Chapter 21: Liberty - Believe in Jesus and Do as You Please

If I had to determine whether I was a Christian based on my works, I’d have to conclude I am not a Christian.

And I mean that. Not as false humility. Not as a devotional cliche designed to sound pious while secretly trusting that my life is actually pretty good. I mean it as a plain statement of fact. If the test is my behavior, my thought life, my consistency, my follow-through on every good intention I’ve ever had - I fail. Spectacularly. Regularly. And not in the vague, generic sense where someone says “we’re all sinners” while mentally exempting themselves from the really bad stuff. I know what’s in my head. I know what’s in my heart. And if that’s the evidence, the verdict is guilty.

But the verdict was already delivered. And it was “not guilty.” Before the foundation of the world. Before I drew my first breath or committed my first sin or even existed as a conscious being. The Father looked at me in Christ and saw perfection. Not my perfection. Christ’s. And that hasn’t changed. Not because I’ve gotten better. Because He finished the work.

And that means the kingdom of God is a party, not a burden.

The Party

I’ve been to churches where everyone looked miserable. Where the Sunday morning faces were tight and grim and the worship was more like a funeral march than a celebration. Where people dragged themselves to the altar week after week to recommit to the same failures they recommitted to last week. Where the sermons were a list of things you should be doing better, and the application was always “try harder,” and the atmosphere was heavy with the kind of religious exhaustion that no amount of coffee can fix.

And then I read the New Testament.

“The kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” (Romans 14:17)

Righteousness. Peace. Joy. In the Holy Ghost. Not righteousness achieved by human effort. Not peace that depends on your spiritual performance. Not joy that only shows up when you’ve had a good week. Righteousness imputed. Peace that surpasses understanding. Joy that exists regardless of circumstances because it’s rooted in a Person who doesn’t change.

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” (Galatians 5:1)

Liberty. Freedom. Christ made us free. Past tense. Accomplished. And Paul says stand fast in it. Don’t let anyone take it from you. Don’t let anyone put you back in chains. The yoke of bondage is the law, the regulations, the man-made requirements, the endless religious treadmill of “do more, try harder, be better.” Christ broke that yoke. He didn’t loosen it. He broke it.

And what He left in its place is liberty.

The Spirit Writes the Commandments

Here is what liberty looks like in practice.

The old covenant took commandments and carved them on stone. External. Impersonal. One size fits all. The same ten commandments for every person in the nation, regardless of their heart condition. And the result was predictable: external conformity at best, outright rebellion at worst, and a whole lot of hypocrisy in between.

The new covenant takes those same commandments and writes them on the heart.

“But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:33)

In the language of this book, the old covenant was law as software - external code running on unregenerate hardware. It didn’t work because the hardware couldn’t execute it. The new covenant is law as firmware - the Spirit flashes the code directly into the heart, beneath the conscious level, and the behavior follows naturally. The outside-in approach failed because dead hardware can’t run living software. The inside-out approach works because the Spirit changes the hardware first.

And a Spirit-changed heart is irresistibly moved toward obedience. Not by compulsion. Not by threat. By desire. The believer obeys because they want to. The firmware aligns the desires with God’s will, and the application layer follows. This is what Paul means when he writes:

“For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:13)

To will - that’s the firmware. The desire. The inclination. To do - that’s the application layer. The behavior. The visible life. And both are God’s work. Not yours. He produces the wanting and the doing. You experience it. You participate in it. But the engine is His.

This isn’t license. License says “I can do whatever I want because there are no consequences.” Liberty says “I want to please God, because the Spirit who changed my heart aligned my wants with His.” The distinction is everything. License removes the standard. Liberty changes the heart so the standard is met from the inside. The behavior might look the same from the outside - both the licensed man and the liberated man might avoid the same sins - but the mechanism is entirely different. One avoids sin out of indifference. The other avoids sin out of love. And the second mechanism is the only one that actually works.

Rebuke the Imposers

Paul doesn’t just teach liberty. He defends it with force.

“If ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.” (Galatians 5:18)

And then he turns on anyone who tries to put believers back under regulations:

“But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?” (Galatians 4:9)

Weak and beggarly elements. That’s what Paul calls the law when it’s imposed on believers. And notice his incredulity - how do you turn back? After knowing God? After being known by Him? After the Spirit has set you free - you want to go back to the cage?

And he doesn’t stop there:

“I would they were even cut off which trouble you.” (Galatians 5:12)

That is as sharp as Paul ever gets. He says he wishes the Judaizers would go castrate themselves. The man who wrote the love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13 has zero patience for people who take the liberty of Christ and replace it with human regulations.

Because the gospel is at stake. When you impose rules on believers that the gospel doesn’t demand, you are adding to the finished work of Christ. You are saying what He did wasn’t enough. You are telling a free person they need to earn what was given to them. And that is a different gospel. Paul calls it exactly that:

“I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel.” (Galatians 1:6)

Another gospel. Not the gospel modified. Not the gospel with a few extra requirements. Another gospel. And Paul pronounces an anathema on anyone who preaches it - “let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). Twice, in consecutive verses, he says it. Because the stakes are that high.

So when someone tells you that you need to keep the Sabbath to be a faithful Christian, rebuke them. When someone tells you that you need to tithe or God will curse your finances, rebuke them. When someone tells you that you need to dress a certain way, vote a certain way, educate your children a certain way, attend a certain number of services per week, abstain from alcohol, observe Lent, fast on Fridays, or any other human regulation not demanded by the gospel - rebuke them. Not because those things are inherently wrong. Some of them are fine. But the moment they become requirements, the moment they become conditions of faithfulness, the moment they are imposed on the conscience of a free believer - they become the yoke of bondage that Christ died to break.

