Have you ever noticed that something you once chose seems to have started choosing for you? You may know exactly what has a hold on you. You may not feel trapped by anything at all. Or you may have been taught another way of becoming free, and want to know whether Jesus offers the same thing.
Wherever you are starting from, the question deserves an honest answer, and the answer is yes. But we have to be clear about what needs liberating. Jesus does not free us by teaching us to escape the world God made. He frees us from sin, and from the hold we have allowed good things to gain on us.
What Does Jesus Liberate Us From?
When the Bible speaks of the world as something we need to be freed from, it does not mean the earth God made or the good things in it. It means a way of living that is set against God, and the hold it has on us.
So none of this is the problem: money, work, reputation, comfort, food and drink. Every one of those is good or harmless in itself. God made a world full of things worth wanting, and he did not make them as traps.
The trouble lies somewhere else. Our wanting turns into needing, and our needing turns into serving. A person can spend thirty years working for money they never enjoy, or arranging a whole life around what other people will think, and never once decide to live that way. It happens the way a current carries a swimmer. The swimmer believes they are choosing their direction, and all the while it is the water that decides.
What would you find hardest to lose? Whatever your answer, it leads to a harder question than the one in the title. Why can we not seem to hold any of it freely?
Why We Are Not as Free as We Think
Jesus once had an argument about freedom with people who were sure the subject did not apply to them. They were speaking with him face to face, and their family line went back to Abraham himself, the man God had made his promises to centuries before. It was a genuine and honorable heritage. When Jesus spoke about becoming free, they were not being foolish or evasive. They were telling the truth as they understood it.
| “They answered him, ‘We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, “You will become free”?’”
John 8:33, ESV |
If you have been reading this far and thinking that you are not enslaved to anything, you are in good company, and you have just made the same objection they did.
Jesus does not soften his answer.
| “Jesus answered them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.’”
John 8:34, ESV |
Notice what he does not say. He does not say that some people are slaves, or that the poor are, or that the greedy are. He says everyone who practices sin, which is everyone, including the people standing in front of him and including you and me.
Look at what he names as the master. Not money. Not the world. Sin. Sin is not a small word for making mistakes. It is the moral wrong we have done against a holy God, and against the people he made. Every one of us has done it, and doing it has put us under a master we did not choose and cannot escape by trying harder.
And sin does something worse than bind us. It separates us from God, who made us for himself, and that separation is the deepest trouble a person can be in.
This is why the answer to bondage is never a technique. A man who owes far more than he could earn in a lifetime will not clear the debt by promising to manage better. Being careful from now on cannot touch the debt itself. Someone has to pay it. The wrong we have done is like that. It is not a habit to be broken. It is a debt to be paid, and we cannot pay it.
God Made This World and Called It Good
There is a mistake at this point that has done a great deal of harm, and it would send you looking for freedom in exactly the wrong place.
The physical world is not the enemy. Bodies are not the enemy. Money, food, work, marriage, beauty, and pleasure are not the enemy. God made all of it, and he made it good.
None of it is still as he made it. When people turned away from God, the damage did not stay contained in us. It ran out into everything, so that the world we live in now is a good world that has been spoiled: bodies that fail and die, work that exhausts, love that wounds, beauty that does not last. It is the spoiling that needs undoing, and God’s answer to a spoiled world has never been to discard it.
Long after the world had gone wrong, the Bible still said this:
| “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.”
1 Timothy 4:4, ESV |
Those words were written to correct people who had begun teaching that holiness meant refusing good things. They were sincere, and they were wrong.
Jesus himself settles the matter, and he is not a second God alongside the Father. He is God the Son, fully God and fully human, and he did not rescue us by staying clear of physical life. He entered it. He was born with a body, he ate and drank and grew tired, he died a physical death, and he rose again in a body that could be touched.
And what God has promised at the end is not an escape from the world but a renewed one, with God himself coming down to live among his people. We have written more about that in Does Jesus Give You Life After Death?
