Freedom Redefined: How the Image of God Shapes the Way We Live
How Our Culture Gets Freedom Wrong and How Scripture Invites Us to Live It Rightly
What Is Freedom?
It’s funny how seemingly small moments with our children can reveal big truths about life and the world around us.
A brief exchange with my seven-year-old recently got me thinking about how our culture understands concepts like autonomy, individualism, liberty—and what it really means to be free.
To celebrate Marsaili’s heavenly birthday, we planned a family photoshoot in the backyard. We had paint and canvases set up, and we gave Liam free rein to paint however he wanted. And he did exactly that—with purple paint all over his body.
When I told him not to paint his entire body, he looked at me with genuine confusion: “But Mommy… you said there were no rules.”
That moment stuck with me. Because isn’t that how much of the world has come to define freedom—until it doesn’t work?
We often use terms interchangeably that were never meant to be synonymous. Freedom, autonomy, and liberty exist in relational harmony, but they are distinct. That distinction matters—because how we define these things shapes how we apply them.
They are interdependent: freedom flourishes when liberty and autonomy are rightly ordered within the constraints that protect all three.
Doing whatever we desire without consequence, order, or restraint isn’t freedom—it’s license. And license is ultimately destructive.
True freedom is not found in self-rule, but in joyful surrender to the One who created all things and who governs by His goodness and grace. Biblical freedom doesn’t lead us inward to dependence on the self; it leads us into communion with a holy God (Galatians 5:1).
The Bible’s First Picture of Freedom
Regardless of the position you might hold on secondary issues related to how many days or years it took for God to create the world, one foundational truth unites us as believers: God created it all. And that “all” includes us—humanity.
Today, as Americans, we celebrate the birth of our country. One of our country’s foundational documents asserts that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But as Christians, we know that if a Creator endows those rights, then we are also made in His image—and therefore accountable to His design for how those liberties are to be stewarded. When liberty is divorced from the responsibilities that come with being created and redeemed by a perfectly just and faithful God, it quickly devolves into license—and ultimately, into chaos.
We find true freedom when we draw back to the original design and function God created for us, humanity. Freedom isn’t about what we evade, it’s about purposeful pursuit. God gave humanity five instructions when he created us:
Be fruitful and multiply. Yes, bearing children is sacred, but fruitfulness also means we resist idleness and stagnation, resting in the promise of our purpose (Genesis 1:28).
Subdue the earth by bringing order to it, becoming peace bringers rather than peacekeepers (Romans 12:18).
Utilize the earth and the resources we have been given with a heart posture of gratitude and reverent stewardship (1 Peter 4:10).
Practice faithful obedience as a response to the love God has repeatedly shown us through His mercy—even when we do not choose Him first (1 John 4:19).
Live in communion with one another as a body of united believers. Interdependence isn’t something to be feared. Be dedicated to stirring one another on to good works (Hebrews 10:24–25).
This is what bearing God’s image looks like functionally for us as Christians in a modern society hellbent on painting God as a heartless narcissistic monster. God desires this level of function and purpose for us because God desires relationship with us. He invites into fellowship with Him and offers us an opportunity to bring love, peace, and mercy to a chaotic world, not because He needs us, but because He is that gracious.
Our obedience to the commands God has given us does not determine our value as human beings—it is a response to it. We were made to bring honor and praise to a Creator most deserving of it. When we are allow ourselves to see and recognize our value as image-bearers, we are drawn to fulfill the purpose for which we were made.
Freedom Fractured
Humanity has long been in the business of twisting and manipulating the meaning of freedom. We can trace it all the way back to Eden.
Adam and Eve’s choice to take from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil wasn’t sinful because the tree was evil. The sin was in their self-serving grasp for power. It was a decision that set into motion a recurring pattern of moral collapse, growing more destructive with each generation. Within a single generation, humanity fell from divine communion with God to fratricide (Genesis 3 & 4). This decline is not isolated to Eden or the story of Cain. It’s a pattern that is echoed across human history:
Humanity denies their Creator.
Humanity doubts their Imago Dei purpose and function.
Humanity deviates from their call and design.
Humanity descends into moral failure, each generation compounding the consequences.
And yet…
God intervenes with grace, warning, or covenant to call them back.
Humanity faces consequences—sometimes with repentance, but often with hardened hearts.
Still, God remains, preserving a path to redemption.
This is the anatomy of freedom’s manipulation: what begins with seductive promise of self-sovereignty always ends in the erosion of life, truth, and community. Moral collapse and rebellion begin with subtle cracks in the foundation. The serpent’s strategy in Eden wasn’t to tempt Eve by presenting her with something glaringly sinful. And he does the same with us today. He begins with seeds of doubt and cloaks temptation in something seemingly beautiful—in Eve’s case, the desire to be wise.
Time and time again over the course of history we see this pattern. Moral depravity. Weaponized empathy. Selfish, unyielding denial of Christ. This is sin. This is the spiritual war we have been fighting since the beginning of time.
Praise be to God our freedom does not hinge on our ability to claw our way out of the rubble and remains of our fallen selves. The path to redemption is not dependent on us. It was finished at the cross.
The Redemption of Freedom
In Eden, Adam and Eve hid in their shame after they disobeyed God. In response, God called them out of the shadows. He didn’t desire for them to live in shame’s prison. He called them into the light. He clothed them. He covered them. He foreshadowed the way in which the sins and shame of humanity would eventually be covered by the blood of the Lamb (Genesis 3:21, Hebrews 9:22).
Jesus (Emanuel, “God with us”) lived among us. He endured every temptation we could ever know and still did not sin (Hebrews 4:15). He dwelled among us. He knew and still knows our pain and our sorrow. And as the true and perfect Image Bearer, He submitted to the will of the Father and paid the price for our sin. His death, resurrection, ascension, and the gift of the Holy Spirit form the redemptive arc of true freedom—freedom we could never earn, especially while hiding from our God-given identity. Jesus restores our ability to live freely and to become who we were always created to be.
Living in Christ’s Freedom
So many of us have forgotten who we were created to be. We live in a strange tension. We feel both trapped and lost at the same time because we’ve searched for freedom and purpose everywhere but the One who gave us our design, our function, and our freedom in the first place. To live out true, Christ-centered freedom, we must recognize, internalize, and embody the commands God gave us from the very beginning.
We have to choose fruitfulness over idleness. We have to become peace bringers, courageous enough to step into systems of brokenness with compassion and inspire change. We have to preserve, protect, and manage the resources we have been given with gratitude and a sincere reverence for the gifts we have been blessed to receive. We have to seek above all else to bring honor and glory to God, even when it is unpopular. And we must do all of these things in fellowship with one another. We were never built for isolation. We were built for belonging and purpose.
True freedom isn’t found in pursuit of self. It is found in surrender to the God who Created all things and still calls us beloved. The responsibility of Christ-centered freedom is ultimately to embrace surrender, because in that surrender we become coheirs with Christ. A flawed people becomes a redeemed people. A fiercely loved people who God calls to something greater than ourselves. Jesus made that kind of freedom possible, and now we have the profound honor of living in it.