Liberty

In the film Jurassic Park, after all the wheels have come off and everything has gone wrong, the character Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, utters the film’s most famous line:

“You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”

That is the principle that Paul cites long before that film was ever made: just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. This is the Jurassic Park principle of Christian freedom and Paul unpacks what it means for the Christian life.

Love over rights.

Paul is pro-freedom. He agrees with the Corinthians when they say: “Everything is permissible.” But then he challenges them:

• "Not everything is beneficial."
• "Not everything builds up."
• "No one is to seek his own good, but the good of the other person."

In other words, just because you’re free to do something doesn’t always mean you should. There’s that governing Jurassic Park Principle.

That doesn’t mean you never express your freedom. Paul isn’t saying the Christian life is all restriction and abstinence. He’s saying that love trumps freedom. Our love for others is more important than the full expression of our freedom. Freedom may say we can but love may say we shouldn’t.

Possible Preaching Angle:
Paul’s guiding principle is this: love trumps freedom. That means sometimes we choose not to use our freedom because it could harm someone else, particularly in the faith.

Tarryn Pitt loves scouring thrift shops for treasures, from vintage canning jars to velveteen armchairs. “I’ve been thrifting my whole life — it’s one of my favorite things to do, at least once or twice a week,” she said. “Pretty much all of my home decor came from a thrift store.”

She was browsing in secondhand stores where she lives in Prineville, Oregon, when she got an idea about her upcoming wedding. The average cost of a wedding in the United States is about $33,000 — an amount she said she found extravagant and also created a lot of environmental waste.

“I wanted something that was unique and fit my personality,” said Pitt, 25. “A thrift store wedding dinner seemed like the perfect answer.”

She and her fiancé, Holt Porfily, are inviting 307 guests to their outdoor mountain wedding in Sisters, Oregon. All of the wedding tableware and decorations at the outdoor meal will be thrifted.

“It’s honestly not just about saving money for us, though,” Pitt said. “What we’re doing is super sustainable, and I love giving old things new life.”

So far, she said, she has spent less than $2,000 on her wedding dinnerware and decorations, about half of what she priced out to rent similar items.

In late December, she posted a TikTok video of some of the plates she had found during one of her thrift shop excursions. Pitt said she was shocked when the video received more than 3.6 million views and 2,200 comments.

Pitt said the response has been so positive that she now plans to keep only a few plates after the wedding, and she hopes to rent the rest to other interested brides and grooms. She said she will keep the price low for obvious reasons.

Think of yourself as living in an apartment house. You live there under a landlord who has made your life miserable. He charges you exorbitant rent. When you can’t pay, he loans you money at a fearful rate of interest to get you even further into his debt. He barges into your apartment at all hours of the day and night, wrecks and dirties the place up, then charges you extra for not maintaining the premises. Your life is miserable.

Then comes Someone who says, “I’ve taken over this apartment house. I’ve purchased it. You can live here as long as you like, free. The rent is paid up. I am going to be living here with you, in the manager’s apartment.” What a joy! You are saved! You are delivered out of the clutches of the old landlord!

But what happens? You hardly have time to rejoice in your new-found freedom, when a knock comes at the door. And there he is—the old landlord! Mean, glowering, and demanding as ever. He has come for the rent, he says. What do you do? Do you pay him? Of course you don’t! Do you go out and pop him on the nose? No—he’s bigger than you are! You confidently tell him, “You’ll have to take that up with the new Landlord.” He may bellow, threaten, wheedle, and cajole. You just quietly tell him, “Take it up with the new Landlord.” If he comes back a dozen times, with all sorts of threats and arguments, waving legal-looking documents in your face, you simply tell him yet once again, “Take it up with the new Landlord.” ln the end, he has to. He knows it, too. He just hopes that he can bluff and threaten and deceive you into doubting that the new Landlord will really take care of things.

