Advent Day 15: Third Sunday of Advent

To experience true freedom, we must first acknowledge we’re enslaved.

I grew up on the Mississippi River flood plain. Now that I live in the rolling hills of Tennessee, I’m always struck by the flatness of my birthplace every time I visit. I can stand on my parents’ front porch and see for miles, watch traffic coursing north on Highway 25 from the back deck. The land just rolls out in front of you, one field fading into the next, no boundaries.

But if you’ve ever flown over southern Missouri, Kansas or any of the Plains states, it doesn’t take long to recognize boundaries are everywhere. Fields divided by field rows and roads. Fences, bridges, and posts. The boundaries are there, even if they’re hard to recognize from ground level. 

Some people think of freedom as a life without boundaries. Just doing whatever you want, whenever you want, with no accountability and no submission to others. It’s a me-centered life, doing what makes me happy on my own schedule, no matter how it affects anyone else. 

But it’s not freedom. 

Freedom isn’t the absence of boundaries; it’s living within the right boundaries. The right boundaries protect, nurture and shape. They help define purpose and direction. Without boundaries to nudge you back on the paths that lead to beauty, life and goodness, you soon find yourself mired in a mess of your own making, unable to get out on your own. 

The reality? That’s me—and it’s you, too. 

But to experience true freedom, we have to first admit that we’re enslaved, mired in a mess we created through our choices and sin. 

Scripture often uses metaphors to convey deep truths—and one of the primary metaphors of salvation in the Bible is slavery and freedom. Just like light and darkness, the imagery creates a dichotomy, two polar opposites, and we can’t move from one to the other without the calling of God, the work of Christ and the conviction of the Spirit. 

And the first step is admitting that you’re enslaved. 

Ephesians 2 tells us that before we met Christ we were dead in our sins. We defined our own boundaries, crowned ourselves the authorities in our own lives and sought all the things the hunger inside us said would satisfy. Money. Fame. Our own way. Authority. Power. Doing whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. And none of it led to life or true freedom—because only Jesus does that. 

As we light the third candle today in the Advent wreath, praise a faithful God who at the right time in history sent his Son into the world, not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. 

Because true freedom isn’t the absence of boundaries, it’s trusting the one who finds us in the chaos and slavery of our sin and shows us that he is the path that leads to life.