Free Indeed

John 8:31-36

August 16, 2026 • Mount Pleasant UMC

This past summer, we celebrated 250 years as a nation. 250 years of freedom. I remember the 200th and one of the differences I noticed—and I may be wrong, because I was pretty young at the 200th—but it seemed that this year all of the various political groups were trying to co-opt the celebration for their own purposes. I don’t remember that happening before. Before it seemed we united around the anniversary. Now, it’s just one more thing that divides us, which I think is horribly ironic: one of the things that divides us is our freedom (including our freedom to disagree, which we even seem to disagree about).

We’ve been exploring what I call “signposts” in the Gospel of John, things that help us make sense of the world and, not unsurprisingly, point toward the way God intended the world to be. The problem is that these signposts are broken and have been broken for a long time. As a result, we lack direction. We don’t know which way to go because the signposts aren’t currently pointing in the right direction. But what if God’s people began following the signposts Jesus talked about? What if we allowed the Holy Spirit to direct us rather than the culture, rather than the current trends of the world? I mean, there is no doubt we live in a broken world, one which has lost sight of and stopped moving toward God’s design for the world. What if we could be part of the solution rather than the problem? Those are the questions we are asking over these weeks, and so far we’ve explored love and justice. Tough things to live out, but then again so is this week’s signpost: freedom.

When we hear the word “freedom,” whether in our own conversations or in political discourse, we typically think of freedom as giving us the ability to do whatever we want, say whatever we want, and act however we like. The current cultural doctrine is that you can live however you like, no matter what anyone else thinks. And other people are free to do the same, as long as they don’t infringe on how you want to live. In a word: chaos. I honestly believe that our current definition of what freedom is has caused a big part of our current problems. If everyone just lives according to their own idea of what freedom is, then we’re constantly offending someone else whose idea is different. Eventually, there is nothing that holds us together, nothing we have in common. Sounds familiar? And that problem exists even in the church. I saw a Facebook post some time back where someone said they were looking for a church that agreed with their beliefs. Um, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. We don’t customize Jesus for whatever we want to be true. And that’s not freedom.

So what is freedom? Jesus gets into a discussion about that with the Pharisees in John 8. It’s important to remember that the Pharisees, though viewed as religious leaders, were not clergy. They were a conservative movement within Judaism, wanting to call the people back to faithfulness to the Scriptures, to following God’s law. In many ways, Jesus and the Pharisees were aligned theologically. Where Jesus argued with them (and other religious leaders, for that matter) was about the way they lived out what they preached. Or didn’t, rather. Jesus told his disciples once to listen to what the Pharisees taught, but don’t do what they do (cf. Matthew 23:2-3). They believed the right things; they just didn’t live it out (even though they expected everyone else to). 

Of course, none of the religious leaders liked Jesus all that much. Here, in John 8, they are arguing about who he is. Jesus has told them, “I am the light of the world,” and that kicks off this whole long discussion about all the ways these religious leaders simply didn’t get who Jesus was and what he was up to. John seems to say that Jesus is trying to teach those “who had believed in him” (8:31), his followers, but the Pharisees and other religious leaders keep interrupting. That’s what happens at the beginning of the passage we read this morning. Jesus tells his followers, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (8:31-32). And that sets the religious leaders off because, after all, they didn’t need to be set free! “We are Abraham’s descendants,” they tell him. “We have never been slaves of anyone!” (8:33). Okay, wait a minute. That’s not true. Their whole faith was rooted in an event called Passover; the fact that God had rescued them from slavery in Egypt is the defining story for the Jewish faith. They still celebrate that rescue every year. Slavery was and is part of their story. And beyond that, their people had been taken into exile by conquering armies; the group that went to Assyria actually never returned and the group that went into Babylon was there for at least a generation. Even as they stood there near the Temple, they were not free. They were occupied by the Roman Empire, and while maybe they had some level of freedom in their day-to-day lives, everything they did had to be approved by Rome. They couldn’t even crucify a man without Rome’s permission and approval. They had been and were, essentially, slaves. But Jesus wasn’t talking about physical slavery because freedom, for Jesus, is not about our external situation (cf. Wright, Broken Signposts, pgs. 124-125).

That’s why Jesus responds the way he does: “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (8:34). And notice, this discussion as John tells it takes place right after some religious leaders brought the woman caught in adultery to Jesus, one of the stories we talked about last week. Do you remember how that ended? “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (8:7). I would guess some of those same religious leaders are the ones who are giving Jesus a hard time now. So when he says, “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin,” he knows they have already admitted, by their actions, that they are not without sin. So, therefore, they are slaves to sin. And we know, just as much as they did, that what Jesus says here is true. Ask any addict if they are free. Now we may think of addiction as just being about things like drugs, alcohol or gambling. But sin is just another form of addiction. We become slaves to whatever we allow to have influence or power in our lives, whether that is money or sex or power or drugs or lust or social media or our smartphones or the list could go on and on. “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (8:34). The religious leaders can’t deny the truth of what Jesus says. Neither can we.

Then Jesus compares our situation to that of a family. If a family has a slave, and many did in his day, that slave is not a permanent part of the family. No matter how much they might care for the slave or not, they are still not part of the family. They are not permanent. A slave might be traded or sold tomorrow. Our sin will treat us the same way. Gambling is fun, until the money is gone and the debts pile up. Alcohol makes you feel good, until it doesn’t and the high wears off. A different partner every night is what many think of as freedom, until the loneliness and despair settles in. There’s a reason they call aimlessly scrolling through social media “doomscrolling,” because of the way it makes us depressed and addicted all at the same time (cf. Wright 127). Slavery to sin leaves us alone and lonely because a slave does not have a permanent place in the family.

Until the Son steps in. Until the slave is adopted into the family and given the family name. That’s what Jesus is talking about here. By his work, by his death and resurrection, as he is setting the world to rights, he intends to adopt us into his family, into God’s family. “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (8:36). If the Son welcomes you in, you become a son or a daughter yourself. Forever. You belong. You are free indeed.

But we know that being part of a family—any family—has obligations and guidelines. You live in a certain way because you are part of the family. You believe certain things, perhaps, because you’re part of the family. You have commitments because you’re part of the family. “Freedom is not the ability to do what one wants and not to do what one does not want to do” (McKnight, John, pg. 143). Not at all. Rather, “freedom is empowerment to know God’s will, to believe in and become allegiant to Jesus, to love God and love others, and to be transformed from a world-shaped life to an abundant-life-shaped life” (McKnight 143). Think of it this way: the freedom Jesus promises and the freedom our world needs is not everyone doing their own thing. It’s freedom from and freedom for.

It’s freedom from fear. A slave lives in fear constantly—fear that their taskmaster will be displeased, or fear that their addiction or their sin will be found out. I remember one afternoon when I was working at the IGA in Rossville and I went to dump the mop water out the back door. As I opened the door, I saw the car of one of our family friends drive by. I started to wave but he didn’t see me because he was drinking from the bottle as fast as he could. While driving. He didn’t want anyone to see him or figure out his addiction. A million or a billion other stories could be told just like that; there are stories in the news every day of sins being exposed. We live in fear that our sin will be found out. When Jesus brings us into the family, he frees us from fear.

It’s freedom from self. In our culture, we’re taught either directly or by assumption that we have to do it ourselves. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Stand on your own two feet. If you want something done, you have to do it yourself. And that includes our freedom from sin. You’ve got to figure it out. You have to defeat that addiction. You. And Jesus comes along and says no. “The Son sets you free.” Not you. Not me. Freedom is not something we can achieve on our own and take credit for. I cannot change myself; I’ve tried it and it’s impossible. The Son sets you free, so you can stop trying to do it all on your own.

It’s freedom from other people. That doesn’t mean isolating yourself or only looking out for “number one.” It doesn't mean going to live on a deserted island or abandoning the practice of community. It means that because you’re now part of God’s family, what other people think or say about you no longer matters. H. G. Wells once said that the voices of other people sounds louder in our ears than the voice of God. That won’t be the case when we have been set free by the Son. And because God’s approval and God’s voice becomes the most important one, we no longer have to pay attention to what others say about us. That includes the number of likes or comments we get on social media. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is what God says about us because the Son has set us free and welcomed us into the family.

