Ultimate Freedom

Jesus is the perfect example of true freedom.
From the very beginnings of His ministry as He was tempted in the desert, to His pleading in the Garden of Gethsemane, and finally to the Cross, Jesus demonstrated to all of mankind what true freedom really is. He faced the fact of freedom, its limitations, and freedom’s obligation. And in the process of understanding what freedom truly is, He lived in a place knowing whom He wanted to serve. His was the highest obligation. Jesus knew what needed to be done, and did it.

“To be free is to have the possibility of choice and the power to make the decision we want to make.”
The problem is knowing what you want. And there’s a process of using your freedom. From doing what we want, we realize that our choice will lead us to who we will become. So then it changes to who we want to be. From there it solidifies into knowing who we want to be. And finally, we see that our loyalties strengthen and or freedom finally revolves around whom we want to serve.

Jesus lived by this. He served His Father no matter what the costs. Even in the Garden of Gethsemane, where He pleaded for His life, Jesus ended His tearful prayer with “Not my will, but Your will be done!” And the paradox of this is, that Jesus wasn’t giving away His freedom when He said these words. On the contrary, He was realizing the ultimate freedom we can live. God came within our very nature and redeemed us from the inside.
Salvation must lie in freedom. Freedom is inescapable and necessary. The knowledge of good and evil made us unable to automatically choose the right and true. Since we lost that innocence because of freedom, we can only be reached through freedom.

When Jesus was standing before Pilate and was asked why He wouldn’t respond (Pilate reminded Jesus that he had the power to kill or free Him), Jesus finally responded, "You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above." Jesus could have called on legions of angels to come down and save Him from certain death at any moment. But with every step He made a choice. He went in His freedom to die for us. No one forced Him to, He chose to. The purity of His freedom showed us a way to that same freedom. The Crucifixion was the climax of the entirety of His freedom. Literally, Christ was an example of freedom with His very life, for our ultimate freedom.

_{Now what are you going to do with that freedom?}