About a dozen years ago, author and speaker, Os Guinness, wrote book entitled A Free People’s Suicide. Guinness is British by birth, but is a careful student and passionate fan of American life and culture. He is also a committed Christian whose thinking on matters of Christian worldview and apologetics are worth engaging for those interested in learning and growing in their faith and its application to the broader culture. 

In any event, the book is a kind of love letter to the United States. The freedom we have available to us in our nation is unlike anything that exists anywhere else in the world. No other nation has a constitution that is quite like ours. There’s a reason that our Constitution has been in place and operational longer than any other national constitution in the world. Other nations have copied what we have, usually badly, but no one has ever proposed something that gave people a greater experience of ordered liberty than what we have here. 

The thing about an ordered liberty such as we have, though, is that it’s not natural. A quick survey of human history shows pretty decisively that freedom is not our natural state. We have flirted with it here and there for a time, but then things get dicey and we have always been rather quick to trade liberty for security and the diminishment of freedom that tradeoff tends to bring with it. Or someone who desires power more than liberty for his fellow citizens comes along and achieves his aim at the expense of freedom for those around him. 

A perfect example of this can be found in the French Revolution of 1789. Inspired by the incredible success they helped us achieve in throwing off the British crown and its totalitarian authority, the French people rebelled against their own monarchical tyranny and declared themselves free as we did. But unlike here, their revolution soon devolved into violence and bloodshed, and the people who cheered the rebellion and the elimination of those who had ruled over them willingly welcomed Napoleon, the tyrannical emperor, to reestablish order from the chaos. 

So then, why did France’s revolution fail so spectacularly when ours succeeded equally spectacularly? Well, our Constitution had a lot to do with it. But that’s far from the only factor to consider here. In fact, it’s not even the most significant factor. When John Adams was reflecting on the nation’s great founding document, he had this to say about it: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” 

One of the factors that influenced not only the American Revolution itself, but which contributed in enormously significant ways to how it was pursued was the Second Great Awakening. This period of religious revival led by the preaching of George Whitfield among others made the Christian faith along with both a public and private embrace of virtue incredibly popular in the colonies. As our yet-to-be-formed nation marched toward revolution and freedom, we did so from a posture of virtue. Our leaders understood and were not shy about observing that virtue was an essential element to a successful revolution. Without that, every revolution eventually goes the way of the French Revolution. 

Virtue is absolutely essential for freedom to be maintained. Without virtue, the behavior that comes so naturally to people must be restrained to keep things from devolving into chaos. Without virtue we are forced to choose between either lawless anarchy or a rigorous state control in which freedom is nothing more than a dream the wealthy have time to consider. To put that a bit more succinctly, without virtue, order is only maintained by law. The less virtuous a people becomes, the more law is required to maintain the order we all desire. Well, the more law we have, the less freedom we have. 

There’s a problem here, though. We have never shown ourselves to be particularly adept at maintaining virtue on our own once we have established it. Again, the French Revolution makes this abundantly clear. It may have launched with some virtues theoretically undergirding it, but there was nothing beyond public will holding those in place, and public will very quickly demonstrated itself incapable of maintaining that effort. Public will tends to be as capricious as the people from whom it originates. 

So, absent sufficient personal will to maintain virtue, we need something external to ourselves to help us in that effort. Law can’t be the solution here because our aim is to maintain that very ordered liberty—that is, the freedom—we started with. If law is our solution, then freedom won’t be our outcome. We need something else here. Well, there is only one thing that has ever demonstrated itself to be up to the task of helping people maintain a commitment to virtue without using the means of law. 

That thing is faith. But not just any faith will do. Not all faiths, not all worldviews are the same. History is the only source we need to bear out this truth. Of all the various religious and non-religious worldviews that we have created for ourselves over the course of human history only one of them has ever created the kind of intellectual and philosophical cultural context in which an idea like ordered liberty even made sense. There has always and only been one form of tyranny or another with one exception. Christianity. Now, that doesn’t mean that anywhere and everywhere the Christian worldview has been dominant that ordered liberty has been the result. It hasn’t. But it is nonetheless the only worldview that has produced the ordered liberty we so enjoy, to which we are so accustomed that we think it is normal. 

In other words, in order to maintain the freedom we love and celebrate—especially at this time of year—we have to have virtue in place. But unless we have faith—and specifically the Christian faith—helping us to maintain that virtuous character, we won’t do it on our own. Faith produces virtue which creates the necessary cultural environment for freedom to flourish which in turn creates a context in which faith tends to be rewarded such that it is pursued with even greater intentionality and devotion. In his book, Guinness calls this the “Golden Triangle of Liberty.” 

