I had a long-time friend from my newspaper days suddenly stop communicating with me this year. No phone calls or emails.

I reasoned, “Well, I know he hates what I write on my website. Maybe something really turned him off.”

Then, on my birthday a few weeks ago, I got a phone call from him. As part of catching up, he asked me if I was still writing.

I said, “I guess you don’t check into my site anymore?”

There was a long pause, so I added, “You just can’t stomach it, right?”

He replied something like, “This is a discussion I don’t want to have.” Before changing the subject entirely, he simply stated, “There’s just no definition of God that satisfies me.”

Later on, reflecting on what he said, I thought, “Wow, God just cannot win! He writes this whole huge Book explaining exactly who He is, and all that he wants to be to each and every person for eternity, and it’s all discarded with outright contempt.”

Just yesterday, in running a few errands, including standing in a super-long line at the post office, I listened to an old sermon of my pastor’s on my Walkman, and found this passage:

God Almighty loves freedom. It’s a basic function of His character and His nature. Now if you take a list of theology books about the essence of His deity, you’ll see attributes such as “omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and eternal life and love and grace and immutability and righteousness.” But you won’t see freedom. It should be there, not just as an attribute, but as a function.

God loves freedom. He loves to just go be Himself— unrestricted, unrestrained, un-held back. Just go be His giving self. The heart of God is a heart of giving. It’s a life of living for others.

God the Father lives for God the Son. Ephesians 1 says He wants His Son to be exalted as the head of all things in the heavens and in the earth.

God the Holy Spirit lives to see Jesus Christ glorified. God the Son lives to glorify the Father. You know what they’re doing—they’re living for each other.

The Divine principle of life is freely living for others. And when you see great Christian activity, you see that giving spirit of God living in His people.

William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army and a great warrior for Christ, was asked on his death bed to send a Christmas message to his troops around the world, and he wrote one word on a telegram: “Others.”

God loves freedom to just go and give. He loves freedom so much that when He made man, He gave man freedom. He was willing to put at risk His eternal purpose and plan, and pleasure and design, in order to vest you and me with liberty and freedom.

What grace does is it exalts freedom and liberty to the highest point possible. We’re not led to be under a performance system that requires some performance from you in order for God, or anyone else, to accept you.

Under a system of grace, there’s an understanding that you don’t live for yourself, and for your own pleasures and desires, but you’re living for another, and for His glory. That’s real freedom.

Now, freedom scares people. That’s why it’s so easy to put people under legalism, because if I tell you what to, who’s responsible?

Folks, the way your life pleases God is not by putting yourself under a performance system, and saying, “Boy, if I go out and win 10 people to Jesus today, God’s going to be happy with me.” Or, “If I give $50,000 to missions this year, God’s going to be happy with me.” That isn’t it.

The way your life is going to make God happy is for you to find out what His pleasure is—what His plan is and what He’s doing, then have that be what you’re doing.

You know how it’s had? Not by a performance system, but by being filled with some wisdom and knowledge. By understanding who we are and understanding the competency that gives us in Christ.

You see, that wisdom makes us confident to handle these things. If you’ve got convictions, you don’t have to make a lot of decisions. A lot of the decisions are made for you by your convictions.”