TL;DR: Are we really as free as we think we are? Drawing on Romans 6, this sermon explores why we so often return to the very habits, patterns, and behaviors that diminish us. While our instinct is usually to try harder, exercise more control, or develop better strategies, Paul offers a surprising alternative: trust the promise. Through Christ's death and resurrection, the old self has already died and sin no longer has dominion over us. True freedom comes not through greater self-mastery but through surrender, reception, and trusting what God has already done. The gospel is not ultimately about getting our lives under control—it's about receiving the freedom Christ has already secured for us.
What follows is the actual transcript of my sermon, delivered June 21 in at First Congregational Church in Loveland, CO, formatted for substack. Audio is available at the bottom.
Are We Really Free?
Recently I was having coffee with a good friend, and as we are wont to do, we began talking about what the other had been reading. Myself, as someone who’s a pastor and general church nerd, always tends to read around church or theology or culture. He is a business executive coach, so he often reads about topics such as leadership and coaching and that sort of thing.
And sometimes he even reads beyond those boundaries.
But when he shared the name of the most recent book he had been reading, I was quite surprised. The topic and the title were a bit taboo, in fact.
I was immediately curious.
As someone who cannot, cannot, cannot resist an intriguing title, ⁓ I’ve already, in fact, taken home a book and read it from the church library here.
I was immediately drawn by the title and went to our local library to download the audio version of the book.
The book title is this:
Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power, a method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don’t.
No.
Now I must admit I feel a little sheepish saying those words in church and even especially from the pulpit, but I figure ⁓ this is Pride Month, so we say things that are unorthodox or untraditional, and I can get away with it perhaps.
And if not, I’m only here for, you know, how many more weeks?
As it turns out, this is a sermon about a kind of freedom that most would not understand.
The Patterns We Keep Repeating
Existential Kink is a self-help book by Carolyn Elliott, and she argues that our recurring negative patterns persist because at some level we are unconsciously attached to them. And by bringing these hidden desires into light, they lose their power over us and we become free to live differently.
She’s seeking to build off the words of the famed psychologist Carl Jung.
Who was German, guess, right? So it fits well in this context.
That he said,
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Listening to the author as she reads these words, I couldn’t get away from the question:
What if she’s right?
What if we’re not nearly as free as we think we are?
We say we’re free, but we don’t live like it.
And while Elliot’s language is certainly provocative, I suspect most of us would recognize that same basic premise.
We know what it’s like to find ourselves stuck in these same patterns again and again and again.
We swear we’ll respond differently next time.
We promise we’ll finally let it go.
We tell ourselves that we’re done.
We’re done with that bad habit, that resentment, that way of thinking.
And yet somehow.
Somehow we find ourselves there again and again.
Alas, I found myself there this past week.
Which raises, I suppose, for us a rather uncomfortable question.
Are we really as free as we think ourselves to be?
And if we’re not, what do we do about it?
We often move toward tactics of control and strategy.
We make vision boards, vision statements, we practice visualization, but these can sort of function like wallpaper over a deeper rot.
And until we address these underlying issues, the same black mold will just seep through, infecting our relationships, our actions, and our overall well being.
And perhaps this is where I suppose things get a little interesting, because maybe the deeper issue is not that we need to get a better hold of ourselves, develop better strategies for when we lose our temper, or even become more disciplined versions of ourselves.
Again, none of these are bad per se.
But it’s sort of like wallpapering over the black mold.
It’s not solving the root excuse me, it’s not solving the rot at the core of the problem.
And the deeper question is this:
Why do we keep returning to the things that hurt us?
Why do we keep repeating those same patterns?
Why do we keep finding ourselves stuck again and again in those same places?
In short, why do we say we are free yet live as anything but free?
A Very Pauline Question
I’m only a few chapters into this book and immediately after listening to the introduction I texted my friend and said:
This sounds very Pauline.
Meaning, this sounds very similar to the questions that the Apostle Paul is wrestling with in the book of Romans.
In his own way, I think Paul is asking a very similar set of questions.
Why do humans keep returning to the very things that diminish them?
Why do we say we’re free but keep living as though we’re under the power of something else?
The details, of course, are different.
We turn to vision boards, affirmations, strategies for self-improvement.
Not again that these are inherently bad per se, but Paul’s audience did something similar too, except their move was to turn to strict adherence to religious rules and practices.
The challenge, of course, is that underneath both practices, both moves is the same instinct:
If I can just get myself under control, then I will finally be free.
And that’s the very instinct that Paul here is trying to challenge.
Don’t You Know You’re Dead?
So Paul says something perhaps equally unorthodox and surprising to his hearers.
Don’t you know that you’re dead? he says.
Don’t you realize that the old person you used to be is buried and the corpse of your old self is dead and gone?
I mean he doesn’t quite say it like that.
He says this:
This is what we know that the person we used to be was crucified with him in order to get rid of the corpse that had been controlled by sin. That way we wouldn’t be slaves to sin anymore because the person who’s died has been freed from sin’s power.
Remember the question we’ve been wrestling with:
Why do we keep returning to the things that hurt us?
Paul’s answer is not what we might immediately expect.
He doesn’t offer a better strategy.
He doesn’t offer a more disciplined approach.
He doesn’t tell us to try harder or to go back to my children’s sermon to pull harder.
Instead, he proclaimed something else.
Something that God has already done.
That the old self is dead.
That the old self has been crucified with Christ.
And that the good news is that in death we are freed from that which once had control or dominion over us.
