The Liberty of the Spirit

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” — ROMANS viii. 2,

me free from outward law. I am often as much the child of Mount Sinai as was the Jew. I walk through the world as the boy walks through the schoolroom — remembering that he has lessons to learn and that he has answers to record. I speak of my responsibility, of my accountableness, of my judgment to come. That is the law of sin and death, and it is a very useful law; it keeps back the hand from much that is evil. But does it keep back the heart? No, there is the weak spot. The heart submits but it does not feel free. It is no more free than the boy in the schoolroom is free; I want to be in the playground but I am compelled to attend the class. Who will release me from this compulsion? Who will liberate me from this thraldom? Who will break the chain that binds me and restore to me the joy of my unfettered days, the freshness of the unforbidden morning?

Thou, O Spirit! Thou canst set me free. It is not in freedom from the chain that my liberation must come; it is in love of the chain. It is not by leaving the school for the playground that I shall become a free man; it is in making the school itself a playground. What I want is not fewer burdens but more life, more love. I want Thy law which now is outward to become inward — the breath of my nature, the necessity of my being. I want Thy life to become to me a habit, an instinct, an environment, an atmosphere out of which is death. I want to find that to be absent from Thy service is to be in poisoned air, that to be engaged in Thy work is to play in my native element. I would make my service to Thee not an obedience but a thirst — the thirst of the hart for those water-brooks without which its nature is unfinished. When the order of Thy life has become my law I shall be free from that other law which was made for sin and death.