The Paradox
A person may possess legal liberty, bodily autonomy, and the power to choose, yet remain enslaved. This happens because freedom divorced from truth becomes bondage. The person who serves disordered desires (gluttony, avarice, ambition) has inverted the proper order of the soul. The will, meant to serve reason and virtue, instead serves the appetites. The intellect, meant to pursue truth, becomes a tool for rationalizing sin.
Why This Matters
Real freedom is not the absence of constraint, it’s the ordering of the self toward genuine good. A slave to greed is whipped by endless wanting. A slave to lust is imprisoned by compulsion. A slave to power is forever anxious, forever grasping. Each believes himself free because no external master commands him. But the internal master is far more tyrannical.
The Only True Freedom
This is why Christ says: “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
(Matthew 6:21)
Freedom comes through serving what is true, good, and beautiful ultimately, through serving God. Paradoxically, to serve God is the only real liberation. The will aligned with divine truth experiences peace, rest, and genuine autonomy.
Examine what you serve, for you become the slave of whatever commands your deepest choices.
Sin will make us slaves!
God is free because He cannot sin, not because He can. That’s His nature and He is inviting us to come to Him, to be like Him.
Matthew 10:26-31 RSVCI
“So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the dark, utter in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim upon the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
Reflection
Jesus tells us not to be afraid. When we fear, we cling to who we are and what we have; we see ourselves as the threatened center of a hostile universe. Fear is the “original sin” of which the Church Fathers speak. Fear is the poison that was injected into human consciousness and human society from the beginning.
And fear is a result of forgetting our deepest identity. At the root and ground of our being there is what Christianity calls “the image and likeness of God.” This means that at the foundation of our existence, we are one with the divine power that continually creates and sustains the universe. We are held and cherished by the infinite love of God.
When we rest in this center and realize its power, we know that we are safe, or in more classical religious language, “saved.” And therefore we can let go of fear and begin to live in radical trust. But when we lose sight of this rootedness in God, we live exclusively on the tiny island of the ego, and our lives become dominated by fear.
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