In his book Making Sense of God, Tim Keller notes that when the national anthem is sung at sporting events, the cheering begins on the line “o’er the land of the free.” The singer quite often extends that line with a lengthy high note. Keller writes, “Even though the song goes on to talk about ‘the brave,’ this is an afterthought. Both the melody line and our culture highlight freedom as the main theme and value of our society.”

But true love imposes limits on our obsession on freedom. The film Secondhand Lions captures this well. In a scene near the end of the film, a small fatherless boy who has been abandoned by his mother to be raised by his crazy great-uncles. The boy tells one of his uncles, who is prone to depression and has contemplated taking his own life, that he cannot do that because he, the small boy, needs him. “You're my uncle. I need you to stick around and be my uncle.” The faithfulness of love will shape—and constrain—the freedom of love.

According to Lifeway research, among Protestants with evangelical beliefs who attend church monthly or more:

74% agree Christians drinking alcohol can cause other believers to stumble

33% say they drink alcohol

29% agree the Bible bans alcohol

In his book Making Sense of God, Tim Keller writes:

When The Star-Spangled Banner is sung at sporting events, the climactic phrase comes to an elongated high note: “O’er the land of the freeee ….” The cheers begin here. Even though the song goes on to talk about “the brave,” this is an afterthought. Both the melody line and our culture highlights freedom as the main theme and value of our society.

Freedom has come to be defined as the absence of any limitations or constraints on us. By this definition, the fewer boundaries we have on our choices and actions, the freer we feel ourselves to be. Held in this form, I want to argue that the narrative has gone wrong and is doing damage.

Modern freedom is the freedom of self-assertion. I am free if I may do whatever I want. But defining freedom this way … is unworkable because it is an impossibility …. We need some kind of moral norms and constraints on our actions if we are to live together.

Modern people like to see freedom as the complete absence of any constraints. But think of a fish. Because a fish absorbs oxygen from water, not air, it is free only if it is restricted to water. If a fish is “freed” from the river and put out on the grass to explore, its freedom to move and soon even to live is destroyed. The fish is not more free, but less free, if it cannot honor the reality of its nature.

The same is true with airplanes and birds. If they violate the laws of aerodynamics, they will crash into the ground. But if they follow them, they will ascend and soar. The same is true in many areas of life: Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, those that fit with the realities of our own nature and those of the world.

In 1960, two men made a bet. There was only $50 on the line, but millions of people would feel the impact of this little wager. The first man was Bennett Cerf, the founder of Random House. The second man was named Theo Geisel, but you probably know him as Dr. Seuss. Cerf proposed the bet and challenged that Dr. Seuss would not be able to write an entertaining children’s book using only 50 different words.

Dr. Seuss took the bet and won. The result was a little book called Green Eggs and Ham. Since publication, it has sold more than 200 million copies, making it the most popular of Seuss’s works and one of the best-selling children’s books in history.

At first glance, you might think this was a lucky fluke. A talented author plays a fun game with 50 words and ends up producing a hit. But there is actually more to this story and the lessons in it can help us become more creative and stick to better habits over the long-run.

What Dr. Seuss discovered through this little bet was the power of setting constraints. Con­straints are not the enemy. Every artist has a limited set of tools to work with. Every athlete has a limited set of skills to train with. Every entrepreneur has a limited amount of resources to build with. Once you know your constraints, you can creatively figure out how to work with them.

There are a lot of authors who would complain about writing a book with only 50 words. But there was one author who decided to take the tools he had available and make a work of art instead.

Possible Preaching Angles:

God has also given us constraints, such as, lack of education, lack of resources, a painful past, a besetting sin, or physical disabilities. But as we rely on God to overcome, we showcase his power and bring glory to him (2 Cor. 12:7-9).

John Ortberg shares what he learned about civic duty and enthusiasm from being called to jury duty:

It was 9:00 on a Monday morning and I was one of 150 unhappy campers sitting on plastic chairs crammed into a sterile basement room in the San Mateo County Courthouse, reporting for jury duty. We all had one thing in common: We wanted to be somewhere else.

