the accessibility of freedom from sin’s bondage

Please accept my apology for being a day late for this post!

The letter below was written to my believing brothers in prison about six months into the first portion of their season of intense Covid lockdowns, which, in the end, lasted for more than a year.  I leave the first paragraph in, because it reminds us of the isolation which is constant, Covid or not.  

Dear brother,

Reaching out recently to urge folks in churches to consider correspondence fellowship with brothers and sisters behind the walls, I asked the believers outside if there was anything they intensely missed about fellowship when their churches couldn’t meet. I asked them also to imagine the isolation you experience under current health-precaution circumstances.  I was thankful, in recent virtual staff meetings for Metanoia, to hear of how genuinely concerned our regional representatives were for your day-by-day wellbeing.  We are praying for you.  How are you? Are you well?

For this week’s reflection, I believe there can be encouragement in contemplating the accessibility of freedom from sin’s bondage.  Freedom is granted to us through faith, and faith’s function as it relates to freedom from sin will have a lot to do with coming to believe this: that empty things are empty and meaningful things are full.  We also need to know that the meaningfulness and fullness of such things as are good is a personal matter.  All goodness and meaning springs from who God is, and so the believing will be a coming to know and appreciate him.

Scripture speaks regularly of sin’s character as false advertisement; it references the lie that is involved in what drives its appeal to craving.  When the Apostle Paul wrote to the folks of the Ephesus area, he described to them what the authentic Gospel looked like…

Ephesians 4:22-24 that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I would call the “BAD SUSHI” church dinner we once had.  It’s not at every church dinner that one gets sushi, so when we saw it we descended upon it!  It looked marvelous, and it tasted marvelous (at least for the moment). Within 24 hours, 18 of us had dropped into food poisoning's desperate gastro-intestinal distress!

Here is the application of this little illustration.  The next day, it was not be hard at all to resist the temptation to eat leftovers from it! Each of us 18 (and I was one of them) had become rather intensely acquainted with the corruption of those apparent “delicacies”, and the chucking of them into the dumpster was rather a joy.

Now, as I say this, I don’t mean that we will always find the lesson about sin’s corruption easy to learn.  Perhaps we know too well how we have experienced the distress of sin and returned to it anyway. What I’m putting forward is that the bedrock truth of the matter is accessible by faith.  Sin’s advertisement is in fact false, and God’s way and will is rich and worthy.  Faith can discover that truth, and there can be a restful stability over against sin’s allurements.  C. S. Lewis put it well in an essay, when he took up the matter of what it is that we crave…

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), pp. 1-2