks. As much as I missed my father, Edwards was saying the things I most loved in him were just a shadow of the real thing found in Jesus.
You want comfort? Jesus is there. You want kindness? Jesus is there. You miss that wisdom and patience? It’s all there in Jesus. If you never had a father like that, Jesus has had that goodness all along.
So do not ignore your sorrow or over spiritualize it. Plunge it into the love of God in the finished work of Jesus, and praise comes up out of the bottom. It did that week. This is where every other story fails. Identity, power, freedom, morality, truth, happiness, and progress-not one of them can sustain you through suffering and death.
Not long ago I watched The Princess Bride with my kids. Inigo Montoya corners the man who killed his father. “Offer me money.” “Yes,” says the man. “Offer me everything I ask for.” “Anything you want.” Montoya says, “I want my father back.” I began to cry. I wanted my father back too, and no promise of happiness or freedom or money makes up for that. Earlier in the film, we are told, “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.” If death is the end, that phrase is a beautiful lie we try to believe in. But if Jesus really rose from the dead, then death is just a delay and I will get my father back.
That means Sagan is wrong and Edwards was right. Love costs your freedom only if the one you love can be taken for good. Edwards did not tell the widow and her sons to grieve less. He told her whom to take her grief to.
You can bind yourself to Him, because He bound Himself to you first. Jesus said of His own life,
No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down on My own accord. — John 10:18 NIV
He was free and He spent every bit of it on us. He paid the ransom price to cover our debt. He was cast outside the city so that we might be brough it. The cross is where He says, “My life for yours.” So stop looking for your freedom in the absence of constraints. Find it by binding yourself to Him, and then to the people He has put in front of you. You can afford it now. When you do, you will find the love, beauty, truth, and wonder that you were looking for elsewhere was always to be found Him.
Prayer
Father, I have kept my options open, and it has left me more tired and fearful of people than I meant to be. Thank You that Jesus bound Himself to us, to set us free. Teach me to see that real freedom comes by being in Your presence. In Jesus’ name, amen.
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Adapted with permission from The Stories We Live By: Seven Cultural Myths that Fail Us and the Story that Never Will by Timothy Keller and Michael Keller, copyright River Road Stewardship LLC and Michael Keller.
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Your Turn
Let’s read this again: “You want comfort? Jesus is there. You want kindness? Jesus is there. You miss that wisdom and patience? It’s all there in Jesus. If you never had a father like that, Jesus has had that goodness all along.” Let’s lean into Him today! ~ Devotionals Daily