Until Larry happened.

Larry works for the government, and however much we pay him, it's not enough. In a few short minutes, he won over the crowd of prospective jurors and infused us with a sense of honor and purpose. "I know you're all busy people," he said. "But I want to say thank you. I want to tell you, on behalf of the judges and our legal system and the county of San Mateo and, really, our nation, we're grateful for your service."

Although almost no one is happy about getting a summons to jury duty, Larry said, it's actually incredibly meaningful, and it's the foundation of a justice system in which people have a right to trial by a jury of their peers. He told us a story about a ninety-five-year-old woman who was no longer able to drive, but who took three buses to get to the courthouse so she could serve. When she arrived, Larry asked her, "Did you call ahead like you're supposed to, to find out if you're even needed for jury duty?" She said, "I couldn't. I don't have one of those push-button phones." Turns out, she still had a rotary dial phone.

Larry reminded us of the nobility of justice, and the long centuries of struggle for it, and how, even now, people around the world were fighting, and in some cases dying, for the right to exercise this privilege. As he spoke, people stopped texting; they sat up straight; they nudged each other and seemed inspired. By the time my number was called, I was so excited to serve that when the judge asked me whether I could pronounce someone guilty, I told him I was a pastor and that, according to the Bible, everybody was guilty. I said, "I could even pronounce you guilty!"

I wasn't selected to serve on a jury that time, but the point is that a room full of sullen, silent, phone-checking, self-important draftees had been transformed into a community of joyful patriots in a matter of minutes. When people left the courthouse that day, they were talking and laughing like old friends.

In her blog post titled "So I Quit Drinking," Christian writer Sarah Bessey gives a powerful example of habits that, perhaps not sinful in themselves, become sinful to us. She begins by admitting that she had been a lover and consumer of wine throughout adulthood, and it "never bothered [her] in the least."

Bessey continues:

[But] I have learned that when you are walking with Jesus, the Holy Spirit is always up to something. And when it comes to conviction, I have found the Spirit to be gentle but relentless. Change and transformation is an ongoing process … We begin to sense that this Thing that used to be okay is no longer okay. The Thing that used to mean freedom has become bondage …

Because a year ago, I knew God wanted me to stop drinking. … Oh, I had all of the excuses for why I could keep enjoying my wine in the evenings—I work hard, I give so much, I'm not an alcoholic, I'm never hung-over, it doesn't affect my life, it's social, it's fun, it's in the Bible for pity's sake! I began to be haunted by the writer of Hebrews who said, " … let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us."

I began to wonder why I was resisting throwing off the "weight" of alcohol, why I was so determined to keep running my race with this habit that had begun to feel so heavy. In my soul, I could see the Holy Spirit practically jogging alongside of me to say every now and again: "Aren't you ready to put that heavy weight down yet? I think it's time you stopped this one. … It looks to me like it's getting heavier the longer you hold on."

Bessey mentions the dangers of legalism, but then she concludes, "But in our steering away from legalism, I wonder if we left the road to holiness or began to forget that God also cares about what we do and how we do it and why. Conviction is less about condemnation than it is about invitation. It's an invitation into freedom. It's an invitation into wholeness."

In an interview in The New York Times, award-winning actor Ben Affleck reflected on the pressure to hide our broken areas. When he watches other movies that strain to make their heroes entirely likable and valiant, Mr. Affleck said: "I find that boring. Instead, I think it's interesting how we manage the best version of ourselves, despite our flaws and our weaknesses and our tendencies to do the wrong thing."

The article noted, "[Affleck] has also realized that for all of his Hollywood success, some part of him will always feel like a relentless striver who must prove, through his work, that he has a right to be there." Affleck put it this way:

That [relentless striving] never goes away. All these habits that we develop, that help us at some point, they have flip sides. In this case, it's hard to turn that feeling off … The urge of making it good and trying to make sure that it works, that you've done the most interesting version that you can—it's like a neurosis that drives me to work every day.

