In Psalm 119:45 the psalmist writes, “I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts.”
On the face of it, something doesn’t seem right. How is it that seeking out God’s precepts, presumably to obey them, is to walk around in freedom? How does obedience go together with freedom?
Actually, this relationship between obedience and freedom is commonly understood in developing any skill. Consider what goes into learning to play a sport like, say, basketball. I’ve watched young people practice this or that way of dribbling the ball and they do it over and over until it becomes second nature to them. They want to master the skill so that they become free from the need to always be concentrating on it.
So with matters of the Spirit. The more carefully we follow the do’s and don’ts that govern the process of listening to God, the more freedom we will experience from the grunt work of it all. Then, as with mastering any skill, our initial, careful obedience will eventually yield in us an effortless response to God in which we feel truly free.
