Sermon Illustrations on Freedom from Sin/In Christ
Background
Accepting Guilt and Sinfulness, A Psychologist’s Perspective
Hobart Mowrer was Research Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. Mowrer critiqued Freudian psychology and its assertion that guilt was merely a pathology to be dispensed with. In this excerpt, he describes the importance of forgiveness as it pertains to guilt and sin:
Just so long as a person lives under the shadow of real, unacknowledged, and unexpiated guilt, he cannot…‘accept himself’….He will continue to hate himself and to suffer the inevitable consequences of self-hatred. But the moment he…begins to accept his guilt and his sinfulness, the possibility of radical reformation opens up, and with this…a new freedom of self-respect and peace.
Hobart Mowrer, The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion, 1961, p.54.
Being Formed in Christ’s Image
In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey, M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the Biblical understanding of the process of spiritual formation over and against the “self-help” philosophies abundant in our day:
Scripture is also clear in its witness to the fact that only God can liberate us from our bondage, heal our brokenness, cleanse us from our uncleanness and bring life out of our deadness. We cannot do it by ourselves. Thus spiritual formation is the experience of being shaped by God toward wholeness.
But spiritual formation as “being formed” will also be seen to move against the grain of our do-it-yourself culture and our powerful need to be in control of our existence. Generally, we like to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Self-reliance is deeply ingrained in us.
To allow someone else to control our life is seen as weakness, to be avoided at all costs. The English poet William Henley captured the spirit of our culture well when he wrote, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” But spiritual formation as “being formed” will reveal that God is the initiator of our growth toward wholeness and we are to be pliable clay in God’s hand.
Taken from: Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation by M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton. Copyright (c) 2016 by M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
What is Freedom?
Freedom is not what our culture tells us it is. Freedom is not my deciding, from the urges and longings of my sinful nature, to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, how I want to do it, with whom I want to do it. According to the Bible, that is bondage, not freedom. Rather, true freedom is living as Jesus lived, for he is the freest human being who ever lived.
In fact, he is the only fully free human being who has ever lived, and one day we will be set free fully when we always and only do the will of God. So, what is freedom? Amazingly, Jesus’ answer is this: Freedom is submitting—submitting fully to the will of God, to the words of God, and to the work that God calls us to do.
Stories
Carrying a Human-Sized Weight Around
In May 2018, in a Connecticut hospital, a group of twelve surgeons worked for five hours to remove a tumor from the abdomen of a thirty-eight-year-old woman. That may seem like a lot of doctors and a long time for a single tumor—until you learn that single tumor weighed 132 pounds! The patient reported that, prior to the surgery, the tumor had grown at a rate of ten pounds per week. That’s forty pounds a month! “Ovarian mucinous tumors tend to be big,” said Dr. Vaagn Andikyan, who was the lead surgeon on the team. “But tumors this big are exceedingly rare in the literature.
It may be in the top 10 or 20 tumors of this size removed worldwide.” The tumor was technically benign, but it was far from harmless. According to Dr. Andikyan, the patient couldn’t walk, she was malnourished because she’d been unable to eat, and she was at extreme danger for blood clots and other blood-vessel-related damage. Her very life was in jeopardy. “When I first walked into the examination room . . . I saw fear in the patient’s eyes,” Dr. Andikyan said. “She was so hopeless, because she had seen several other doctors, and they were unable to help her.”
Can you imagine trying to go about your day with a 132-pound weight dragging you down from the inside? Can you imagine the pressure that must have built up in and around that poor woman—the squeezing, maddening, crushing pressure? But then can you imagine what that patient must have felt like the day after the surgery? The week after? Can you imagine the change that must have taken place after a 132-pound burden was removed? “She’s back to a normal life, she’s back to work,” the doctor said. “And when I saw her in my office, I saw smiles, I saw hope, and I saw a happy woman who is back to her normal life and her family.” Wouldn’t you like to experience that kind of joy? That kind of freedom? I have. And believe me, it’s as wonderful as it sounds.
Vance Pitman, Unburdened: Stop Living for Jesus So Jesus Can Live through You, Baker Books, 2020.
Did You Know You Are Free?
This difference between possession and enjoyment is well illustrated in the story of Louis Delcourt. He was a young French soldier during the First World War who overstayed his leave and, fearing disgrace, he decided to desert. He persuaded his mother to lock him up in the attic of their home and there she hid him and fed him for twenty-one years.
But in August 1937 his mother died. There was no chance now of his retaining his incognito and remaining in hiding. So, pale and haggard, he staggered along to the nearest police officer, where he gave himself up. The police officer looked at him in utter incredulity and asked him, “where have you been that you have not heard?” “Haven’t heard what?” asked Louis. “That a law of amnesty for all deserters was passed years ago.”
Louis Delcourt had freedom but did not enjoy it because he did not know that he had it. It is the same with many Christian people today. They have been set free by Jesus Christ. But they are not enjoying their freedom because they do not know that they have it.
Taken from The Living Church: Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor by John R. W. Stott Copyright (c) 2007 by John R. W. Stott. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
A Neglected Garden & The Right to Choose your Religion
The British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was once engaged in a conversation with a man who believed children should never receive any kind of religious education or instruction, not until they were old enough to decide for themselves what they wanted to believe. This would allow them the freedom to choose whatever religion they wanted to believe in, rather than have one foisted upon them by their families. Instead of disagreeing out loud, Coleridge invited the man to his home to visit his garden. When the man entered, he was shocked to find an overrun, neglected plot of land.