And it is, of course, freedom from sin. Sin is, as I often say, a breach in a relationship, primarily with God but often with each other. David, in his famous Psalm 51 after his adultery with Bathsheba, after he had her husband Uriah killed, sang this to God: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Psalm 51:4). Sin is a break, a trauma between me and God and me and other people. And that takes us back to the first signpost, the one which I told you two weeks ago is at the root of all of these: love. If we choose to love God and love the other person, we won’t want to sin. If we set our mind on doing the loving thing as God defines it, we won’t be compelled to break those relationships. The love of God, being welcomed into the family, frees us from the desire to sin and “enables us to be the persons we know we ought to be” (Barclay, The Gospel of John—Volume 2, pgs. 21-22). This doesn’t happen overnight, but as Jesus sets us free, that desire to love others grows in us. The Bible calls it sanctification—perfect love.

So it’s freedom from all these things, but the freedom God gives is also and ultimately freedom for something. It’s freedom for following Jesus. N. T. Wright says, “Jesus himself was the most free person who has ever walked the earth, and his freedom led him to crucifixion” (132). He freely gave his life for us—for you and for me and for every person who ever has walked on this planet. And he told his followers, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). We really trivialize that statement when we say things like a difficult relative or a hard job or an illness is “my cross to bear.” That’s not what Jesus was talking about at all, and none of his disciples would have heard it that way. A cross was not a momentary problem or even a large irritation. A cross represented a horrible, violent, painful death. Jesus isn’t saying we have to put up with difficulties in order to follow him. He’s saying we have to be willing to give up our lives for his sake. Because, after all, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). We are free from all these things so we can be free for Jesus, free to give our all in doing what he calls us to and calling others to follow him as well. After all, “free people…become agents of freedom in the world” (Wright 131). We have this news to share: “The God who made us wants us to be free” (Wright 131).

So a lot of you may remember that the Terre Haute Friendship House began as a ministry of Mount Pleasant, growing out of Grace Unlimited. Friendship House helps those with disabilities to learn independence with the goal of being able to be on their own. For the first couple of years, Friendship House was directly a part of the church, and even when it was spun off into its own 501(c)3 organization, we have maintained close ties, supporting them financially and with items we collect from time to time. In the last year, they have launched Friendship House Foundations, which is helping teach skills to friends who don’t live there but can come a few days a week for learning and service and community. It’s taken off I think way faster than anyone really anticipated and has received significant support from the community. Then, last spring, we had to make the incredibly difficult decision to close our preschool. Twenty-five years and the economic forces that were against us finally brought us to that point. And that was hard. It kept me and others up at night. I loved the preschool. I’m telling you—any day I needed a boost I’d go down to see the kids and I couldn’t help but feel great around them. But all good things come to an end and so we closed the preschool and I began wondering and praying, “What’s next? What do you have in mind, God?” I wondered that for a few weeks and then Jess came in and met with us and asked if Foundations could use that space. They’d been educational rooms; could they still be? Could those rooms be places where people experience freedom in their lives and freedom in Christ? The program had become too large to hold at the house. Would Mount Pleasant be willing to love the participants in that way? I didn’t have to think about it too long. Yes, there were and are details we have to work out, but if freedom is following Jesus where he leads, if freedom is loving others and being willing to give of what have for the sake of that love, then the answer was always going to be yes. They start tomorrow downstairs and I can’t wait to see what will come out of it. I think, in some way, it’s part of healing the signpost called “freedom.”

What Jim White is doing in Liberia, what our own Celebrate Recovery is doing here on Friday nights, what Friendship House is doing in their Foundations and in community living, what our children’s and youth ministries are doing in everyday life and relationships, what we as a church are doing as we infiltrate the community Monday through Saturday is offer freedom. Because true freedom is found when we give up our lives so that we can follow Jesus wherever he leads. And it’s true: only in Jesus do we find true freedom because “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (8:36). Let’s pray.