Imagine you are twelve years old again, and you love baseball. All your heroes are baseball players, all your extracurricular time is spent either with a ball glove in hand or watching a game on television, and, regardless of the season, it's been that way as long as you can remember. It's not that you're particularly good or particularly bad at baseball, you just love the game—the smack of the bat after a line drive, the smell of the grass, the feel of sliding headlong into second base. You've never had to defend it or describe it that way, but that's what you feel. And you can imagine one day having a jersey with your name on the back.

Things have begun to feel a little different this season, though, because twelve-year-olds have to try out for JV teams at the end of the year, and you get the feeling that not everyone makes the cut. You suddenly find yourself comparing your fielding skills with the other infielders and with players from other teams, and you start to count the number of times you miss balls that are hit to you. You keep track of how many strikeouts you get in each game.

Your coach has a way of calling you out, too. In one particularly bad stretch of the season, your coach calls across the field after you make yet another missed fielding play, "That's four times this game! Keep your head down!" You don't keep your head down, though, and after the fifth ground ball makes its way between your legs, your coach demotes you to the outfield. You replay his voice in your head. At your next at-bat, you strike out quickly, and you wonder if baseball is your sport after all.

Possible Preaching Angles: The authors note: "The Law is shorthand here for an accusing standard of performance. As we have noted, whenever the Law is coming, condemnation follows close behind. Whenever an expectation stands before us—from our coach, from ourselves, from God himself—we are either condemned by our failure before it, or made to be condemners in our fulfillment of it. The Law is the unfeeling voice of The Coach—it tolerates no excuses, it accepts no shortcuts. The Law is good, in that it proffers good fundamentals ('Keep your head down when fielding a groundball,' 'You shouldn't smoke,' 'Spend only the money you have,' etc.), but the failure which pursues it always creates a reaction. When we are criticized, we must defend."

Robert Cialdini, a researcher and an expert on the theory of persuasion, conducted an experiment at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. The park had a problem, as it made clear on a warning sign:

YOUR HERITAGE IS BEING VANDALIZED EVERY DAY BY THEFT LOSSES OF PETRIFIED WOOD OF 14 TONS A YEAR, MOSTLY A SMALL PIECE AT A TIME.

The sign plainly appealed to the visitors' sense of moral outrage. Cialdini wanted to know if this appeal was effective. So he and some colleagues ran an experiment. They seeded various trails throughout the forest with loose pieces of petrified wood, ready for the stealing. On some trails, they posted a sign warning not to steal; other trails got no sign. The result? The trails with the warning sign had nearly three times more theft than the trails with no signs.

How could this be? Cialdini concluded that the park's warning sign, designed to send a moral message, perhaps sent a different message as well. Something like: Wow, the petrified wood is going fast—I'd better get mine now! Or: Fourteen tons a year!? Surely it won't matter f I take a few pieces.

In the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia, there's a special display for a rickety, home-made aluminum kayak. This tiny, makeshift boat seems oddly out of place in the midst of displays for impressive Navy vessels and artifacts from significant battles on the sea. But a bronze plaque tells museum visitors the story behind this kayak's heroic makers.

In 1966, an auto mechanic named Laureano and his wife Consuelo decided that they could no longer live under the oppression of Cuba's totalitarian regime. After spending months collecting scrap metal, they pieced together a boat just barely big enough for two small people. Then Laureano jury-rigged a small lawn mower engine on the back of the kayak.

After months of planning, on a moonless September night, sitting back to back and wearing only their swimming suits, they set out in the treacherous Straits of Florida. They had only enough water and food for a couple of days. Finally, after they had floated in open water for over 70 hours, the U.S. Coast Guard found and rescued the couple just south of Alligator Reef Light in the Florida Keys.

