Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
1895
I should like to read to you again the words of Jesus from the 8thchapter of the Gospel of St. John:—
"Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on Him, if ye continue in My word, then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man; how sayest Thou, ye shall be made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house forever, but the Son abideth ever. If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."
I want to speak to you to-day about the purpose and the result of thefreedom which Christ gives to His disciples and the freedom into whichman enters when he fulfils his life. The purpose and result of freedomis service. It sounds to us at first like a contradiction, like aparadox. Great truths very often present themselves to us in the firstplace as paradoxes, and it is only when we come to combine the twodifferent terms of which they are composed and see how it is only bytheir meeting that the truth does reveal itself to us, that the truthdoes become known. It is by this same truth that God frees our souls,not from service, not from duty, but into service and into duty, and hewho makes mistakes the purpose of his freedom mistakes the character ofhis freedom. He who thinks that he is being released from the work, andnot set free in order that he may accomplish that work, mistakes theChrist from whom the freedom comes, mistakes the condition into whichhis soul is invited to enter. For if I was right in saying what I saidthe other day, that the freedom of a man simply consists in the largeropportunity to be and to do all that God makes him in His creationcapable of being and doing, then certainly if man has been capable ofservice it is only by the entrance into service, by the acceptance ofthat life of service for which God has given man the capacity, that heenters into the fulness of his freedom and becomes the liberated childof God. You remember what I said with regard to the manifestations offreedom and the figures and the illustrations, perhaps some of themwhich we used, of the way in which the bit of iron, taken out of itsuselessness, its helplessness, and set in the midst of the greatmachine, thereby recognizes the purpose of its existence, and does thework for which it was appointed, for it immediately becomes the servantof the machine into which it was placed. Every part of its impulse f