1Co 6:9 Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders
1Co 6:10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
1Co 6:11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
1Co 6:12 "Everything is permissible for me"—but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me"—but I will not be mastered by anything.
1Co 6:13 "Food for the stomach and the stomach for food"—but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.
1Co 6:14 By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also.
1Co 6:15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!
1Co 6:16 Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh."
Over the past few weeks, in watching the news from around the world, I am reminded of how great freedom really is. As a believer in Jesus Christ I know that this freedom is a gift from God, given to me in accordance with 1 Corinthians 12 so that I may up build the body and use it to help people. Freedom is never something to be taken for granted nor is it something that we should ever give up.
But the freedom we have in Jesus Christ is the best sort of freedom, because it is freedom that comes not from political policy or nationhood, but it is a freedom that comes from love. God not only wants us to love him as he loved us, but he wants us to love and obey him by choice. He gives us the option to remain with him or to walk away from him. In Jesus, he gives the world a gift and gives them the choice to either accept that gift or to deny it, that gift is eternal life. In giving us this gift, he fulfils the Old Testament laws and breaks down the barriers between those who chose to love him and those who don’t. He allows those who do not accept that gift, those who are not obedient, to going on living while on this earth; however he allows them to walk away from God in eternity. He even tells us to love them and to work to share the truth with them in love. Carl Barth, the Swiss theologian, said that “Hell is separation from God” and this is confirmed by Jesus works in Luke 16 when the Rich Ruler is separated from Abraham and poor Lazarus by a chasm, and in that place, far away from God, where those who deny him choose to walk into, there is suffering. But it’s a choice nevertheless and God gives us the freedom to choose at any time during our life here on earth.
I would contrast this with those around the world who are forcing people to accept their way of thinking, in this life. Those who force people to live like them by making such choice illegal, or worse by subjecting those who do not chose to obey to hatred in the form of torture and even murder.
See here’s the difference. When Jesus calls people to him and he wants them to come freely. He calls people to repent of sins and he wants them to repent freely because their heart has been changed. If we are forced, by law, to live in obedience to God, then we are not choosing him freely, and we are not repenting due to a Change of heart or even a change of mind. In fact, we may very well go on being sinners in our minds, still desiring that sin, while we don’t act on it because it is against the law or because we fear for our lives. So in this case repentance doesn’t happen because we give our lives to Jesus and because we have a heart changed and renewed by his spirit, it happens because it is forced on us.
Now of course I am speaking of oppressive regimes and even religions around the world, but this is also somewhat of a warning. We know what we got in Jesus is awesome! So it’d be easy to want to force that on the world or our communities. Unfortunately, Christians have done this in the past and it has never ended well. It has only caused sin to become secrete and believers to be false.
We need to cherish this freedom and use it as the gift that it is. God is calling us to love and to reach out to sinners. In a society where our morals are forced on people that is not possible, as sinners go underground, and if sinners are underground we will not be able to find them in order to love them, and if we cannot love them, we cannot share with them the love of Jesus Christ, and if we cannot share with them the love of Jesus Christ they will not come to repentence and salvation. In a society where there is no freedom, those who choose disobedience are hidden away from those who have the gift of eternal life. In many cases those folk choose disobedience because they have never known what it means to love and be loved by Jesus.
It’s easy as Christians to want to divide ourselves from “those people” and to think that we can force them to be good Christians by carrying protest signs or signing online petitions to make their choice illegal. Chances are, however, that these people have chosen to walk away from Jesus because no one has ever shown them the love of Christ. If we show them hate, if we protest against them, if we sign petitions to stop their choice in religion or in the placement of their religious buildings, if we ban them from our borders or our communities then we put up a wall between ourselves and them, a wall that will mean that they will never hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a wall that will restrict us from obeying the call to “Go make disciples...” So cherish the freedom that we have in Jesus Christ, but never forget the reason that we have such freedom is so that we can freely give as we have freely received (Matthew 10:8).