“Do you call this a garden?” the man shouted. “There are nothing but weeds here!” “Well, you see,” Coleridge said, “I did not wish to infringe upon the liberty of the garden in any way. I was just giving the garden a chance to express itself and to choose its own production.”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
A Surprising Conversion
After a sojourn in the United States where he experienced the vibrancy of Black churches, Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1931 to teach at the University of Berlin. His pastoral ministry continued as a chaplain and a teacher of a confirmation class for young boys in an impoverished part of Berlin, choosing to live in their neighborhood. It was during this year that Bonhoeffer experienced a radical conversion experience:
Then something happened, something that has changed and transformed my life to the present day. For the first time I discovered the Bible…I had often preached, I had seen a great deal of the Church, and talked and preached about it—but I had not yet become a Christian…Also I had never prayed, or prayed only very little. For all my loneliness, I was quite pleased with myself. Then the Bible, and in particular the Sermon on the Mount, freed me from that. Since then everything has changed. I have felt this plainly, and so have other people about me. It was a great liberation. It became clear to me that the life of a servant of Jesus Christ must belong to the Church, and step by step it became plainer to me how far that must go.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, trans. Eric Mosbacher, et al. (Fortress Press, 2000)
The Truth Will Set You Free
Dallas Willard gave a series of lectures on the kingdom of God. In one, he discussed the popularity of the phrase, “The truth will set you free” by putting it in its proper kingdom context:
The whole passage from John 8 is this, “When Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” It’s amazing how people will just start at the end and come back and chop off what they want.
We have an elevator at USC [where I teach philosophy] in the humanities building that just says “The truth will make you free.” Apparently you don’t even have to know [the truth]. It just works, right? Jesus really said, “If you continue in my word.” That means “If you put in practice what I do, if you walk in it.”
Colleen Strachan
Analogies
Freedom from Sin
Its [Romans] message is not that ‘man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains’, as Rousseau put it at the beginning of The Social Contract (1762); it is rather that human beings are born in sin and slavery, but that Jesus Christ came to set us free.
For here is unfolded the good news of freedom, freedom from the holy wrath of God upon all ungodliness, freedom from alienation into reconciliation, freedom from the condemnation of God’s law, freedom from what Malcolm Muggeridge used to call ‘the dark little dungeon of our own ego’, freedom from the fear of death, freedom one day from the decay of the groaning creation into the glorious liberty of God’s children, and meanwhile freedom from ethnic conflict in the family of God, and freedom to give ourselves to the loving service of God and others.
John Stott, The Message of Romans (The Bible Speaks Today Series), InterVarsity Press.
Until the Snake Has No Head
My grandad told me a story once and that story became a light. A light that unlocks the dark and releases you into the land of a thousand suns. Apparently, so the story went, there had been a tropical snake, longer than the length of a man, that wound its way up the stilts of a jungle cabana and slithered right into one unsuspecting woman’s kitchen. That woman turned around, split the day with one blood-curdling scream, and flung herself outside wide-eyed. That’s about when a machete-wielding neighbor showed up, calmly walked into her kitchen, and sliced off the head of the reptilian thing.
The strange thing is that a snake’s neurology and blood flow make it such that a snake still slithers wild even after it’s been sliced headless. For hours that woman stood outside, waiting. And the body of the snake still rampaged on, thrashing hard against windows and walls, destroying chairs and table and all things good and home.
My Grandad turned to say it, and I can tell you, it felt like a proclamation of emancipation: A snake can only wreak havoc until it accepts it has no head—that it’s actually dead. The enemy of your soul can only wreak havoc in your life until you accept that it’s already dead—and you’re already free. Be who you already are. Be Free — because you already are free. Your enemy is dead — so silence the lies in your head. No enemy can’t imprison you — because your Savior empowers you. Nothing can hold you in bondage — because you are held by him. Not one thing can hold you back — because his arms are holding you.
Taken from Ann Voskamp in Rebekah Lyons, You Are Free, Zondervan, 2017, pp.14-15.
Humor
A Neglected Garden & The Right to Choose your Religion
The British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was once engaged in a conversation with a man who believed children should never receive any kind of religious education or instruction, not until they were old enough to decide for themselves what they wanted to believe. This would allow them the freedom to choose whatever religion they wanted to believe in, rather than have one foisted upon them by their families. Instead of disagreeing out loud, Coleridge invited the man to his home to visit his garden. When the man entered, he was shocked to find an overrun, neglected plot of land.
“Do you call this a garden?” the man shouted. “There are nothing but weeds here!” “Well, you see,” Coleridge said, “I did not wish to infringe upon the liberty of the garden in any way. I was just giving the garden a chance to express itself and to choose its own production.”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
The Truth Will Set You Free
Dallas Willard gave a series of lectures on the kingdom of God. In one, he discussed the popularity of the phrase, “The truth will set you free” by putting it in its proper kingdom context:
The whole passage from John 8 is this, “When Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” It’s amazing how people will just start at the end and come back and chop off what they want.
We have an elevator at USC [where I teach philosophy] in the humanities building that just says “The truth will make you free.” Apparently you don’t even have to know [the truth]. It just works, right? Jesus really said, “If you continue in my word.” That means “If you put in practice what I do, if you walk in it.”
Colleen Strachan
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