If Jesus frees you, you will be free of your sin. You will be free of your guilt. You will be free of the punishment you deserve for all your rebellion against God. You will be free to pursue what is good. You will even be free to be full of joy and thankfulness even at a time like this.

Do you want freedom? Do you feel like the government has crossed a line? Do you feel restricted, perhaps even enslaved? Do you feel forced to do things that you wish you didn’t have to do?
Do you long to be free?
We typically think of freedom as the ability to do whatever we want to do.

Perhaps our concept of freedom is wrong.
In the past, freedom was defined as the ability to pursue what is good.
We don’t want people to be free to murder each other. We don’t want business owners to be free to lie about their products. We don’t want absolute, unbridled, unrestrained freedom. We want freedom that is directed towards good.
We want the freedom to earn a living for our family. That’s a good thing.
We want the freedom to serve all sorts of people at our shops without having to turn away the unvaccinated. That’s a good thing.
We want doctors to have the freedom to advise their patients on the best medical decision for them. That’s a good thing.
But there’s a problem.
Are any of us truly free?

We might feel like the government is enslaving us at the moment – and that is true in many regards. But the truth is that we are all by nature slaves of a worse master than the government. Jesus put it this way: “everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34).

Jesus is telling us that by nature none of us is truly free. We all sin and, therefore, we are all slaves to sin. None of us is able to pursue and do what is good.
We are restrained in our sin by the consequences or by the shame of what other people might think but if we were all left without restraint – in total, unbridled freedom – we would find that we sink into dreadful sin.
Richard Wurmbrand lived in communist-era Russia. He was a Christian pastor who was imprisoned for his faith.

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The story of Owen and Baxter offers us several valuable lessons. Here’s one: at the outset of any conflict, we should try to stand back from the confronting issues and try to understand what other factors might be at work in our own hearts and in the hearts of those around us. Paul admonishes us: “if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:18). His meaning is obvious. We are not responsible for the actions of the other person, but for our part, we should do all we can to live in peace with those around us.

When the Issue Isn’t the Issue
Recently, I found myself in a disagreement. In my work context, I have been setting a new direction. I discovered that a colleague I respect was worried it was the wrong direction, so we sat down to talk about it. After forty-five minutes of amicable and professional discussion, it was clear we still took a different view. And then something interesting happened: my colleague trusted me by opening up about her early life as the child of alcoholic parents. She explained how the changes I was proposing undermined the sense of her place in the world that she had built up over her adult years. Her honest reflection changed the whole complexion of our conversation.
I think that story illustrates an important dynamic in many conflicts: the issue may not be the issue. In other words, the concerns that we think are driving the disagreement are not the real issues at all, or at least may not be all of the issues or even the main issues. Beneath the surface or behind the immediate triggers of conflict lie other dynamics that remain out of sight to the combatants. In this case, the self-knowledge of my colleague was extremely helpful. At least she could recognize what was going on inside of her and had the courage to share that with me. But not everyone has that level of self-awareness. Sometimes we don’t know ourselves at all. As the Scriptures acknowledge, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). So when disagreement breaks out, all sorts of issues may come into play that have little to do with the presenting concerns but have everything to do with hidden realities of the heart of which our opponent has no awareness, or even we have no awareness. If that happens, we are in trouble, for who can resolve what they cannot see?
An Example from History
There’s another story that illustrates the same dynamic, but this one is nearly 400 years old. John Owen (1616-83) and Richard Baxter (1615-91) were two of the most significant figures within seventeenth-century English Puritanism. Both were dedicated, effective pastors; both were prolific authors and theologians; both were influential leaders of their respective streams within the Puritan tradition. So they shared an enormous amount of common ground. But they did not like each other, and the conflict between them, once it began, was lifelong. A while back I set out to understand why they came to such a deep and bitter animosity. I excavated the different layers of their relationship to identify the varied reasons why it went so badly wrong. I learned that the three most consequential reasons for their mutual dislike were all in place before they even met.
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Written by David J. Ayers |
Monday, October 31, 2022
Given all we know about the impact of commitment and social support, teaching young people to prioritize church attendance and to keep religion central in their daily lives will most likely help them to be more faithful to their churches’ sexual teachings.

Evangelicals share something in common with every other branch of conservative Christianity. They hold to a simple view of sex outside of marriage, rooted in many centuries of historical teaching and what appear to be the plain teachings of the Bible, especially the New Testament—don’t.
Yet most self-identified Evangelicals1 engage in premarital sex. And doing so has become increasingly morally acceptable among them, regardless of what their churches teach. We have seen a long trend toward greater liberalization of sexual ethics among Evangelical laypersons over the past several decades, underscored in recent years by several prominent Evangelical leaders breaking ranks to embrace progressive views on sex.
The recent, highly public defection of a superstar of the “sexual purity” movement, Josh Harris, is a dramatic case in point. Starting with the repudiation of his own best-selling books promoting courtship practices that promoted abstinence until marriage, on to pursuing his own “amicable” divorce, and then rejecting Christianity entirely—all on social media—Harris has become a poster-child for the “new” Evangelical sexual ethic. Unique, perhaps, only in indicating that his views are no longer Christian (rather than the more typical attempt to claim that Christianity allows for pre-marital sex), Harris is indicative of a larger shift away from traditional stances on sex within Evangelical circles.
For example, in the General Social Survey (GSS), in 2014 through 2018 combined, only 37% of “fundamentalist2 adults said that sex outside marriage was “always wrong,” while 41% said it was “not wrong at all.” From 1974 to 1978, the same percentages were 44% and 27%, respectively.
Meanwhile, the GSS shows that among never-married fundamentalist adults between 2008 and 2018, 86% of females and 82% of males had at least one opposite-sex sexual partner since age 18, while 57% and 65%, respectively, had three or more. These percentages were even higher for those under 30.
In my recent book, Christian Marriage: A Comprehensive Introduction, I looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), which provides a lot more detail on sexual activity and includes a larger number of respondents.3 In this article, and in the corresponding research brief, I incorporate the most recent NSFG cycle released in December 2018 to further explore the sexual practices of young, never-married Evangelicals, combining the surveys for 2013-15 and 2015-17. I summarize my findings below.
The following figures compare the percentages of never-married respondents in these NSFG cycles, by gender and in two age groups and five major religious affiliation categories, who have ever engaged in sexual intercourse, as well as those who have ever engaged in any sexual activity (vaginal, oral or anal) with an opposite-sex partner.
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