Was it worth the risk to find freedom? Laureano thought so. Years later, he said,

When one has grown up in liberty, [you] realize it is important to have [freedom]. We lived in the enormous prison which is Cuba, where one's life is not worth one crumb. Where one goes out into the street and does not know whether or not one will return to one's home, because the political police can arrest you without any warning and put you in prison. Before this could happen to us, we thought that going into the ocean, and risking death or being eaten by sharks, is a million times better than to stay suffering under [political oppression].

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Spiritual Freedom—There is a deep longing in every human heart to find the spiritual freedom that only Christ can provide. Risking everything to possess our freedom in Christ is a million times better than remaining in spiritual bondage. (2) Political Freedom—This provides an excellent way to illustrate the themes of July 4th. (3) Courage, Danger, or Risk—It also serves as a remarkable story of courage and perseverance in the face of danger.

In the last days of the Civil War, the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia, fell to the Union army. Abraham Lincoln insisted on visiting the city. Even though no one knew he was coming, slaves recognized him immediately and thronged around him. He had liberated them by the Emancipation Proclamation, and now Lincoln's army had set them free. According to Admiral David Porter, an eyewitness, Lincoln spoke to the throng around him:

"My poor friends, you are free—free as air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it …. Liberty is your birthright."

But Lincoln also warned them not to abuse their freedom. "Let the world see that you merit [your freedom]," Lincoln said, "Don't let your joy carry you into excesses. Learn the laws and obey them."

That is very much like the message Jesus gives to those whom he has liberated by his death and resurrection. Jesus gives us our true birthright—spiritual freedom. But that freedom isn't an excuse for disobedience; it forms the basis for learning and obeying God's laws.

One of the more popular TV ads during the 2010 Super Bowl was sponsored by Audi and takes a poke at the imaginary "green police" out of control.

Standing at the checkout counter of a store, the clerk tells a customer: "Okay, so it's $37.08. Paper or plastic?"

The customer replies, "Plastic."

Into the scene walks a uniformed officer who says, "That's the magic word. Green police. You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy." The officer then hauls the customer away with his hands in cuffs behind his back.

In quick succession we see different scenes of the green police arresting other people guilty of minor environmental infractions.

Green police line the side of a suburban street sifting through garbage cans at the curb. An officer finds a battery in the garbage. An officer in charge yells, "Let's go. Take the house."

A man stands at his kitchen sink at night with an orange rind in hand. Suddenly a searchlight blazes through the window upon him and a green policeman orders over a loudspeaker: "Put the rind down, sir! That's a compost infraction." The man puts the rind down and runs away into the darkness.

A green policeman stands on the brightly lit porch of a comfortable looking suburban home. When the homeowner walks onto the porch, the officer asks, "Did you install these bulbs?" When the homeowner says yeah, he is hauled away to a waiting squad car, and a TV reporter speaks into the camera, "Tragedy strikes tonight where a man has just been arrested for possession of an incandescent light bulb."

A green policeman busts two teenagers for drinking from plastic bottles.

As green policeman surround a man and woman in a hot tub, one of the officers announces, "The water setting is at 105," and the couple is arrested.

The commercial ends with a green policeman busting two real police officers in a squad car. The green policeman asks the real cop, "Are those Styrofoam cups you're drinking from?" The cop says yeah, and the green policeman responds, "Please step out of the car and put 'em on the hood."

In this ad, the problem with the green police is that they are pursuing a good thing—a healthy environment—in an extreme way. They are well meaning, but overzealous.

So it is with legalists. While some are motivated by a Pharisaical spirit, others are pursuing a very good thing—purity and holiness—but they are doing it to an extreme. They police the actions of others in behaviors that the Bible says nothing specifically about. While the Bible does call the leaders of the church to exercise church discipline with regard to certain actions that are clearly named in Scripture, legalists want to raise the bar and also enforce their extra-biblical standards on others.