Pastor's Power Points

Redemption – Released from What Held Us!

She came out of it with some minor bumps and bruises, but when my niece showed me the photos of her car that was involved in an accident, I was amazed (and so was she) at her good condition.  The experience of a violent situation such as an accident is traumatic, yet often we can look in retrospect and gain greater understanding and perspective of that from which we have been rescued.  So it is with our redemption. Having been purchased and set at liberty we must understand and not forget the clutches that held us in bondage, for some of them would still like to claim us.

We have been rescued from the dominion of darkness (Col. 1:13-14) wherein our master was the father of lies. Under his sway we believed and acted in self-preeminence and self-sufficiency. It was a lie that led us to perceive God to be less than what He has revealed about Himself. The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that man does not need God. When God is diminished, man makes much of himself becoming self-deceived in regard to his own importance and greatness.

That lie still wants to own me as a redeemed person.  When I submit to it (believe it) I tend to think that life is about me, so my efforts and resources are invested in my pleasures and rights, in what others think of me and making sure that I am treated as I ought to be, and that my mistreatment of others is duly overlooked.  The redeemed person has been rescued from this awful oppression and need not submit to its lure.  Be advised: it goes kicking and screaming, but redemption gives us the power in Christ to put off the old man.

Heed the story of the “rich fool” who consumed his time and energy on gain for himself. His soul was required of him and he was not “rich toward God.” This defines foolishness.  That “gain” may be tangible, it may be intangible: it may be the pressure of doing life the way Dad did… it may be the pressure of getting “more out of life” than Dad did. Peter states that we were redeemed from such aimless conduct (I Pet.1:18) The redeemed person is set free from the emptiness and futility of defining his life by what he amasses for himself, and to be rich toward God.

The key phrase in a popular song on the Disney channel goes: “your heart will tell you no lies.”  Having discussed this with my children around the dinner table we concluded that this line is the one lie to rule them all.  It is a lie firmly rooted in human autonomy.  The idea of “freedom” for the natural man is the liberty to do whatever he pleases. Unrestrained desire, however, is anarchy and enslavement to one’s own passions is a brutal form of bondage. It is bondage of the soul that plays out in bodily pursuits driven by the senses in command of one’s resources and efforts.

Contrasting the redeemed with the unregenerate Paul states that we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). How can desires be so tyrannical? Because they wage war against the soul (I Pet.2:11) and against the law of my mind (Rom. 7:23); they are the passions that are at war with in you that cause conflicts (James 4:1) and that plunge men into ruin and destruction (I Tim. 6:9).

Could it be that David Hume was correct in supposing that “we are slaves of our passions – ‘rational’ only in the purely instrumental sense of being capable of employing our intellectual power to, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, ‘range abroad and find the way to the things desired?’”* This is man’s affirmation of what God has revealed – that we were slaves of sin.

But part of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ is knowing that in Christ we have been redeemed from every lawless deed (Titus 2:14); we have been released from the enslavement of sin which held us under the curse of the Law (Gal. 3:13) required by the demands of God’s holiness. The believer can look back at what he was and what had enslaved him but no longer does. That is the believer’s positional reality. What was the cost of this redemption? John informs us that Jesus Christ was the propitiation for our sins. This means that He absorbed the wrath of God for us – for our release from the clutches of sin, its empty, aimless way of life and its resulting destruction.

The nature of redemption must be remembered:  we did not climb out of this pit on our own – we were rescued! We were bought at a price to be set free in order to live up to the way our Maker designed us. Redemption is not only what we have been released from, but what we have been liberated to.