I read a very sad article the other day about someone who had found freedom from religion. In particular, she had managed to free herself from Christianity, which she found boring and restrictive. The same day, I read another article by an atheist who likes to go to church from time to time, especially midnight mass, because it's good entertainment - a great singalong and the moralizing by the vicar is generally harmless. He was encouraging other atheists to do the same, because it is a fun way of meeting nice people.
Is Christianity really so impotent that you can go along to a church service, have a good time and not be affected in any way? On the other hand, is it so restrictive that people need to be set free from it? Are churches getting something wrong? What does the Bible have to say about this?
"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free," says Paul in his letter to the church in Galatia (now part of Turkey), in the first verse of chapter 5. Freedom! Freedom is found in Christ, not in escaping from him. We use the word 'gospel' to give a name to the stories about Jesus in the Bible and also for the grand story underlying the whole of the Bible. That word, though, just means 'good news'. In the original Greek, the word for good news is actually used, and gospel is just a mediaeval updating of the Old English 'godspel', which means, yes, good news.
The gospel of Christ is good news for you and me!
So what is the good news? It is that in Christ we can be set free from the way of life that ties us to addictions, the rat race, materialism, depression, anger, envy, greed, immorality etc. The problem is that while life is good we don't notice that there is anything wrong. We go to work, earn money, buy what we want to make life comfortable and exciting - and then get trapped into needing to keep that going. We might want to live with our partners without being married, but that arises from desires within us that make it difficult to abstain. In the end, these things all lead to disaster in this life, or after we die when finding ourselves living outside God's presence - that is in Hell.
If we give our lives to Jesus, he takes away all the unhelpful ties and the guilt that goes with them. Instead he gives us his Holy Spirit, so that we can start to live with our main characteristics being love, joy, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, goodness and peace, in all situations, as Paul explains later in Chapter 5 of Galatians (verses 22 & 23). There is not a rule that we have to live that way, but an invitation to allow God to make us like that. If we accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour and allow the Holy Spirit to work in us, then that is what will happen: our old ways of life will drop away and we will start to live differently.
However, the Bible also makes it clear that saying we have become Christians and then deliberately continuing to live as we did doesn't work; Jesus' friend John talks about this a bit in his first letter (e.g. 1 John chapter 1, verses 5 & 6). Imposing rules on us doesn't work either, and never did, but if our lives don't start to change then we haven't really let God into us. We have to work with him and say 'yes' to what he is doing in us. It will take time and we'll get it wrong many times, but there is forgiveness if we are sorry. That can start to look like a restriction if we wriggle about it, but actually, if we do work with him, he is powerful to set us free from all the desires that would tie us down and prevent us from experiencing a full relationship with the creator of the Universe.
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