Freedom From, Freedom For | Chrishan | Hillsong East Coast

hey church well for those in jersey that have been asking the question when are we going to hear a message from jersey here we are what a thrilling day and i was thinking about my parents i was thinking about this week my parents and and kind of our history our legacy and i don't know about you but my parents would tell me stories about when they went to school my parents would tell me about how tough it was going to school i've been thinking about that as we've been dropping off our kids and everyone's gone back to school this week and it's been utter chaos as everyone has new check-in systems and how amazing we have got some stories to tell but my parents would tell the stories they would say hey when we when we used to have to go to school we used to have to walk two kilometers with heavy backpacks and heavy bags and heavy books and it was a trial and then you get talking to my grandparents and my grandparents would tell me oh back when we went to school no it was so difficult we had to walk two kilometers with no shoes in the snow and everything just got that much worse the stories that you would hear they had no lights they had to study under a street lamp out the front of the house just to get the work load done i don't know about you but i grew up hearing these stories and i've got to tell you i think we're going to have some stories to tell the next generation my kids are going to have some stories to tell their kids like back when they went to school they weren't even allowed to go to school they had to go to school on a zoom screen and tune in to school and they are going to have some stories to tell but my parents because of the encounters that they had had with education and with school because of the challenges they had faced because of what opportunity had looked like when we moved as a family to australia there was a perspective that they had on what education was about there was a perspective that they had on what freedom was about for me as a kid growing up in australia i had a different perspective on freedom freedom meant i can do whatever i want whenever i want to do it but my parents sense of freedom wasn't designed the same way i want to read to us from galatians because this idea of freedom keeps coming up again and again in our lives and in the way that we relate to one another galatians chapter 5 and verses 13 to 15. it reads like this in the message it is absolutely clear that god has called you to a free life just make sure you don't use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom rather use your freedom to serve one another in love that's how freedom grows for everything we know about god's word is summed up in a single sentence love others as you love yourself that's an act of true freedom if you bite and ravage each other watch out in no time at all you will be annihilating each other and where will your precious freedom be then you see in the galatian church there were two pitfalls that they were falling into and paul is trying to guard and guide them through this process he is at his classic passionate best at the very start of this chapter paul is talking to the galatians he's saying you've been consumed again with trying to live according to the law trying to think to yourselves that we can live good enough lives we can do good enough things and if we are good enough and if we abide by all the regulations and if we live by all of the laws then we can somehow make ourselves more right with god we can somehow make ourselves acceptable to god we can somehow make ourselves pleasing to god and paul is saying all of that work is done on the cross there's nothing more you can do through the law to make yourself right with god they had this pitfall this challenge this tendency to move back towards operating according to the law we have that same challenge today in popular culture we tend to think if i can just live a good enough life if i can just be a good enough person then one day god will accept me because i've been good the bible makes it so clear this week in many christian traditions there was a day of the cross where we remember the cross and we remember the work of jesus and one of those days the reading was john 3 16 and we might come across it so often we see it on placards at the football which is started again yes and we can see all of that taking place but we can sometimes forget the power of those words for god so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him may not perish but have everlasting life [Music] it is jesus's work that sets us free it's nothing that we can do in our own strength it's nothing that we can do by abiding according to the law or according to regulations we don't earn our good standing with god he has done it all for us and if we put our faith in jesus's goodness instead of our own ability to be good then the bible says then we can be made right with god so paul is talking to a church that has received jesus but has this tendency to go back into thinking about this in old ways and paul is saying that if you think like that you were just as enslaved as you were before then paul is guarding them on the other side so there's a pitfall on this side but there's a pitfall on the other side and on the other side it's to start to think i can do whatever i want with my life i can live as free as i want i can do whatever i feel like doing and and i can engage in whatever kind of activity i can get i want to engage in that's what freedom is all about i i make mistakes i stuff up i can set my life up to just live that way and god's just gonna forgive me anyway and paul is saying that's not living in freedom either i have a friend of mine who talked to me about his addicted state and said he realized that he'd gotten as low as he could get when he was stealing from his own grandmother and we start to realize that sometimes the very things that we think make us the freest just enslave us in new ways and paul's saying that's not what freedom looks like either so what do we need to understand about freedom jesus when he is talking to the people he says this in john chapter 8 verses 31-36 then jesus said to the jews who had believed in him you if you continue in my word you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free they answered him we're descendants of abraham and have never been slaves to anyone what do you mean by saying you will be made free jesus answered them very truly i tell you everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin the slave does not have a place in the household the sun has a place there forever so if the sun makes you free you will be free indeed if the sun makes you free you will