God wants you to silence the ignorance of foolish people by doing what is right. Live as free people, but don’t hide behind your freedom when you do evil. Instead, use your freedom to serve God.
1 Peter 2:15–16
The freedom the Bible talks about is not the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want. It doesn’t give you permission to argue with authority or to disobey orders from those in charge. The freedom spoken of here is the freedom to be a servant of God. The world may tell you that freedom is following your heart and giving in to your desires, but that isn’t freedom—it’s actually bondage to your flesh, which most often has anything but God’s will in mind. A life bent on serving yourself is ultimately a life of bondage to the cravings of your sinful nature. And it leads to all kinds of trouble like fear, worry, stress, bitterness, addiction, and fights. When you serve yourself you serve a small and ineffective god, but true freedom comes when you become the servant of the one true God.
Being called a “servant” doesn’t much sound like freedom to the untrained ear, but serving the perfect being who wants only what’s best for you, knows all things, sees all things, and protects and saves you isn’t the normal kind of servitude. Serving God is serving perfection, it’s serving love, and it’s the best enslavement there ever was. And since God is perfect in all he does, serving him equals freedom from all that is imperfect and bad—freedom from the sin that controls you when you live to serve yourself.