But yet there is immediately a greater and fuller.
When we hear those words of Jesus, we see immediately that not the idea
of imprisonment but the idea of liberty, not the idea of restraint but
that of setting free, is the idea which is really in His mind when he
offers the fullest life to human kind. Have you often thought of how the
whole Bible is a Book of Liberty, of how It rings with liberty from
beginning to end, of how the great men are the men of liberty, of how
the Old Testament, the great picture which forever shines, is the
emancipator, leading forth out of imprisonment the people of God, who
were to do the great work of God in the very much larger and freer life
in which they were to live? The prophet, the psalmist, are ever
preaching and singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of
man, that man was not imprisoned in order to fulfil himself, but shall
open his life, and every new progress shall be into a new region of
existence which lie has not touched as yet. When we turn from the Old
Testament to the New Testament, how absolutely clear that idea is!
Christ is the very embodiment of human liberty. In His own personal life
and in everything that He did and said, He was forever uttering the
great gospel that man, in order to become his completest, must become
his freest, that what a man did when he entered into a new life was to
open a new region in which new powers were to find their exercise, in
which he was to be able to be and do things which he could not be and do
in more restricted life.
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