--The only thing that God requires is our faith in Christ, which faith will always lead us also to live according to love and within the boundaries of the Ten Commandments. Thus, Christian liberty is the freedom for Christians to do whatever the Holy Spirit working inside of them permits or to avoid whatever He prohibits within these extremely broad limits.
--Aside from proclaiming the Gospel (see part 4), this vital doctrine has two major practical advantages, both of which fit the global scope of God’s Salvation project.
--First, it gives us all the latitude we need to work within and reach other cultures not like our own. Precisely because the culture-style of a Christian is almost infinitely flexible, we can adapt to and preach the Gospel in almost any context. This gives us the great advantage of not having to force people in that cultural context to leave everything they have ever known to follow Christ.
--In the past, one of the greatest barriers to evangelizing in foreign cultures has been the idea that not only must they become Christians but they must become Western Christians. This mean that converts not only had to accept Christ, but they had to become aliens to their own culture, which made them immediately adrift personally and ineffective evangelically with their own people.
--But the doctrine of Christian liberty, properly understood, would allow them plenty of latitude in being Christian with their native context and seeing how to fulfill all the incomplete strands of it through Christ rather than forcing them to abandon it as if the entire thing must be changed to conform to God’s will.
--This kind of cultural fascism has really hindered the spread of the Gospel, and it just plain fails to grasp this core doctrine. Such missionaries wind up being Judaizers all over again without even realizing it.
--I’ll explain the other advantage next time.
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