When we read the story of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke immediately after Satan had spent 40 days trying to tempt our Lord and Savior from going against the will of His Father, we find Jesus begins to travel back to his hometown of Nazareth, where He had been brought up. As was His custom, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read and was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah.
When He opened the book, He found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty (freedom) to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty (freedom) those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD.” (Luke 4:16-19)
Christ came to free us from sin through His atoning sacrifice. Hebrews 2:14-15 tells us that Jesus “shared in their humanity, so that by His death, He might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who, all their lives, were held in slavery by their fear of death.”
The wages of sin are death (Romans 6:23). Christ paid the death penalty for us, freeing us from death row through His sacrifice. We have been set free, but as Paul wrote, this freedom does not give us license or permission to continue to do the very things that brought on the death penalty. (Romans 6:11-22)
Paul wrote in Galatians 5:13, “For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but, through love, serve one another.”
Ultimately, true freedom comes through the resurrection at Christ’s return. As Paul explains in Romans 8:21, “The creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty (freedom) of the children of God.”
Pastor Mark