We tend to think freedom means having no limits, calling our own shots, doing whatever feels right in the moment. But the psalmist paints a radically different picture. He ties wide-open living to walking according to God’s ways, not away from them. In Psalm 119:45, he connects true liberty with seeking the Lord’s precepts—a freedom found not in breaking God’s boundaries, but in loving them.

Freedom That Runs on Rails

Think of a train. It’s most “free” when it’s on the tracks, moving at full speed toward its destination. The moment it leaves those rails, it doesn’t gain freedom—it crashes. God’s Word is like those tracks. “And I will walk in freedom, for I have sought Your precepts” (Psalm 119:45). The psalmist isn’t afraid of God’s commands; he runs to them, because they keep him from derailing his life.

Jesus echoes this when He says that if we continue in His word, we are truly His disciples, and we will know the truth that sets us free (John 8:31–32). Freedom is not the absence of authority; it’s living under the right authority. The more deeply we submit to God’s Word, the less we’re bossed around by our feelings, addictions, fears, and cultural pressures. His precepts don’t chain us; they chain up the sins that once enslaved us.

Seeking the Path, Not the Shortcut

Notice the psalmist doesn’t say, “I will walk in freedom because I know all Your precepts,” but “for I have sought Your precepts.” Freedom isn’t just about having Bible information; it’s about an ongoing, hungry pursuit. It’s a lifestyle of asking, “Lord, what do You say about this? How can I align my steps with Your heart here?” That seeking posture keeps our hearts soft and our feet steady.

James describes God’s Word as “the perfect law of freedom” and says the blessed person is the one who looks intently into it and actually does what it says (James 1:25). Our culture promises quick shortcuts to happiness—follow your heart, redefine truth, ignore guilt. But shortcuts always skip the cross and miss the resurrection. Seeking God’s precepts means we’re willing to let Him confront us, cleanse us, and then comfort us on the other side of obedience.

Practicing Freedom Today

So what does walking in freedom look like on an ordinary day? It might mean opening Scripture before you open your phone, letting God set the tone. It might mean confessing a secret sin instead of managing it, because Christ died to set you free, not help you cope (Galatians 5:1). It might mean obeying a hard command—offering forgiveness, telling the truth, refusing compromise at work—and discovering that peace follows obedience, even when feelings lag behind.

Freedom also looks like joy in the long run. As you consistently seek God’s ways, your desires begin to change. The temptations that once hooked you start to lose their shine. His Spirit writes His law on your heart, and you find yourself wanting what He wants (Jeremiah 31:33; Philippians 2:13). That’s the miracle of grace: God doesn’t just hand us a path; He walks it with us and reshapes us as we go, until His will becomes our delight, not our dread.

Lord, thank You that Your commands lead to true freedom, not bondage. Today, move my heart to seek Your precepts and give me courage to obey them, step by step.

IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE to overemphasize the importance of sound doctrine in the life of a Christian. Right thinking about all spiritual matters is imperative if we would have right living. As men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles, sound character does not grow out of unsound teaching.

The word doctrine means simply religious beliefs held and taught. It is the sacred task of all Christians, first as believers and then as teachers of religious beliefs, to be certain that these beliefs correspond exactly to truth. A precise agreement between belief and fact constitutes soundness in doctrine. We cannot afford to have less.

The apostles not only taught truth but contended for its purity against any who would corrupt it. The Pauline epistles resist every effort of false teachers to introduce doctrinal vagaries. John's epistles are sharp with condemnation of those teachers who harassed the young church by denying the incarnation and throwing doubts upon the doctrine of the Trinity; and Jude in his brief but powerful epistle rises to heights of burning eloquence as he pours scorn upon evil teachers who would mislead the saints.

Each generation of Christians must look to its beliefs. While truth itself is unchanging, the minds of men are porous vessels out of which truth can leak and into which error may seep to dilute the truth they contain. The human heart is heretical by nature and runs to error as naturally as a garden to weeds. All a man, a church or a denomination needs to guarantee deterioration of doctrine is to take everything for granted and do nothing. The unattended garden will soon be overrun with weeds; the heart that fails to cultivate truth and root out error will shortly be a theological wilderness; the church or denomination that grows careless on the highway of truth will before long find itself astray, bogged down in some mud flat from which there is no escape.

In every field of human thought and activity accuracy is considered a virtue. To err ever so slightly is to invite serious loss, if not death itself. Only in religious thought is faithfulness to truth looked upon as a fault. When men deal with things earthly and temporal they demand truth; when they come to the consideration of things heavenly and eternal they hedge and hesitate as if truth either could not be discovered or didn't matter anyway.