A few verses earlier, Paul writes that if we are united together in death like Jesus, we will also be united together in resurrection with Jesus.
In other words, Paul isn’t simply talking about self-improvement.
He’s talking about death and resurrection.
He’s talking about God doing something so profound that the person we were once no longer has the final word.
Trust the Promise
We tend to think we’re free from our past self, our old lives, our old habits.
Or perhaps more accurately, we think we can control them.
We think we can manage them, contain them, keep them in check.
Yet for all of our assumptions of freedom and control, we’re often more bound to these old ways than we would care to admit.
And Paul’s entire argument is that the old self is dead and buried, and sin no longer has dominion over us.
Sin no longer has control over us.
Death no longer has dominion.
And the question I invite you to consider this morning is whether we trust that promise to be true.
In his book The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticism, theologian Andrew Root writes that faith is about reception, not right actions or beliefs.
This is quite a contrast to our modern understanding of faith.
And today in some Christian contexts we understand faith as right beliefs, mentally assenting to the right sort of beliefs.
With the assurance that if we just think the right thing or believe the right thing, then we will be okay.
In other contexts, Christian contexts, faith is understood purely as right actions, that if we just do the right thing, then we’ll be the right way.
Again, none of these are bad per se, but they’re both moves of control.
And they can become assumptions that if we can simply get a hold of ourselves, if we can simply believe the right thing or simply behave the right way, then we can steer ourselves in the right direction.
What Paul is saying, what the good news of Jesus is saying, I believe, is something quite different entirely.
It’s saying:
Trust the promise.
Trust that this has already happened.
Trust that the old self is gone and the new self is come.
And to be sure, this is quite contrarian to our modern ears.
Shaped as we are for command and control, our move in most places is just to try harder.
To try harder.
And the good news of Jesus is essentially:
Try less.
I mean, again, the finger traps.
Try less.
Don’t produce, receive.
So then it becomes not about self mastery, but instead death with Christ.
It’s not about more effort, it’s about God’s action.
It’s not about finding ourselves, excuse me, fixing ourselves.
But rather trusting the promise.
And it’s not about I will change, but rather Christ is already changing me.
And that’s good news.
The way Paul describes is one of reception, and it’s only in a life of reception can the unknown be made known, and our cells be made attentive to the dramatic truth of God’s transformative love and grace.
Two Stories
So then in a way it’s not about self control, but rather about accepting our own mortality.
I see us quite often in my work as a hospital chaplain.
Not too infrequently I encounter people who have been hospitalized for what they assume is simply one too many drinks.
They often say the same thing.
This is my wake-up call. I’m going to get my life together. I’m going to get this thing under control.
Rarely, of course, do I get to see the fruit of their actions.
Except one time I did.
And it was not pretty.
It was a middle-aged man, not too much older than me, who had been hospitalized and was in quite bad shape.
He was unconscious and had the telltale signs of a person whose liver had quite literally taken too much.
Yellow and jaundiced, he lay there unconscious in the bed.
And as I sat there and talked with his family and his loved ones and prayed with them and encouraged them, something about his story rang familiar.
Sure enough, looking back in his chart when I was going back to track my meeting with this family and patient, I scrolled down a little bit in the chart notes and I noticed that I had actually seen this same man some months prior.
I remember hearing many of the same things from him.
This is a wake up call. I’m going to get my life together. I’m going to get this thing under control.
Quite clearly he had not.
What he had thought he had control over had in fact turned out to be his slave master.
And why, as unorthodox and pre-modern as those words sound to us today about slavery and bondage, I think in many ways they still ring true.
The man had been unable to admit that alcohol was his slave master, and that he was in bondage to it.
He thought he was free, but he was anything, anything but free.
And this is why I find the path of Alcoholics Anonymous so intriguing.
Each and every time they meet together, they say willingly, they say this:
I’m an alcoholic.
I am defeated.
I’m a slave to this.
Perhaps not so much in those certain terms.
See, us modern people today, we tend to think that if we’re a slave to something, we’re not free.
Paul says quite the opposite.
That when we finally stop pretending that we are in control, when we finally acknowledge our own bondage, we become open to a different kind of freedom.
Not by our own power or efforts or trying harder, but by the power of the one who already conquered death:
Jesus.
And that brings me to a second story.
The first man sought freedom through control.
The second man found freedom through trust.
A few days ago, I think it was driving perhaps to and from church here, that I was listening to an evangelical podcast about a man sharing his story about sex addiction.
And he had tried it all.
More rules.
More control.
More attempts at behavior modification.
None of it worked.
And none of it worked because none of it got to the heart of the matter.
The deeper rot inside of him that was a deep woundedness and brokenness that he could neither fix or control on his own.
One day his wife came home and asked him straight out:
“Is this you?”
Directly confronted with the reality, he did the unthinkable.
He didn’t try to fix things.
He didn’t try to manage.
He didn’t try to control things.
He simply surrendered.
“Yes”, he said.
And in surrendering and admitting that he could not fix things on his own, he joined a recovery group where he opened himself up to the radical and transformative grace of God.
He made himself receptive to this truth.
That when he finally acknowledged his own death and failure, newness could be born within him.
Whereas in the past he sought freedom through control and trying harder, instead he found freedom through trust.
The Good News
Friends, this is the good news of the gospel.
Like this is it right here.
Not that we finally can get our lives under control, but that in Jesus Christ, as we’ve already sang this morning, our chains are broken and we’ve been set free.
Thanks.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.