So freedom does not mean having less of the world. It means being able to receive the world as a gift again, from the hand of God who made it, rather than serving it as a master.
The Son Sets You Free
Return to the argument in John 8, because Jesus does not leave his hearers with the diagnosis. He gives them the cure in the same breath.
| “The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
John 8:35-36, ESV |
In the household Jesus describes, a slave has no permanent place while a son belongs there for good. Jesus is not offering the slave better treatment. He is offering you a son’s place in the household, permanent.
Notice who acts in that last sentence. The Son sets you free. You do not set yourself free.
Some of you have made the same promise more times than you would like to count: “This is the last time.” You may have hidden it, or hated what it was doing to you, or wondered whether you are simply too weak to change. Others of you have never made that promise about anything, and the whole subject feels distant. Jesus does not wait for either of you to prove you can free yourselves. Here is how he did it, and why.
God the Father did not have to open a way at all. He opened one because he loved the people who had turned away from him. The Father sent his Son, and the Son went willingly, and the two acted as one, because the Father and the Son are one God.
Jesus lived the life we have failed to live, without sin. Then he went to the cross, the wooden structure the Romans used to execute criminals, and he died there in our place, taking on himself the penalty our sin deserved.
His death was an act of love, and it was more than an example of one. It was a payment, made in our name, for a debt we owed and could not cover.
Three days later he rose from the dead, in a body, and by rising he broke the power of the thing that held us.
Because that debt is paid, the hold on everyone who trusts him is broken. Not loosened. Broken. And because it was Jesus who paid it, there is no second place to go for the same thing. He is not one liberator among several. He is the only one who has ever paid for anyone.
How Can You Receive This Freedom?
This freedom is received, not achieved. You do not clean yourself up so that Jesus will accept you. You come to him because you cannot rescue yourself.
Trusting him means resting your hope on what he has already done, instead of on what you can manage. It means handing him the direction of your life. That is the whole of what he asks. Trust is the open hand that receives what he paid everything to give.
The freedom he gives is not only for this life. Those who trust him are with God forever. Those who refuse him stay separated from God, and that separation is what Jesus came to save us from.
If you would like to read more about why his death was necessary, see Why Did Jesus Die?
What Freedom Looks Like Now
An honest answer has to include when. Otherwise a person trusts Jesus, finds themselves still struggling next week, and concludes that nothing happened. The Bible was written by many people across many centuries, carried along by God, and it speaks with one voice. Paul was one of those writers. He wrote much of the New Testament to the earliest groups of believers, and he described what has changed and what is still changing:
| “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin.”
Romans 6:6-7, ESV |
There are three things sin does to a person, and Jesus deals with all three, though not all on the same timetable.
Sin’s penalty is settled now, and completely. The moment a person trusts Jesus, the debt is paid and the record is clear. Nothing is pending. Nothing is partial.
Sin’s rule is broken now, and its pull weakens over time. Sin is no longer the master, and that changes the day a person trusts Jesus. What takes time is the wearing down of what sin left behind, the habits and the wanting. From the first day, the Holy Spirit, who is God himself, lives in the person who has trusted Jesus, and the wearing down is his work. No one does this to themselves. He changes what a person wants, over months and years, and he begins at once.
Sin’s presence is gone in the end. There will be a day with no pull left in it at all. That day is coming and it has not come yet, which is why the honest word for now is progress rather than perfection.
This freedom is real even when circumstances do not change. Paul himself wrote some of his most joyful letters from a Roman prison, in chains and free at the same time.
A person who has been set free does say no to things, and does turn away from the wrong they once served, toward the God who freed them. But the saying no is not what made them free. They say no because they are free, not in order to become free. The self-denial is the fruit of the gift, never the price of it.