Well, in describing this golden triangle, Guinness wasn’t introducing anything new to the world. Instead, he was borrowing on an idea that has been around for a long time. It’s an idea that goes all the way back to the apostle Paul. In his letter to a group of churches scattered across the southern coast of modern Turkey—a region that was then called Galatia—Paul had a lot to say about freedom, and especially the freedom that followers of Jesus have through their relationship with Him. He also had a lot to say about the kinds of things we do that can result in our losing that incredible freedom. Essentially, Paul insists that we not trade in freedom for what looks like security, but is really just an illusion of security. Our real security is always and only in Christ. 

If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way with me to Galatians 5 where all of Paul’s arguments come to a climax. Let’s look at this quickly. “For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm, then, and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery.” That is: don’t trade freedom for anything else. Everything else is only one form or another of slavery. 

Paul goes on to use an illustration that he comes back to again and again throughout the letter of a particular way his audience was tempted to trade away their freedom for what was sold to them as a kind of security. Jumping down to v. 4, Paul emphatically declares that faith is the only thing that will allow us to maintain the freedom we enjoy in Christ. “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision [that was the issue that mattered so much to them] accomplishes anything.” We could swap out there any other thing we are tempted to trade away our freedom for in pursuit of this illusion of security and the point would remain the same. It’s all a lie. Only one thing allows for freedom to persist. “What matters is faith working through love.” 

Paul next offers his audiences the credit and encouragement that their drift toward this needless loss of liberty was something external to them. They didn’t go to it themselves. Rather, they were duped in this direction. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, but by giving them this credit, Paul was positively encouraging them in the right direction. 

Well, the thing about freedom once we have it is that it can’t be taken from us. It is only and always given away. Now, maybe we have to fight for it, but if we do and if our effort costs us our lives, then we will still die free. This is doubly true with the freedom we have in Christ. Once we are free in Christ, no one can take that from us. But we can give it away. Now, I don’t think that means we can lose it, but we can voluntarily live without it by pursuing a path that leads us away from it; away from Him. 

This is what Paul says next in the last part of this passage I want us to look at together. This brings us back to Guinness’ argument in A Free People’s Suicide. Listen to this now in v. 13: “For you were called to be free, brothers and sisters; only don’t use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love. For the whole law is fulfilled in one statement: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you bite and devour one another, watch out, or you will be consumed by one another.” 

Are you with him? As citizens of this great nation, the only way we will lose our freedom is if we give it away. We’re not getting conquered by anybody else. But when we refuse to walk a path of virtue, more and more laws will become necessary to restrain our vices so they don’t unfairly impact the people around us. The harder we turn from virtue, the stronger and more numerous those laws will have to become. The only way we will walk the path of virtue that allows for our freedom to be maintained is when we are committed on the whole to the Christian worldview. Faith produces virtue which allows for freedom. That’s a message worth proclaiming. It’s not a hard one to demonstrate either. 

Come back home with me here at the end. If you are a follower of Jesus, you have access to an even greater freedom in Him. That freedom is more important to maintain than any amount of national freedom. That is a freedom that can exist no matter what our external circumstances happen to be. In order to maintain that freedom, though, we have to remain on the path of Christ. If we leave His path, we’ll forfeit His freedom. But we are no more capable of remaining on His path on our own than we are of maintaining public and private virtue on our own. We need help. And that help comes from His Spirit dwelling in us. 

We must at all times and in every way lean on the power and presence of the Spirit in us. Jesus Himself made clear that we can’t do anything without His help. Remember what He said to the disciples shortly before He went to the cross to open the path to freedom: “I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me.” Freedom comes from virtue which comes from faith in Christ. Producing the fruit of the life of Christ comes when we remain connected to the vine. Disconnected branches don’t produce anything on their own. 

If you have freedom, then live like free people. And how do free people live? With love for one another. With kindness for their neighbors. With humility and gentleness. With wisdom and self-control. With faithfulness and goodness. You can do these things and remain free in Christ regardless of what anyone else around you is doing. There’s no law against that kind of behavior, Paul said. When you do, you’ll be the best citizens you can be. That kind of thing tends to be contagious, meaning others will follow, and soon you’ll be a part of making the whole nation better for it; freer for it. Let’s live as free people.