Freedom
Responsibility is a subject of Christian freedom. If we have the freedom in Christ to choose holiness, with God's help, we can get holy. If we do not have that free will and leave it up to God completely, the will is passive and we do not grow, only delusion and self-rightousness remains. When St. James talks about works, he is not referring to works that save us but works that show that we are saved. Grace is such that we are forgiven, not that we did anything good but that we admitted that we were not good and that humility gained us the grace through faith and the accompanying power to do good. Once we are saved through faith, we need to repent, that takes the power of the spirit but also an active response to appropriate the power. We have that responsibility to serve Him him as our spiritual sacrifice but it cannot be done on our own so we choose Jesus to do it through us. Grace effects our salvation by taking away our sin but grace (graces) must continue in the power of the spirit to do as He wants. As we desire to follow Him and walk in His spirit, without the will to do it, it will not be done. Love is not just a passive emotion, it is an action, not just a noun but a verb, not just subjective but objective.
The Greek citizen Pericles, who had so much to do with the public life of Athens teaches concerning Athens: reflect that her glory has been built up by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it. Make them your examples and learn from them that the secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage.
Tocqueville: so difficult it is for such freedom not to degenerate into license. A man may delude himself into supposing that he has more freedom than is actually the case, but events will show him his limits. On the other hand, a man never has more freedom than he thinks he has. When we think that we are unfree to remedy a situation, then we are really unfree until someone redeems us.
If there's was one word that expressed the battle cry of the decade of the 1960's, it was freedom. Political freedom today, although invariably celebrated as the supreme good is almost always confused with the license to exploit. I was part of that hippy generation, it was a message of love, peace and getting along. It was also a message of freedom and satan didn't like that message so freedom degenerated into licentiousness with drugs and free sex. But the message of freedom is still a pure one. Unfree religion is the drug of the masses because they have used it as a dependency to obtain their own rightousness; instead of having the freedom to do the right thing, they felt that they were the right thing and became conservative, without the freedom to explore truth beyond their own self-righteousness. [133, 139, 150, 264, 125, 283, 385]
Freedom is absence from control of another, not burdened by constraint. Not only free from, but free to. There are two concepts of freedom - One regards freedom as the power to do what one wants, the other regards freedom as service to God and one's fellow men. One regards power as an end in itself, the other as a means to promote justice and the common good.
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