Coming to Jesus for Freedom
Perhaps you have read this far and you are not sure yet. That is an honest place to stand, and you do not have to pretend otherwise before you can speak to God. You can ask him to show you what is true, and to show you what has a hold on you. If that is where you are, you might pray something like this:
| A prayer for the one who is still looking
God, I do not know yet whether all of this is true. Show me what has a hold on me, and show me whether Jesus is who he says he is. I am willing to see. Amen. |
God the Father is not offended by that prayer. When a person asks him honestly for the truth, he leads them to his Son.
Or perhaps something in you has settled while you were reading, and you are ready to stop trying to get free and to be set free. You do not need religious words or a religious background. Come with your own words, and bring him your trust.
| A prayer to trust Jesus
Jesus, I believe that you are God the Son, that you died in my place, and that God raised you from the dead. I have sinned and I need your forgiveness. I am truly sorry for the wrong I have done. I have been serving things that were never meant to be my master, and I cannot free myself. Thank you for paying what I owed. I trust you now as my Savior, the one who has rescued me. Set me free, and lead me. I want to follow you. Amen. |
If that prayer is your trust in Jesus, here is what God has promised:
| “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Romans 10:13, ESV |
The Father heard you. You spoke to Jesus, and the Father heard, because the Son and the Father are one God. He made that promise in his own Word, and he always keeps his promise.
Your assurance does not rest on how strongly you felt while you prayed, or on whether you said the words perfectly, or on anything you will manage to do next. It rests on what Jesus has already done, and on the character of the God who does not break his word. You are forgiven. The Holy Spirit now lives in you, and he will begin the long, patient work of wearing down what still has a hold on you. None of that is paying God back, because the gift was never for sale.
Frequently Asked Questions
I don’t feel like a slave to anything. Is this article even for me?
Yes, and you are not the first person to say so. The people arguing with Jesus in John 8 said exactly that, and they meant it sincerely. His answer was that everyone who sins is a slave to sin, which makes this less about how trapped a person feels and more about what is true of all of us. Bondage is not always painful. Sometimes it is comfortable, which is what makes it hard to see.
Doesn’t the Bible say not to love the world? Isn’t that saying the world is bad?
It says not to love the world, and it means something specific by the word. In that passage the world means the whole way of living that is organized against God, along with the desires that keep us tied to it. It does not mean the earth, or your body, or your family, or your work. The same Bible says that everything God created is good and that nothing should be refused if it is received with thanks. Both statements are true because they are talking about two different things.
Do I have to give up everything I own to be free?
Giving things up does not make anyone free. A person can give away everything they own and still be ruled by what other people think of them for doing it, so the answer is no. Freedom is given by Jesus, not earned by going without. Once a person is free, they will find that their grip on some things loosens and that they can let them go more easily than before. That letting go is a result of being free, never the way to become free.
Isn’t this just one path to freedom among many?
No, and the reason is not that other paths are less sincere. It is that the problem is a debt, and only one person has ever paid it. Jesus lived without sin and died in the place of people who had sinned, and no one else has done that or could. Sincere effort in any direction leaves the debt exactly where it was. You can read more about why there is one way in Is Belief in Jesus the Only Way to Heaven?
What if I can’t stop, no matter how hard I try?
Then you are describing something real, and trying harder on your own is not the answer. Jesus gives freedom, and he gives his Spirit, and he also gives people who can walk with you, support you, and help you take practical steps. Needing help is not a failure of faith, and faith does not make help unnecessary. Use the buttons below and we will connect with you. If you would like to talk with someone trained for this, Find A Helpline lists free support services in most countries at findahelpline.com, including help for substance use, gambling, and other struggles that will not let go.
I trusted Jesus, but I’m still struggling with the same thing. Did it not work?
It worked. Your forgiveness was complete the moment you trusted him, and nothing about your struggle this week puts it in doubt. Sin is no longer your master. What is still being worn down is what it left behind, and that is the Holy Spirit’s work in you over time rather than a switch that was supposed to flip. Struggle is what it feels like when the Holy Spirit pulls back against what once had the run of the house.
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