In John chapter 8, Jesus made the interesting statement: “If you remain faithful to my message, then you really are my disciples. You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” This offended some members of his audience not only because it asserted that they did not already know the truth, but because it also carried the implication that they were not already free. Everyone likes to imagine that he or she has a firm grip on reality.
Jesus’s statement has become even more relevant today because there are now enormous numbers of competing ideas to which people subscribe, each claiming to be true. If you subscribe to a version of reality which is false, then according to Jesus you live your life in some form of slavery. The “church world” is not exempt from this. For example, human life is said to be sacred when we are talking about unborn babies, but mysteriously non-sacred when we are talking about criminals or people in Afghanistan or Iraq.
According to Jesus, people who hold untrue versions of reality are themselves imprisoned by a form a slavery. By committing sin they become slaves to sin. By choosing to believe a lie, they sacrifice a part of themselves and voluntarily subject themselves to a form of bondage. Their lives become far less than what their creator intended for them as they cling to the comfort of falsehood rather than embracing the dangerous truth.