Assurance

If liberty is the atmosphere of the Christian life, assurance is the foundation.

And assurance comes by grace through faith. Not by works. Not by performance. Not by the evidence of your changed life. Because if assurance rested on the evidence of your life, you’d never have it. I know I wouldn’t.

Here’s the honest version: if I had to look at my behavior to determine whether the Spirit lives in me, the evidence would be ambiguous on a good day and damning on a bad one. I lose my temper. I entertain thoughts I shouldn’t. I neglect things I know I should do. I procrastinate on obedience the same way I procrastinate on everything else. And if the test of my Christianity is the consistent, visible fruit of a transformed life, then the fruit is spotty enough to make the case shaky.

But assurance doesn’t rest on my fruit. It rests on Christ’s finished work.

“Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 1:6)

He began the work. He will finish it. My confidence is in His performance, not mine. My assurance is in His righteousness imputed to me, not in my righteousness produced by me. And the moment you move the foundation of assurance from Christ’s work to your own, you have destroyed it. Because no honest person can look at their own works and conclude with confidence that they belong to God.

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Not of works. Not even partially. Not “saved by grace but assured by works.” Saved by grace. Assured by grace. Sustained by grace. From beginning to end, it’s His work. And the proper response to that isn’t complacency. It’s worship. It’s the kind of deep, settled gratitude that makes you want to live well - not because you have to, but because you love the One who did everything for you.

Prayer Under Sovereignty

I want to end this chapter by addressing something that many people raise when they hear about absolute predestination: “If God ordained everything, what’s the point of prayer?”

And I understand the question. If the script is written. If every frame of the filmstrip is already set. If God sees the whole thing simultaneously and nothing you pray will change what He’s already decreed - then why pray? Why bother? It’s a reasonable question from the application layer.

But it’s the wrong question.

Prayer is part of the script. God ordained both the prayer and the answer. He doesn’t need the prayer to know what you need. Jesus said so:

“Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” (Matthew 6:8)

He already knows. So why ask? Because the asking is the communion. And the communion is the point.

Prayer isn’t changing God’s mind. It’s participating in the story He’s writing. The character prays because the Author wrote the prayer into the script. And the joy of the prayer is real - the character’s experience is genuine, even though the Author sees the whole filmstrip at once. You don’t stop talking to your spouse just because you can predict what they’ll say. The conversation IS the relationship. The exchange IS the intimacy.

“Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7)

Paul doesn’t say “make your requests known to God so He’ll change His plans.” He says make your requests known, and peace will follow. The peace doesn’t come because God adjusted the decree. The peace comes because you talked to your Father. Because you poured out your heart to someone who loves you and who already had the answer before you asked the question. The prayer is the means God uses to bring you into the experience of His sovereignty. Not to alter it. To rest in it.

He already knows. You pray anyway. Because the prayer is the communion, and the communion is the point.

Objections and Answers

“‘Do as you please’ is dangerous - people will abuse it.”

If someone’s heart is unchanged by the Spirit, no amount of law will make them godly. The law never produced a single righteous person. It was weak through the flesh (Romans 8:3). So the law isn’t the solution to abuse. If someone’s heart is changed by the Spirit, they will please God naturally - because their pleasure and God’s pleasure align. The question “what stops them from sinning?” always reveals more about the asker’s theology than about the person they’re asking about. If you think the only thing between a believer and rampant sin is a set of rules, you have a very low view of the Spirit’s power.

“Assurance can’t be separated from obedience - James says faith without works is dead.”

This is the objection that always reaches for the antilegomenon. James 2:17 is the most weaponized verse in every system that wants to smuggle human contribution back into the assurance of salvation. And as we’ll develop more fully in Chapter 26, James is the weakest self-authenticating book in the canon, the one Luther called “an epistle of straw,” and the one most consistently used to override the clearest statements of the homologoumena. Paul says, repeatedly, across multiple letters, in the clearest possible language, that justification is by faith apart from works (Romans 4:5). That the righteousness of Christ is imputed, not earned. That your works are filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). You don’t use James to override Romans. You use Romans to interpret James. And when you do, “faith without works is dead” becomes a description of what false profession looks like from the outside, not a condition placed on the believer’s assurance. Your assurance rests on Christ’s work, not yours. If you look at your works for assurance, you’ll despair. Assurance comes from looking at Christ, not at yourself.

“Prayer under sovereignty is just fatalism dressed up.”

Fatalism says “nothing matters, so do nothing.” Sovereignty says “everything matters, because the Author wrote it all.” The character in the novel who talks to the Author isn’t engaging in a meaningless exercise. The conversation is part of the story. God ordained the prayer AND the answer AND the relationship that grows through the praying. Fatalism removes meaning. Sovereignty infuses it. The pray-er knows that God didn’t need the prayer. But God wanted the communion. And so did the pray-er. That’s not fatalism. That’s love.

“You said ‘believe in Jesus and do as you please’ - Augustine said it first.”

He did. “Love God and do what you will.” And Augustine was right about that one, even if he got other things wrong. The principle is simple: if you truly love God, your will is aligned with His. What you please to do is what He pleases for you to do. Not perfectly - not in this life. But the trajectory is His. The desire is His. The engine that drives the obedience is love, not legislation. And a person driven by love will always outperform a person driven by law. Because love doesn’t get tired. Law always does.