be free indeed the response of the people is stunning because they are a people that had been made free that had been set free a people that had known the exodus out of egypt where they had been slaves and yet their response to jesus is we have never been slaves to anyone and it's just the same way that we respond we respond the same way i'm not a slave i've never been a slave to anyone or anything and yet if we don't realize what we have been set free from we don't recognize what we have been set free for we're not just set free from we are set free for the bible says that we have been set free from sin and death we think about the law of sin and death and we can sometimes think of sin as an outdated form of morality but the reality of sin is that it is a dehumanizing force that is causing us to live well below what it means to be fully human and so when we start to recognize what we have been set free from we can start to recognize what we are set free for for my parents to come into a new country that has opportunity that has ways forward that has access to education like they hadn't encountered before freedom wasn't the opportunity to do whatever they wanted freedom was the opportunity to choose what was good stanley grant's theologian he says it like this he says we never approach the moral decision-making process as neutral chooses instead we are already predisposed and the presence of sin leaves us predisposed toward evil given this tragic situation freedom means to be released from the predisposition toward evil in order to be able to choose the good freedom means being released from the predisposition toward evil in order to be able to choose the good our freedom from sin and death means that where we have been predisposed towards choosing the wrong things we now have an opportunity like never before to choose the good i pray in our lives that we would recognize not just what we have been freed from but what we have been freed for it would be hard to preach a message about freedom when you have grown up as a youth pastor and a youth leader without reflecting on the wise words of william wallace in braveheart william wallace comes to a battlefield and the scottish are gathered all on the hills and they're just about to leave they're just about to run and william wallace comes before a whole lot of his compatriots and he starts to say these words you have come to fight as free men and free you are but what would you do with that freedom and they reply to him and i apologize to any scots who are watching this for my butchery of the scottish accent but i just cannot help myself this morning they say fight against that no we'll run and we'll live and william says these wide wise words i fight and you may die run and you live at least a while and dying in your beds years from now would you be willing to trade all those days from then till no for one chance just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they'll never take our freedom that was just for all of jersey to hear and i hope that it blessed someone and there's a big chair and all of the souls all the army is is going up and celebrating but he asks that question what would you do with that freedom because what we decide we are going to do with that freedom helps us to understand what we are free for and gives the opportunity for their freedom to grow we are called to have that freedom grow in our lives in galatians chapter 5. it goes on to talk about the work of the flesh and contrast it with the fruit of the spirit the work of the flesh is to do with all the things that cause division and strife envy malice drunkenness all of the stuff that is going to produce bad fruit in our lives that is going to be a d dehumanizing force but the fruit of the spirit paul goes on to say is what is going to help us to unleash greater freedom it's not just what we are free from it is also what we are free for we are free for the fruit of the spirit which paul says is love joy peace patience kindness generosity self-control gentleness faithfulness we are free for those things we are free for love when maybe in the past we would have chosen to to get revenge or we would have chosen to be at odds with people or we would have chosen to respond in kind now we get to choose love i had a friend of mine who had all kinds of things being said about him in the media and i was getting upset for him all kinds of things being said on social media by individuals that didn't even know him and i was getting upset towards these people and he was saying to me i just choose to love them i get to do that i get to choose my response and no matter what we've been like in the past we are free for love no matter what our natural predisposition is we don't just have to get through this season that we're in but we are free for joy no matter what it's looked like for us in the past we we might have always wanted to hold on to anxiety and hold on to our fears and hold on to what what what the discontent has looked like but if we are free to give that over to god we are free for peace we are free for patience where all we have known is impatience we are free for generosity we are free for faithfulness even if faithlessness has been in our past we are free for gentleness we are free for self-control we are free for kindness i'm praying that in our lives we would know what it's like to see freedom flourish one of the challenges for us is that we tend to think that freedom means that i can do whatever i like whenever i want to do it and we fail to recognize that there are constraints there are conditions within which freedom flourishes we are designed for those conditions to be in operation and when they are our freedom can flourish you know they did a study with with kids kids that were in kindergarten they they put them in a playground in a massive unfenced area and as they put these kids in this playground what they realized were these kids were staying just close to the playground they weren't expanding far beyond the playground they were just hanging right where that playground was and then they put the kids in the same playground but they put a fence around it and now they started to realize that the kids were expanding far beyond where they were staying before and the fence had brought an opportunity for the kids to explore further and have greater freedom than if it wasn't there to start with our lives have been placed in such a way that there are conditions in which freedom flourishes and this is what it says about those conditions it says we should use your freedom to serve one another in love because that's how freedom grows use your freedom to serve one another in love that is the condition under which freedom grows under