Pas­tor Julien Cyrus

“The Fa­ther has not left me alone; for I al­ways do what is pleas­ing to him” (John 8:29). 

Here, Je­sus, the Son of God, ex­press­es full as­sur­ance and wel­comes the Fa­ther’s un­wa­ver­ing pres­ence in his life. He is ever about his Fa­ther’s busi­ness and re­ceives his high­est ap­proval: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17) be­cause he is com­mit­ted to do the Fa­ther’s will.

Con­verse­ly, there is an­oth­er son who yearns for lib­er­ty and can­not wait to get out of his fa­ther’s house. He is gear­ing up to do what­ev­er he wants, and, in the spir­it of en­ti­tle­ment, de­mands his por­tion of the es­tate and jour­neys to a dis­tant land where he squan­ders his for­tune with reck­less and im­moral liv­ing (Luke 15:11-13).

In God’s scheme of things, in­de­pen­dence is an­oth­er form of de­pen­dence. The in­di­vid­ual who ar­rived at his des­ti­na­tion of choice as a wealthy man soon be­came im­pov­er­ished and fell in­to hard­ship (Luke 15:11). Pre­dictably, the very thing that he de­spised be­came the life­line he need­ed: “I will arise and go to my fa­ther” (Luke 15:18). 

Many be­lieve that a change in ge­og­ra­phy will bring the trans­for­ma­tion that they de­sire, hav­ing grown weary of their as­signed en­vi­ron­ment. For some, in­de­pen­dence means avoid­ing peo­ple and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties that they have grown to de­test. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, in their haste for lib­er­ty, they ar­rive at the new des­ti­na­tion with the same old men­tal­i­ty that de­feat­ed them in the first place.

Je­sus warned: “No one patch­es old cloth­ing with new cloth, for the patch will pull away the gar­ment, leav­ing an even big­ger tear than be­fore. And no one puts new wine in­to old wine­skins. If they do, the old skins will burst, the wine will run out, and the wine­skins will be ru­ined. New wine is put in­to fresh wine­skins, and so both are pre­served” (Matthew 9:16-17).

New be­gin­nings re­quire new mind­sets. We can put it this way: “There­fore if any man be in Christ, he is a new crea­ture: old things are passed away; be­hold, all things are be­come new” (2 Corinthi­ans 5:17).

Paul as­sures us in Gala­tians 5:13-14 that we have been called to live in free­dom. How­ev­er, we must not use this free­dom to in­dulge our dark de­sires, but as em­pow­er­ment to serve one an­oth­er, and to love our neigh­bours as our­selves.

The un­de­ni­able re­al­i­ty is that our ex­is­tence is di­vine­ly con­nect­ed with ser­vice. We find true free­dom when we sub­mit our­selves like Christ to serve oth­ers.

Out­side of God’s struc­ture, our en­deav­ours will amount to noth­ing.

The ser­vant who was for­giv­en of his debts and freed lost his free­dom af­ter he failed to ex­tend the mer­cy that he re­ceived to the fel­low man who was in­debt­ed to him.

Job on­ly re­ceived his de­liv­er­ance when he prayed for the de­liv­er­ance of his friends, and the Lord gave him twice as much as he had be­fore (Job 42: 9-10). Life is an iron­ic para­dox: to re­ceive, one must give; to live, one must die; to be­come in­de­pen­dent, one must learn the prin­ci­ple of de­pen­dence.