Today we finish up a little three-part series on free will, started back in episode 307. On Thursday I asked if there's such a thing as free will. No was the answer, and that led to episode number 308 on Friday. So if there's no free will, how are sinners held accountable for not doing what they cannot do?

And that leads us finally to today's question. Pastor John, how would you define Christian freedom? What we've said about free will so far is that when it comes to choosing Christ, coming to Christ, nobody has this free will. Nobody has ultimate self-determination that would empower them to overcome their own bondage, their own blindness, provide the decisive influence, and open their eyes and see Christ as compelling and come to Him.

Nobody can do that for themselves. Left to ourselves, we are so deeply in love with darkness, we can't come to the light. We are responsible to come, we said that, because our inability to come is not natural inability, it's a moral inability. We're not chained to a post, wanting desperately to come to Christ, but being forbidden to come to Christ.

Nobody's in that situation, and the reason we can't come is because we love the alternative more. And then Christ breaks in, the Holy Spirit breaks in, and sets us free. And I want to argue that only Christians know true freedom, and get at what that true freedom is for just a few minutes.

In Romans 6, it says, "Our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin, for the one who's died is set free from sin." So we are a free people, we're not in chains and bondage to our own lusts anymore.

Or Romans 6 17, "Thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching." So our freedom is described as a free, joyful, satisfying obedience to God. Jesus said, "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." I want to get inside that.

What is that? What is it like to be free indeed? Or Paul said in Galatians 5, "For freedom Christ has set us free." Don't be submitting anymore to bondage. So Christians are the freest of all people. Free indeed. What does that mean? And here's my answer. I'll put it in four pieces and then give a picture through the illustration of skydiving.

To be fully free, free indeed, we must have freedom of desire, freedom of ability, freedom of opportunity, and freedom of no regrets. And skydiving gives a great illustration of what I mean. So what you want now in this illustration is the glorious freedom of skydiving, falling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, the wind in your face, and then popping your parachute at the last minute and coming safely to the ground, and then doing it over and over again in all kinds of conditions.

You want that kind of free, joyful experience. So suppose that you're on your way to the airport to go up for your first real jump, and your car hits a pothole, bangs into a telephone pole, and while you're waiting for the truck to come, you miss your appointment and your opportunity passes, so you lose the freedom of opportunity.

So you have to have a freedom of opportunity to be truly free, and you just lost it. Or suppose you make it to the airport, but it turns out that you skipped all the classes, and you don't know the first thing about skydiving, and so you don't have any basic abilities to do it, and they're not going to let you do it.

And so you don't have the second kind of freedom that you need, namely freedom of ability. You may have freedom of opportunity, you got there, the opportunities before you, you don't have the ability, they're not going to let you jump. Third, suppose you make it to the airport, you go to all the classes, you got all the abilities you need, you take off in the airplane, and as soon as the door opens, you look down, and all your desire vanishes.

You are paralyzed with fear at jumping out of this airplane, and you will not jump out. You have lost the freedom of desire. Now you might dutifully jump out, but that's not the way we want to be Christian, right? Everybody knows dutiful jumping is not freedom. It's just another kind of bondage.

What you want is, "I love this! I want to do this! I'm out of here!" That's freedom. But you don't have it, you just lost it, you're in fear, and so you don't have the freedom of desire. Now, we're almost done. Suppose you get to the airport, no obstacle, you have the freedom of opportunity, you have all the know-how necessary, you have the freedom of ability, you look out the door at the tiny clusters of silos and barns and farmhouses a few miles down, and you just can't wait to jump.

You got all the freedom of desire. This is what you want to do. So you jump, and as you free fall, enjoying every second of it, unknown to you, your parachute is defective. It's not going to open. No matter what you do, are you free? You feel free. You don't know what's about to happen.

This is where most people live. Fully free. Are you free? You're not free. You're dead. You're dead. In 30 seconds, you will be dead. Regrets. In order to be fully free, you got to have a parachute in good working order. You need to be saved. You need to have Jesus Christ, because you are cruising toward destruction, no matter how free you feel in this world without a Savior.

When Jesus makes us free, He makes us free at every, every single level. He's given us the freedom of opportunity. He died for us, and the freedom of ability. He gave us the gift of faith, the freedom of desire. He put a new heart in us and wrote His law on it, and caused us to have new desires and new loves.

And He gives us the freedom of no regrets in a thousand years. We will we will jump out of this airplane forever with Jesus at our side, and the parachute always open, lands in green pastures. If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. And only believers in Jesus have this kind of freedom.

Yes, that's a great illustration. But to be clear, you're not advocating skydiving as a hobby, right? I don't think you should skydive, because... We've got an entire episode on that. Oh yeah, okay, we don't need to go into that. Yeah, yeah, and that episode was titled "Safety is a Myth." It's episode number 10 in the Ask Pastor John podcast series, way back in the beginning.

If you have an iPhone or iPad and the free Ask Pastor John app, you can listen to it by scrolling down the list of episodes to that early episode, episode number 10, "Safety is a Myth." And speaking of fear, what does it mean for a Christian to fear God?

Tomorrow we'll tackle that. Until then, I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.