Too Much Freedom?

It's a question I've heard before. When I was growing up my English teacher had two foreign exchange students from a semi-Communist country stay with her and she told us about how they saw us in Canada as having too much freedom. How since we don't have as many rules we end up hurting ourselves more, since there is no strong opposing force like in their homeland we end up not really respecting authority and it comes to our own detriment because we end up hurting ourselves.

Tonight I was reading about the Temptation of Jesus (you can find it in Matthew 4 or Luke 4 if you're interested). The author was talking about how Jesus could have used that moment of temptation to "fix" our world, but instead left us with the freedom to do what we want, even ultimately reject Him. We are left with so much freedom spiritually that we can even allow our spirits to die...

But that's the beauty of God. He gives us the freedom to decide whether or not to serve Him, and He doesn't even try to make it easy by giving us some miraculous sign in the sky or by revealing Himself as we see fit. Instead, He gives us almost more freedom than we can handle to make a choice to serve Him. Why? It's quite simple. Because devotion caused by an outside force is called oppression. Devotion by choice out of freedom is called love.

Last night at Drink Deep we talked about how I cannot (or can anyone else) force God on someone. It is a choice and if you want to get to know God better it is up to you to spend time with Him, up to you to read your Bible, up to you to serve, up to you to love, up to you to ______. No one else can do that for you, part of being free is it is up to you, for better or for worse. (If you want to talk about that more, we have a discussion on Sunday nights at http://www.fumcfireandwater.net/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=79&page=1#Item_0).

Just something to think about. As William Wallace said in Braveheart, "And what will you do with that freedom?" As the Apostle Paul said, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." (Galatians 5:1a).

T