Montaigne said that a liar is one who is brave toward God and a coward toward men; for a liar faces God and shrinks from men. Is this not simply a proof of unbelief? Is it not to say that the liar believes in men but is not convinced of the existence of God, and is willing to risk the displeasure of a God who may not exist rather than that of man who obviously does?

I think also that deep, basic unbelief is back of human carelessness in religion. The scientist, the physician, the navigator deals with matters he knows are real; and because these things are real the world demands that both teacher and practitioner be skilled in the knowledge of them. The teacher of spiritual things only is required to be unsure in his beliefs, ambiguous in his remarks and tolerant of every religious opinion expressed by anyone, even by the man least qualified to hold an opinion.

Haziness of doctrine has always been the mark of the liberal. When the Holy Scriptures are rejected as the final authority on religious belief something must be found to take their place. Historically that something has been either reason or sentiment: if sentiment, it has been humanism. Sometimes there has been an admixture of the two, as may be seen in liberal churches today. These will not quite give up the Bible, neither will they quite believe it; the result is an unclear body of beliefs more like a fog than a mountain, where anything may be true but nothing may be trusted as being certainly true.

We have gotten accustomed to the blurred puffs of gray fog that pass for doctrine in modernistic churches and expect nothing better, but it is a cause for real alarm that the fog has begun of late to creep into many evangelical churches. From some previously unimpeachable sources are now coming vague statements consisting of a milky admixture of Scripture, science and human sentiment that is true to none of its ingredients because each one works to cancel the others out.

Certain of our evangelical brethren appear to be laboring under the impression that they are advanced thinkers because they are rethinking evolution and reevaluating various Bible doctrines or even divine inspiration itself; but so far are they from being advanced thinkers that they are merely timid followers of modernism-fifty years behind the parade.

Little by little evangelical Christians these days are being brainwashed. One evidence is that increasing numbers of them are becoming ashamed to be found unequivocally on the side of truth. They say they believe but their beliefs have been so diluted as to be impossible of clear definition.

Moral power has always accompanied definitive beliefs. Great saints have always been dogmatic. We need right now a return to a gentle dogmatism that smiles while it stands stubborn and firm on the Word of God that liveth and abideth forever.

I am the Lord that healeth thee. - Exodus 15:26

Them that had need of healing He healed. - Luke 9:2

All the sick in the crowd round Christ were sent away well; but the gifts He bestowed so broadcast had no relation to their spiritual natures, and gifts that have relation to our spiritual nature cannot be thus given in entire disregard of our actions in the matter.

Christ cannot heal you unless you take His healing power. He did on earth sometimes, though not often, cure physical disease without the requirement of faith on the part of the healed person or his friends, but He cannot (He would if He could) do so in regard of the disease of sin. There, unless a man goes to Him and trusts Him, and submits his spirit to the operation of Christ’s pardoning and hallowing grace, there cannot be any remedy applied, nor any cure effected. That is no limitation of the universal power of the Gospel. It is only saying that if you do not take the medicine you cannot expect that it will do you any good. And surely that is plain, common sense. There are plenty of people who fancy that Christ’s healing and saving power will, somehow or other, reach all men, apart from the man’s act. It is all a delusion. If it could, it would. But if salvation could be thus given, independent of the man, it would come down to a mere mechanical thing, and would not be worth the having. So I say, if you will not take the medicine, you cannot get the cure.

I say, further, if you do not feel that you are ill you will not take the medicine. A man crippled with lameness, or tortured with fever, or groping in the daylight and blind, or deaf to all the sounds of this sweet world, could not but know that he was a subject for the healing. But the awful thing about our disease is that the worse you are the less you know it; and that when conscience ought to be speaking loudest it is quieted altogether, and leaves a man often perfectly at peace, so that after he has done evil things he wipes his mouth and says, " I have done no harm." Do not be contented until you have recognised what is true, that you - you, stand a sinful man before God.

There is surely no madness comparable to the madness of the man that prefers to keep his sin and die rather than go to Christ and live. Will you look into your own heart? Will you recognise that awful solemn law of God, which ought to regulate all our doings, and, alas! has been so often neglected and so often transgressed by each of us? Oh! if once you saw yourself as you are, you would turn to Him and say, " Heal me"; and you would be healed, and He would lay His hand upon you. If only you will go, sick and broken, to Him, and trust in His great sacrifice, and open your hearts to the influx of His healing power, He will give you "perfect soundness"; and your song will be, "Bless the Lord, O my soul. . . . Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth thy diseases."