If you have received grace and it hasn’t changed your life, it wasn’t really grace.

Real grace makes a difference. It sets you free from everything you’ve always wanted to escape, but couldn’t. It sets you free to run to the home you’ve longed for all your life. It hands you a glass of cold water after hours in the scorching sun. It puts food before you for the first time in so long, you don’t remember the last time you ate. It welcomes you in out of the cold and wraps you in a warm blanket.

People who receive that kind of grace bury themselves in it. When the gates of the prison fly open, they run out. When home is in sight, they will walk across broken glass or burning coals to get there. When the water is poured, it’s bottoms up; food offered quickly becomes food devoured; and the person wrapped in the blanket after days of exposure will not be separated from anything that supplies the warmth he has missed for so long.

Do you wonder if you are “in Christ?” Are you lingering in your prison cell, or running for your life toward the gate that’s been thrown open?

If you’re just sitting there, wasting away in your cell, I suppose you’re free to do that. But I also say, “Dude…!” You don’t need grace to get that kind of freedom. That kind of freedom is just oppression in disguise, like slavery with designer manacles.

True freedom does not leave you free to choose slavery.