Is Christianity Just About All The Stuff I Can't Do?

Photo by Marc Falardeau

I was completely stumped.

My good friend Jeff and I were hunched over, sitting on a wooden bench in the dark at 3:30 AM, looking at the ground.

"Why don't you want to follow Jesus?" I asked.

"You want to know why? Because Christianity just looks like it's all about what I can't do. You say it's life-giving, but it just looks like a bunch of can't's to me."

I had no idea what to say to that. So I said nothing.

The seconds of silence felt like minutes. I ran through every verse I'd ever read, searching frantically for any kind of answer. But none came. I prayed the shortest prayer you can pray, "Help!" But still, no answer. I was stumped.

Was Christianity all about what we couldn't do? Why didn't I know the answer?

I never responded to Jeff. Because I didn't have any words.

His question was essentially this: Do God's commandments hinder my ability to experience true life? Think about things like doing drugs, having sex with tons of people, forcing other people into doing what you want, gossiping all the time, and all those other things that feel good but are against "God's law." Why should I have to keep from doing those things, if they feel so good? Why does that look like freedom, while God's way looks like prison?

It was a dang good question. And it burned inside me for a long time.

The Answer to the Question

If you've ever wrestled with a question like this, you'll know you can't get the question out of your head until you find the answer for yourself. And that's exactly what happened.

One day, in the kitchen of our legendary college house, the Sheila House, I was talking to another friend of mine who had just moved back to Knoxville from Alabama. He told me a peculiar story about his old party animal roommate.

"My roommate was super into all sorts of wild partying. Every night, he'd come home with a different girl. Eventually, he would bring back girls he wasn't even attracted to, just to have someone he could sleep with.

"Eventually, he started getting to the point where he had to come home with a girl or he'd feel terrible about himself. It was like he needed it. He was miserable without it."

"Kinda seems like he was imprisoned by it," I chimed in.

"Yeah, I guess he was." My friend looked down, thinking deeply.

And then it hit me.

This guy was imprisoned by the same thing Jeff thought would lead to freedom.

We've got it backwards. Somehow, a life of indulgence looks like freedom to most of us. And God's law looks like it's restricting us. But it's actually the other way around.

God's commandments might look and even feel like bondage sometimes, but they're actually guidelines to the most free life possible. They're designed to keep sin from imprisoning us, just like it had done to my Alabama friend's roommate. That guy was imprisoned by sin. In this case, sex.

I want to share two pictures with you, pictures that help me understand this idea:

The "Bear Trap" Image and the "Mouse" Image

Imagine you're traveling through a dense, quiet forest. Leaves cover the ground and crackle under your feet. Now imagine a person coming up to you and saying, "Hey, there are bear traps all over this forest. And I have a map of exactly where they are. Want it?"

This is what the Bible is. It's a guide past all the bear traps. Yeah, if you really want to, you can go charging in without looking. But you're gonna get stuck in a bear trap. And then you're gonna have a swell time trying to get free.

Now, imagine you're a mouse. I know it's weird. Just do it.

Imagine you see lots of cheese in front of you. Some of it is rat poison. But it all looks like cheese. It all smells like cheese. It's pretty hard to tell what's healthy and what's poisonous.

You could indulge in the rat poison. You probably wouldn't be able to tell, either. It would probably taste great. That is, until it slowly started to kill you.

This is what sin is. It feels great in the moment, but eventually it steals your freedom and your life.

The Bottom Line

I can see it clearly now. We were made to live most freely under God's guidelines. Indulging in Sin feels like freedom, but it leads to captivity. God's way may feel like captivity, but it leads to real freedom. 

We don't always understand how it can lead to freedom, especially when it feels so restrictive. But God made us with a certain recipe. And He knows exactly the recipe He used to make us. We were made to need things like sacrificial love, community, a part in something bigger...

Sin acts like it's going to give us these things. But it never actually will.

So if you actually want them... look for them from the One who actually knows how to fulfill your desires. 

Psalm 37:4 - "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart."

James 1:25 - "But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it--not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it--they will be blessed in what they do."

John 8:36 - "So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed."