The Freedom of Sons

Or in other words, does our spiritual war with our old self have an end point that we reach, so that we have arrived at the freedom of sons? Or is there a time when we finally overcome sin?

Saint John the Apostle clarifies this with all frankness:

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” — 1 John 1:8

It is as if the Apostle wants us to learn an important truth concerning the newness in the new self, which is that our struggle with the body of sin or the old self is inevitable and will have no end, and that at any moment we consider ourselves to have overcome sin—far be it—this means we are not right and that we deceive ourselves with this misleading feeling.

Then the Apostle returns and gives us the guarantee of the New Covenant against sin, which abolishes its existence:

“My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.” — 1 John 2:1–2

But Saint John the Apostle returns and makes an exception for a kind of sin that he called a sin leading to death. It is not for the children of God to fall into it. So if sin is a type not leading to death, how do we obtain the freedom of sons and how do we feel it?

Here I would like to present several truths that lead to the complete answer to this question.

First

We must realize that God has called us to be free, and that we are His sons—and this has become a right of ours and an essential part of our new nature. This sonship is a right and a truth sealed by faith in the Son of God, and by renouncing Satan and all his works, and by the imprint of baptism and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit with the Chrism and the Holy Communion in the body and blood of the Son of God. So then we are sons of God and children by the Holy Spirit. If after that we sin, it means that our filial freedom or our spiritual freedom is partially hindered, but not entirely abolished.

Secondly

That every time we act in obedience to the Father through prayer, repentance, or love, or self-denial for the service of others, or struggle against self-lust and its arrogance, or through fasting and humility, or communion with confession, contrition, and thanksgiving—in all this we practice true obedience, because we do the work of God and fulfill His commandments. So, in all these works, we practice the work of sons in the spirit of truly being children of God, and we taste a state of true freedom, spiritual freedom, even if partially.

Thirdly

That the practice of true freedom and the performance of the acts of God in the spirit of sons and their obedience truly place us within the circle of the Kingdom of God, and He who called us to this entry is the Father Himself, who poured the Spirit of the Son into our hearts out of love and honor for Christ His Son, to facilitate our movement from the darkness of slavery to the light of God’s children,

“...giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light, who has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.” — Colossians 1:12–13

Fourthly

Our entry into the circle of God’s Kingdom and Light will inevitably reveal more and more the heinousness of sin and the surrounding darkness that confronted us before and confronts us every day, and this increases our feeling of inadequacy and the certain deprivation of the freedom of sons. Here is a stark confrontation between the stance of the new man, who stands in the obedience of love and performing an unceasing work, while the stance of the old man is to flee from His light and expose every work of the devil, whatever it may be, which has become an abomination to the new man. Here we are in a state of hiding from the face of God, not an expulsion from the paradise of God’s mercy.

“Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you.” — John 12:35

Fifthly

Here, Christ, the Head of our new creation, justifies us to support the position of the new man with the Father against the movement of disobedience of the old man, who is always inclined toward sin and hiding. He consecrates this new position which frees the person from its standing before God the Father, continuously and always bringing it out from darkness to light, and completes the deficiency of its practice by His eternal power in a state of peace and justification. Christ is to us, by denying His self, a state of completing total obedience to the Father, and a guarantor of a state of redemption and an eternal reconciliation, if we cling to Him with faith and hope and the trust of love, and if we live by His commandments as sons.

Thus we arrive at this truth: That we are always sinners, and always in need of sincere repentance and confession of sins, so that we may obtain forgiveness for them by the blood shed for us. Every time we sin, we lose our vision of the Father, because sin is darkness; and we lose our sense of freedom as sons, because sin is bondage; and we lose our courage to appear before His face, because sin is enmity. Every time we confess our sins, for which Christ atones with His blood, our eyes are opened again and we see that we are entering the sphere of the Kingdom.

If we practice the acts of sonship—such as selfless love, selfless service, self-denial, and the glorification of the Father—and we qualify for participation in the Body and Blood, we return to a state of freedom, the freedom of sons, and truly experience it, but it remains an incomplete state of freedom for complete growth due to the continuous sense of sin, as if it were sweet food mixed with bitterness. If we continue the striving of the acts of sonship, and keep the commandments of Jesus, whose essence is love, Christ will come forth for us to complete every inadequacy and every shortcoming in our work as His sons, and consequently He will complete every deficiency in our sense of freedom as sons, and before the Father in the reckoning, finally blameless in love.

Therefore, O world of faith and love, according to the commandment, we taste the freedom of His children, and the Messiah perfects our freedom absolutely, so we walk in Him, in the light, and remain in Him, and stand before the face of God the Father blameless in Christ.