True Freedom: It's Not What You Think and It Costs More Than You Want

A man I know left his wife of eighteen years because he wanted to be 'free.' He had a list of reasons. This is what Scripture actually says about freedom. Some of them legitimate grievances, some of them manufactured, but underneath everything he said the same thing in different ways: he felt caged. So he left. And two years later, sitting in a one-bedroom apartment and seeing his kids every other weekend, he told me he had never felt less free in his life. The cage he'd been in before was at least shared with people he loved.

So. We have a catastrophically confused definition of freedom in contemporary culture. Freedom has come to mean the absence of constraint — the ability to do anything you want, answer to no one, keep all your options open. That sounds liberating until you realize that a life with no commitments, no obligations, no one who needs you is not freedom. It's a very sophisticated form of emptiness.

The Text

John 8:31-36 contains one of the most provocative exchanges in the Gospels. Jesus is speaking to Jews who had believed in him, and he says: 'If you hold to my teaching, you're really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'

The crowd pushes back immediately — and their response is fascinating. 'We are Abraham's descendants and have never been slaves to anyone. How can you say we will be set free?' This is historically absurd: they were, at that moment, under Roman occupation. Their ancestors had been enslaved in Egypt for four hundred years. They had lived under Babylonian captivity. Their claim to have 'never been slaves' is either denial or they're talking about something other than political freedom.

Jesus redirects them: 'Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.' And then: 'So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.'

Unpacking What This Means for Freedom

The Difference Between Political and Moral Freedom

I've taught this passage to several groups now. Jesus is making a distinction that most people in the first century understood better than we do: there's a difference between political freedom and moral freedom. You can be free from external masters and still be completely enslaved internally. The Roman citizens who had every legal liberty in the empire could be. And many were — enslaved to their appetites, their ambitions, their need for approval, their rage.

The Greek word for 'slave' here is doulos — a bondservant, someone who belongs entirely to another. Jesus is saying that repeated sin creates a condition of ownership. The thing you keep returning to, the habit that keeps pulling you back despite your own better judgment, the pattern you can't seem to break even when you genuinely want to, that thing owns you. Whatever it is.

Freedom to Be Your Truest Self

The freedom Jesus offers is specifically freedom from that ownership. It's not freedom to do anything you want. It's freedom to do what you actually want, deep down, before the compulsions drown out the real you. That's a radically different kind of liberty.

The Honest Reading

The freedom Jesus describes requires submission. This sounds like a paradox until you think it through: to be free from slavery to your appetites, your compulsions, your fears, your need to control. You have to submit those things to a higher authority. You've to trade one kind of lordship for another.

This is the part that stops people. Because submitting to Jesus sounds like trading freedom for rules, and the culture has trained us to hear 'submission' as degradation. But here's the question worth sitting with: which master is better? The appetite that promises satisfaction and never delivers? The anger that keeps burning your relationships down? The addiction that has taken everything and keeps asking for more? Or the one who, according to this passage, genuinely sets you free?

The other hard truth is that freedom doesn't feel like what you expect when you first get it. I've sat with people who've been sober for a year, or who've left a destructive relationship, or who've found genuine forgiveness for something they'd been ashamed of for decades. In every case, the first thing they describe isn't exhilaration. It's quiet. A kind of stillness that takes some getting used to. Real freedom often feels less dramatic than the captivity it replaced.

Practice, Not Just Belief

First, identify what actually owns you. Not what you think should own you, not what makes you look good or bad in comparison to others — what actually controls your choices. What do you keep returning to despite wanting to stop? What pulls you back when you've decided to walk away? That's where to start the conversation with God about freedom.

Second, don't mistake rules for freedom's opposite. Jesus says 'if you hold to my teaching', there is structure here, there's discipline, there are things you do and don't do. The commandments aren't the cage; they're the description of what a free person looks like. A musician who practices scales isn't constrained by scales. She's building the freedom to play anything. Structure and freedom aren't enemies.

Third, pay attention to the word 'know' in verse 32 — 'you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.' This isn't intellectual acknowledgment. The Greek ginosko means experiential, relational knowledge. You're not set free by agreeing with propositions. You're set free by an ongoing relationship with the one who is truth. That requires spending time there.

Fourth, be suspicious of any version of 'freedom' that leaves you more isolated, more indulgent, or more defined by what you are free from rather than what you are free for. The man who left his marriage was free from something. But what was he free for? Freedom that has no direction is just drift.

What Stays With You

God, we are a generation confused about what freedom means — sold a version that looks like autonomy but delivers emptiness. The person reading this who is exhausted from chasing a kind of freedom that keeps moving the target — I ask that you meet them with the truth that sets people actually free. Not freedom from responsibility, from commitment, from you. Freedom from the things that own them in ways they can't always name. Let the Son set them free. And then let them discover what they were designed to do with it. Amen.