Freedom Is Not the Absence of Struggle

Freedom Is Not the Absence of Struggle

— By M.T. Clark — P-2010, 07/08/2026 — Today’s Audio Podcast

Today’s Message on YouTube:

Today’s photo of a brilliant blue sky filled with towering white clouds over the green, tree-covered slopes of the mountains comes to us from yours truly, as I captured this view during a Christian music festival at the Sunday River Resort in Newry, Maine, on July 2nd, 2022.

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I share this mountain view to visually represent our arrival at another midweek summit, so happy hump day, and to encourage us to praise the Lord and to help us to remember that next to His kingdom glory, our problems seem pretty small. 

 Being at a Christian music festival and standing among the mountains with worship music rolling across the valley really lifts the soul and puts everything back to its proper perspective. The peaks that look so permanent and immovable are small things in the hand of the God who made them. When we lift our eyes and worship the Lord in the middle of His creation, our troubles may not vanish, but they do seem more manageable when they are compared to the greatness of the God who saved us. 

Our series, “Freedom Stories,” continues today with an honest word about what freedom in Christ does, and does not, remove.

Freedom Is Not the Absence of Struggle

There is a quiet lie that attaches itself to new believers, and to plenty of seasoned ones too, and it says that if you were truly free, the struggle would simply be over.

By that measure, the apostle Paul himself would have to be counted a failure. In the seventh chapter of Romans, he describes a war going on inside him with startling honesty. 

He writes in Romans 7:21-23 (NKJV): “I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” 

This is not a baby Christian writing. This is the man who wrote much of the New Testament, describing a genuine war between the new life he has been given and the old patterns that still fight against it.

I know that war from the inside, and for years I misunderstood and misread it completely. 

When I first came to Christ, I assumed the fight with sin would be over, and so every time the old pull came back, I took it as evidence that nothing had really happened to me at all, except that I was forgiven. 

I was saved, and I was still stuck — still reaching for old comforts, telling myself I was just a big sinner trying to do a little better and that God would forgive me because I was powerless to live as He called me to live. As much as I was happy to be forgiven, my failures caused me much grief. 

What I did not yet understand is the very thing Paul is teaching here: the presence of the struggle is not the absence of freedom.

Watch where Paul goes next, because it is everything. After crying out, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” he answers his own question in the very next breath: “I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” 

The struggle is real, and the deliverance is real, and the two of them live in the same chapter of scripture and in the same man at the same time. 

Paul is not free from the fight in this life. He is free in the fight, because the verdict over him has already been settled by Christ. 

He is a son fighting from victory, not a slave fighting for it.

This is why the presence of temptation, of the old voice, of the appetite you thought you had left behind, is not proof that your freedom was counterfeit. 

A person who feels no struggle at all may simply have surrendered the field, while the person who feels the pull and resists it shows the very evidence that something new is alive in them and worth fighting for. 

Dead men do not struggle. 

The fight you feel is often the sign of the new creation pushing back against the old, and that is a hopeful thing, not a disqualifying one.

As much as I was grieved about being seemingly powerless over my sin, the Lord was working in me and bringing me further and further into repentance until one day – the pain of suffering in my sin caused me to call on God to help me to overcome and He was faithful to lead me out of the darkness of my addiction to freedom. 

So do not measure your freedom by the absence of the battle. Measure it by Whose you are in the middle of it. 

If you are in Christ, the outcome of the war was settled at the cross, and every honest resistance you put up today is you living out a freedom you already possess rather than earning one you are afraid you have lost. 

The struggle is not a sign that grace has failed. It is the ground on which grace is teaching you to stand, and the same Jesus who answered Paul’s cry answers yours: thanks be to God, He delivers us still.

Keep on walking and talking with God.

— M.T.

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“The views, opinions, and commentary of this publication are those of the author, M.T. Clark, only, and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of any of the photographers, artists, ministries, or other authors of the other works that may be included in this publication, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities the author may represent.”

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