“Behold, You delight in truth in the inward being, and You teach me wisdom in the secret heart.”
~Psalm 51:6
A key phrase in a once popular Disney song was: “your heart will tell you no lies.” This line – firmly rooted in human autonomy – is the one lie to rule them all. It is the same philosophy the serpent used in Genesis 3. The idea of “freedom” for the natural man is the liberty to do whatever he or she pleases. Unrestrained desire, however, is anarchy; it is enslavement to one’s own passions and is brutal bondage of the soul that plays out in bodily pursuits driven by emotions and feelings instead of reason or truth.
Paul states that we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, (Ephesians 2:3). How can desires be so tyrannical? Because they wage war against the soul (I Peter 2:11) and against the law of my mind (Rom. 7:23); they are the passions that are at war with in you that cause conflicts (James 4:1) and that plunge men into ruin and destruction (I Timothy 6:9).
Princeton University professor, Robert P. George surmised, “Could it be that David Hume was correct in supposing that ‘we are slaves of our passions’ – rational only in the purely instrumental sense of being capable of employing our intellectual power to, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, ‘range abroad and find the way to the things desired?’” This is man’s affirmation of what God says of us – that we were slaves of our self-preeminent passions.
But knowing Christ is knowing that in Him we are redeemed from such bondage; we have been released from the enslavement of sin which held us under a curse. This is the believer’s positional reality having the credited righteousness of Christ because Jesus was the propitiation for our sins. This means that He absorbed the wrath of God for us that we might be released from the clutches of an empty, aimless way of life and its resulting destruction.
Remember the nature of redemption – we did not climb out of this pit on our own – we were rescued! We were bought at a price to be set free to pursue a life of freedom our Maker designed for us. Redemption is not only what we have been released from, but what we have been liberated to. May we resolve to live as people who are free in the newness of life in Christ. It begins with truth in the inward being.
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