When we were missionaries in Taiwan I remember being asked what the Bible is all about.
What would you say the Bible is all about? I couldn’t use any religious vocabulary like salvation, redemption, sin, eschatology. In Mandarin there is no word for sin. What is translated sin actually means to commit a crime, so I wasn’t going to tell her the Bible is about accusing her of being a criminal. I couldn’t even use the word “God” because when I said “God” I knew the images in my head that word projected were not the images that would be projected into her head. I thought Yahweh. She would think Buddha.
John Upton
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So, tell me — what is the single most comprehensive theme of the Scripture you would say if you were asked that question?
Some would answer it is a book about guilt and forgiveness. For others it is a book about right and wrong. For still others it is a book about love.
I want to suggest that in the end it is above all a book about freedom.
The Bible is huge on the subject of freedom. When God first gathered the children of Israel to form them into people at Mount Sinai God’s first word was not “Look, I created you.” It was not, “Look, I love you.” It was not, “Look, I call you.” It was “Look, I have set you free. You were slaves and I emancipated you. You are free!”
And when Jesus walked among us his very first public word, according to the Gospel of Luke, included these words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach liberty to the captive, to set the oppressed free.”
It is what his healings were about — freedom to get up and live a life that is whole and strong.
It is what forgiveness is about. It is freedom from the tyranny of mistakes, sins and guilt.
It is what the high calling of Christ to us is about. He calls us from the cramped and little cage of our self-absorption so as to live at last expansively and joyously in the magnificent purposes of God’s love.
In the New Testament no one says it with more insistence and exuberance than the Apostle Paul: “For freedom Christ has set us free.” “The Spirit of the Lord is freedom.”
Much of Paul’s writing is for people who actually had tasted freedom but whose freedom is under threat. And freedom according to Paul is threatened from two directions at once. On the one hand, freedom is threatened by the imposing of expectations, qualifications, judgments and rules that in the life of God’s grace make no sense.
We do this to ourselves and we do it to others in an endless, anxious game of having to prove something, earn something that by God’s grace is already ours. So we forfeit our freedom by way of anxiety and control.
That’s not a particularly strong temptation to most Virginia Baptists. The temptation that could threaten our freedom, according to Paul, is the second way to lose it. He says we can forfeit our freedom by way of indulgence. That is easy enough when the culture all around us is blaring the message loud and clear. We are all perfectly free to say, to do, to consume, to feel, to express whatever we wish whenever we wish. We think that is freedom, except that it isn’t. It is just a different way to be enslaved.
Anybody remember an old song by Joan Boaz called Tumbleweed? “I feel like a lonesome tumbleweed turning end over end, once I pulled all my roots free I became a slave to the wind.” We are never free without some solid ground to stand on. Unrooted autonomy leaves us nothing but adrift. I suspect most of us tilt more to the drift of an over exercised autonomy.
Virginia Baptists are a people rich in the history of freedom. We have never been unrooted in our freedom. We have freely chosen to work together to achieve greater ends. Little did we know to what ends, the ends of the earth, would be where they would go, but they do.
I love the fruit of freedom as Paul puts it. When freedom is done well it produces wonderful fruit — fruit like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Those are words you can savor. This is our deepest and sweetest freedom and if we will have it the Spirit will bear the fruit of that freedom within us and among us and that is a promise.
The world is hungry for it. Can you imagine love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control? By the Spirit’s generous gift it can be ours — can’t you taste it?
O taste and see that the Lord is good. Touch and celebrate and see that the fruit of the Spirit is beautiful, delicious and free.
John Upton is excutive director of the Baptist General Association of Virginia. He gave this address during the annual meeting of the BGAV.