Saturday Night Devotions on Sunday

I Peter 2:16

     As free, yet not using your liberty as a cloak for vice, but as servants of God.

     If Christ has set us free, we are free indeed (John 8:36).  We are free from being dominated by sin; we are free from the fear of death; we are free from worthless religious traditions which teach ritual but starve our soul; we are freed from wasting our lives on worthless temporal pursuits – oh the joy of the freedoms gleaned by means of the presence of our indwelling Savior!  Among the myriad of wonderful freedoms enjoyed by the believer in Christ, however, one freedom is perhaps misused more than the others.  We are freed from religious ritual and legalism, that is true, but the temptation for the Christian is to use our new found freedom “as a cloak for vice.”  In the Old Testament, followers of God were easy to spot.  They had several hundred pages of rules to live by in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  The laws in those pages were full of outward actions that were intended to verify a person’s pure devotion to God.  But what will we use to replace those rituals and “thou-shalt-nots”?  Peter pleads with us here not to use our freedom in Christ as an excusing cloak for a less-than-holy lifestyle.  Oh the tragedy when Christians live by the dogma “don’t judge me,” rather than living by the inner drive to be holy.  If we think that our freedom in Christ gives us license to live immorally we are horribly mistaken.  This “cloak for vice” is all too commonly used by believers today.  We use our freedom to excuse all manner of vices.  We entertain ourselves by unwholesome means, enter relationships that God considers immoral, use profane language that stain our character, imbibe in drinks and drugs that weaken our witness, and then pretend to think that we are above judgment and criticism because of our “freedom in Christ.”  Peter plainly calls us here to use our freedom paradoxically to become “servants of God.”  Usually, “freedom” means we can do what we want – this leads to using “liberty as a cloak for vice.”  But Peter calls us to use our freedom to do what our Master wants, “as servants of God.”  David felt this wonderfully contradictory state of becoming the servant of God to be freed by God: “O Lord, truly I am Your servant; I am your servant, the son of Your maidservant; You have loosed my bonds (Psalm 116:16).”  Let us rejoice that our life in Christ has “loosed our bonds” from a heart to sin and a penchant to waste our time on meaningless matters, but let us not neglect the duties of our liberty and submit to the Lord as faithful servants.