Somewhere you decided that needing other people to help you walk with God was a kind of failure. Maybe a church handed you rules dressed up as relationship, correction that had no warmth in it, until “accountability” became a word that made your shoulders tense before anyone finished the sentence. So you did the reasonable thing. You backed away from anyone who might tell you what to do with your own soul, and you called the distance freedom, because for a while, it felt exactly like freedom feels — lighter, unsupervised, entirely your own.
Lighter is not the same thing as free, though, and it took a while for that difference to show up.
There’s a particular kind of person this pattern would recognize instantly: someone convinced that submitting their own judgment to anyone else’s, even briefly, even to people who have walked further than they have, is a liberty being taken from them rather than a liberty being protected. It sounds like strength. It usually isn’t. It’s often just untested judgment wearing the costume of independence, and untested judgment has a long, quiet history of leading people somewhere they never meant to go.
Christ addressed this directly, and He addressed it to people who already considered themselves believers, which is worth noticing before anything else. “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31-32, NKJV). Read the order of that sentence carefully, because the order is the entire point. Freedom does not come first. Abiding comes first — a word that means staying, remaining, not drifting off after the first uncomfortable correction — and freedom is what eventually grows out of the staying, not what replaces it.
Abide is not a passive word.
It is closer to a discipline than a feeling. It requires returning to the same text on the day you don’t want to, submitting a conclusion you were proud of to a passage that quietly contradicts it, staying in a conversation with people who see something in you that you can’t see in yourself. None of that is comfortable. All of it is what Christ calls the actual road to the freedom you were chasing by avoiding it.
The men He was talking to bristled immediately, the way people usually do when someone suggests their freedom might not be as complete as they assumed. They protested that they had never been in bondage to anyone, a claim that was not even true of their own history, let alone their present condition. Christ’s answer went past their objection to the deeper claim underneath it. “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin” (John 8:34, NKJV) — and then, further down, the line that should be sitting with you right now more than any of the others: “Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36, NKJV).
Free indeed.
Not the counterfeit kind, the kind that looks like freedom because nobody is currently telling you what to do. The kind that actually holds up under pressure, because it was built by staying close to Him rather than staying clear of everyone who might slow you down.
Here’s what makes this hard to hear if you’ve been burned before. The people who hurt you with rules probably called it discipleship too. That’s real, and it deserves to be named honestly rather than argued away. But the answer to counterfeit order was never no order. A counterfeit exists precisely because there is a genuine article it’s imitating badly. Bad accountability doesn’t prove all accountability is bondage any more than a false peace proves all peace is false. It proves you were handed a copy, and you are still owed the original.
You are not wrong to want distance from what hurt you. You may simply be putting the distance in the wrong place — pulling away from anyone at all, when the actual danger was never nearness itself. It was nearness to the wrong thing, offered in Christ’s name by people who never checked whether their rules matched His words.
The original does not ask you to hand your judgment over to a person. It asks you to abide — stay, return, submit your conclusions to the text and to people who love you enough to say the hard thing — in Christ’s own word, specifically. That is a very different claim than the one that hurt you, even though from a distance the shape can look similar enough to keep you running from both.
So the freedom you have been calling independence — no counsel, no correction, no one close enough to see you clearly — is not nothing. It’s real. It’s just smaller than what He was offering, and it came at a cost you may not have priced yet: nobody standing close enough to catch what you can’t see coming.
What might it cost you to keep confusing distance for freedom, when the freedom He actually offers was never found out there alone?
Focus Verse: “Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” — John 8:36 (NKJV)
Reflection Question: Name one person or one practice of accountability you’ve quietly kept at arm’s length because it felt like a threat to your freedom. What is it actually costing you to keep that distance?
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