Making Sense Of God - Timothy KellerSample

“The Law That Gives Freedom”

When you are falling in love, you take the initiative to discover a list of all the things that the loved one loves and hates. Then you go all out to say and do the things that delight him or her. You are “doing their will” rather than your own, but you gladly accept the new limits on your behavior.

Why? It is because you have put your joy and happiness into the joy and happiness of the other. You are happy to the degree they are. You have come to discover the pleasure of giving pleasure. You don’t follow their will as a means to get other things you want. Their love and joy are main things you want. They are ends in themselves.

This is how Christianity says our ultimate relationship works with God. When a Christian grasps how Jesus saved us at infinite cost to himself, how he emptied himself of his glory and took on a humble form to serve our best interests, it creates a grateful joy that inwardly moves us to want to please, know, and resemble him. Our happiness gets put into his happiness, and serving him becomes our perfect liberation.

Only this makes sense of how the Bible speaks of freedom. James 1:25 says God’s law is the “law that gives freedom.” Jesus says that following God’s truth sets us free (John 8:31–32). The book of Hebrews says that when we put our faith in Christ, God’s law is written on our hearts, not with chisel or ink but with the Spirit of God, and this creates freedom (Hebrews 8:10; cf. 2 Corinthians 3:2,3,17).

All this means that Christians, like someone newly in love, are enabled to see the will of God not as a crushing, confining burden but as a list of God’s loves and hates by which we can please him and come to be like him. To have the law “written on our hearts” means that we are freely doing what we most want to do. We are loving our redeemer through following his will.

Excerpt from Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical by Timothy Keller

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © 2016 by Timothy Keller