which freedom flourishes see we tend to think you know i want to live a kind of life where i can i can do whatever i want whenever i want but freedom doesn't flourish that way if we want true freedom if we want to experience the fullness of what god has for us there are conditions in which that happens if anyone in who's listening if you if you've gotten married if you've been a part of a family if you've had some incredible deep friendships the kind of community that we are all created for then we start to understand that the only way to have those kinds of friendships and relationships is to constrain what feels like our freedoms if we just live life however we want if we boundary ourselves completely in such a way that we think we can protect ourselves from any kind of hurt or discomfort we might experience in relationship now boundaries are important and jesus models those for us all of that is important but in order to come into any relationship that's going to have depth that's going to have beauty that's going to be nourishing that's going to feed our souls in order to experience any relationships like that the way that we are called to we are going to have to trade some of what we have perceived as freedom for some of the blessing that's going to come with being in deep community jesus models this kind of life for us it says of jesus that even though he was god that even the son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many when we have a perspective for me jesus was the freest man that ever lived jesus lived the freest life but lived it to serve other people he shows us what it's like to be truly human and he does it through his service of others and i pray that we would discover freedom in our lives like that that we would know what it's like to serve one another in love tim keller in his book reason for god he says it like this a fish because it absorbs oxygen from water rather than air is only free if it is restricted and limited to water if we put it on the grass its freedom to move and even live is not enhanced but destroyed the fish dies if we do not honor the reality of its nature in many areas of life freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones the liberating restrictions tim calls it i pray and believe that we would step into those kind of conditions in which our freedom is going to flourish maybe you're connected today and there's things going on in your relationships maybe you're connected today and there's things going on in your calling or in your workplace or in your internal world i pray that freedom would truly grow in our lives as we step into the conditions that god has for us in proverbs chapter 29 and verse 18 it says in the new king james where there is no vision the people perish where there's no vision where there's no access to this is what god sees where there's no revelation some translations say where there's no prophecy the message says when we can't see what god is doing the people cast off restraint or the people perish and it's interesting that when we don't have an idea of these are the conditions in which we are called to flourish when we lose sight of what god sees for us what god sees for humanity what god sees for us as people when we lose sight of that we perish we cast off restraint because there is a restraint that will have us living in all that god has for us and cause us to truly flourish i pray in our lives that we would embrace those conditions that are going to cause freedom to flourish and that we would serve one another in love especially those we are called in the closest community with i pray that in our lives in this season that as we come to think about what freedom looks like and what freedom means for us that we would recognize what we have been set free from and what we have been set free for and the conditions in which that freedom is going to flourish we want to take a moment and pray for those of us connected here today and you recognize that your life's not right with god freedom starts there with recognizing what jesus has done for us with putting our faith in his goodness and not in our own and we are going to pray a simple but a powerful prayer a prayer getting your life right with god a prayer putting your faith in the lord jesus christ and if you know you need to make your peace with god you know you need to get your life right with god and i'm going to invite us all to pray this prayer together a fresh way of committing our lives and our purposes to him but especially if you know you need to get your life right with god why don't you pray this prayer with us today let's pray dear god right now i give you my life i stop living my own way i want to follow you come and be my lord and my savior and my greatest friend in jesus name amen amen if you're praying that prayer today we're celebrating with you and we'd love to do anything we can as a church to help you step up into all that god has for your life if you text the word jesus to 84 000 we'll be able to connect with you place you in an environment where people are going to be able to encourage you into all that god has for you maybe just click the link in the description below let us know that you prayed that prayer i want to pray once more today for every single one of us especially for those who have felt restricted in this season for those who have felt restricted in relationships restricted in calling restricted internally i want to pray and believe that freedom would flourish in our lives in these days father we thank you for your work of freedom in our lives we thank you for what you have set us free from and what you have set us free for lord may the fruit of the spirit be evident in our lives as we are led by your spirit and as we step into all that you have for us may the greatest days of our experience of your freedom be the days that are ahead of us and may others be blessed as a result lord let us walk into your freedom in increasing ways in jesus mighty name we pray amen and amen we're going to worship why don't you linger with us we love you church thanks for joining us today looking forward to seeing many of us next week in person in new york and in new jersey and looking forward to regularly connecting in connecticut and boston as well let's linger in worship and let's allow god to do a fresh work of affirming his freedom in our life in jesus name amen [Music] is [Music] is [Music] cover [Music] would you do it again [Music] huh [Music] again [Music] come down [Music] again [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Hillsong Church East Coast

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Length: 31min 28sec (1888 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021