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THE ACCURATE VERSION of Amazing Grace goes “I once was lost but now I’m found”. Sometimes I sing, “I once was bound, but now I’m free.”
Perhaps that’s because I know what it’s like to be bound—to be caged in by relationships, by fear, by pain, by limited finances and responsibility, and by legalism. As a child, my parents limited my choices, and often wisely. As an adult, I’ve often imprisoned myself by my own choices and attitudes.
Paul wrote to my condition,
Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!
— Romans 6:16-18 (The Message)
The Oxford English Dictionary has over twenty entries for the word free. Most are about release from limitations to choosing for ourselves. To be free usually means an unhindered ability to make one’s own choices. At times choosing freedom from circumstances and sin is an inner choice, a choice of attitude. That’s a constant process. Fortunately, it is not complicated; it’s simply and honestly turning to Jesus and resting in Him whatever the outward situation, surrendering to His arms and following Him in the dance. Like Paul and Silas who were able to worship and sing while shackled to a prison wall.
Jesus said,
If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
— John 8:31,32Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
— John 14:6
My picture “Free” catches a split second moment of choosing. The shape and form of the joyful dance of life in Christ is one of continual life and motion in freely willed surrendered response to the Holy Spirit.
But this image doesn’t feel quite right. It’s a bit suspended. I’d like to reach into it and change a bit of the shape here and alter a color there— but to do so would detract from the sense of catching the movement in less than a nanosecond of choice. The shape and forms will be dancing a bit differently in less than an instant. It’s quite dissatisfying not to know what they will look like next—an image that emotionally evokes that cutting edge of trust seems beautiful me. Perhaps I make too much of it.
