It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. – Galatians 5:1.
There is probably no word in the Christian vocabulary that has been more misunderstood or abused than this one word, freedom (unless perchance, it’s the word love). What did Paul mean by freedom? First, he was not talking about political freedom. However much we Americans may believe on the basis of natural law that God has endowed all persons with certain inalienable rights, including that of political liberty, Paul provided no basis for the kind of philosophy articulated in our Declaration of Independence. Even less was Paul referring to that freedom in a psychological sense. Emotional and mental health is a desirable goal, and certain therapeutic techniques developed in the modern world may be quite compatible with New Testament Christianity. However, Christian freedom is not “an innate quality or state of being which the individual discovers (or recovers) by sorting out past experiences and relationships. It is a gift bestowed as a result of Good Friday and Easter.”
Finally, Paul did not expound through Christian freedom the right to advocate theological anarchy within the confines of the believing community. A church that is unable to define and maintain the doctrinal boundaries of its own fellowship or, even worse, that no longer thinks this is a task worth doing, is a church that has lost its soul. The proclamation of the whole counsel of God involves identifying and saying no to those forms of teaching that, if carried out consistently, would threaten the truth of divine revelation itself. This is one of the most serious issues facing the contemporary and modern church today. We can err deeply by either drawing the boundaries too tightly or by refusing to draw them at all. On the one hand, we lapse into legalism, as many today do; on the other, into relativism, as many more in this age do.
We will not go astray if we remember that for Paul, Christian liberty was always grounded on the believer’s relationship with Jesus Christ on the one hand and with the community of faith on the other as led and directed by the Holy Spirit. Outside of Jesus Christ, human existence is characterized as bondage, and slavery, bondage to the law, bondage to the evil elements dominating the world, bondage to sin, the flesh, and the devil. God sent his Son into the world to shatter the dominion of these slaveholders. Now God has sent his Spirit into the hearts of believers to awaken them to new life and liberation found only in Christ.
When the Galatians first received the Spirit of God, they also received the gift of freedom, as Paul made clear in 2 Corinthians 3:17, “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” When Paul listed the various graces included in the “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22–23), freedom was not included among these desirable virtues. This is because freedom is already presupposed in each one of them. Thus the fruit of the Spirit is freedom, freedom to love, to exude joy, to manifest peace, to display patience, and so on. It is “for freedom” that Christ has set us free. This means that Christian liberty is freedom for others, freedom that finds its true expression not in theological privatism (“I am free to believe anything I choose”) or spiritual narcissism (“I am free to be myself no matter what”) but rather freedom to love and serve one another in the context of the Body of Christ.
Evidently one of the major problems among the churches of Galatia was that believers there did not know what to do with their Christ-won freedom. Some were using their liberty as a pretext for license, to the gratification of their sinful nature. Others were “Lone-Ranger” Christians, having forgotten the mandate to bear one another’s burdens. Still others had fallen into discord and faction, backbiting and self-promotion. Thus in these closing two chapters Paul summoned the Galatians to a mature use of their spiritual birthright, reminding them that it is love, the love of Christ shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit, that brings liberty to its fullest expression.
It is in that love, and in the love of Christ alone that we can stand firm in our freedom.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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