Every summer (and every election year) the idea of freedom gets a lot of airtime. In my own town, our kids enjoy gathering on a hill to watch fireworks celebrating Independence Day. We see freedom celebrated with barbecues and parades, and no shortage of fireworks going off after midnight. But long before freedom was a national value, it was a tenet of discipleship. Both in Scripture and our Wesleyan tradition, freedom has never been just about escape or the ability to do as we please.
To a young church puzzling out how to steward their freedom, Paul once wrote: “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free … serve one another humbly in love.” (Galatians 5:13, NIV)
In the Wesleyan tradition, that calling isn’t truly a contradiction; it’s more of a reminder that freedom is a stewardship issue. What is freedom for, ultimately?
Freedom FOR others
“If anyone boasts, ‘I love God,’ and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.” (1 John 4:20, MSG)
Those in North America are often calibrated to see freedom as the ability to insist on our rights. For Wesleyans, freedom is the conviction to insist on other people’s rights.
When the early Wesleyan movement was forming in the mid-1800s, freedom for others was a central conviction and leaders like Orange Scott believed freedom meant acting for the good of others. He wrote:
“True holiness is not stationary, but progressive; it is active … an active principle,
which seeks to do good, and to diffuse happiness.”[1]
That conviction gave rise to abolitionist pulpits, women preaching in tent meetings and pastors risking their lives on the Underground Railroad. Our idea of freedom wasn’t complete until it took shape in the lives of others.
To be truly free was to become an agent of freedom for your neighbor, following the belief that salvation is not a solitary sport, that churches weren’t just about bringing souls to a spiritual heaven, but living “on earth as it is in heaven” in our neighborhoods.
Freedom FOR love of God and neighbor
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23, NIV)
Freedom from sin allows us to live the best life possible. If Jesus had a better life to recommend, he would have recommended it; but Jesus reminds us that when we notice freedom springing up in our life, the fruit will look like the fruit of the Spirit.
Wesleyans believe the Spirit frees us from the guilt of sin, the power of sin, and (through entire sanctification) even the nature of sin, renewing our whole lives through sanctified love.
But the purpose of sanctification isn’t just to be more morally pure (though that’s a worthy goal). The good news of sanctification is that we can be free to love God and others, putting on the nature of Christ in our interactions with them.
Freedom equips us to do good with clarity, to serve without fear and to love without limits. We don’t use freedom to drift into comfort but to grow into the likeness of Christ.
As Luther Lee — a founding voice in our tradition — once said:
“Liberty is a divine inheritance … but liberty becomes glorious when it is consecrated
to the cause of truth and righteousness.”[2]
The holiness movement never imagined a holiness that hovered in private. It carried water, cast votes, sang hymns in jail cells and opened pulpits to the poor. Holiness meant freedom and freedom meant love that was free to show up where it was most needed.
Freedom FOR the future
“Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.” (John 12:24, MSG)
One of the greatest challenges to our discipleship today is the gap between Jesus’ admonition to “fear not” and the cultural defensiveness that often springs up in our churches today.
We lead with worry about the future of our churches — we worry about our own rights — we worry about the crosswinds of politics, culture and how our tribe will weather those storms. It’s not necessarily bad to attend to those things; AND at the same time, part of our faith is the belief that God can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
Wesleyans believe that while we partner with God in stewarding our churches, Christ is still the one who is able to care for the church.
Wesleyans believe that churches are at their best, not when we are defensive of our own congregations’ survival, but when we give our lives and budgets away so our neighbors can thrive.
Wesleyans believe that the risen Christ can do for the church what he did with the fishes and loaves: bless what appears to be “not enough,” and turn it into more than enough, because our freedom isn’t expressed best in defensiveness, but in multiplying our lives by giving them away.
This is the kind of freedom that has animated Wesleyans for generations. It creates teachers who see every student as image-bearers, chaplains who step into hospital rooms with hope, and shepherds who fan out into every wholesome vocation, living out the conviction that freedom is best expressed with a deep love for God and neighbor.
Rev. Ethan Linder is the pastor of discipleship at College Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana, and contributing editor at The Wesleyan Church’s Education and Clergy Development Division.
Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
The Message (MSG), copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson
[1] Orange Scott, “The Grounds of Secession from the M.E. Church” (Boston: D.S. King, 1848), 103.
[2] Luther Lee, “Autobiography of the Rev. Luther Lee” (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1882), 120.
