Sting Song Says

By Fred Pruitt

I think it was a Sting song that said, “If you love someone, set them free.” That is a great truth. God did that to us. He took the greatest gamble of all eternity to create humanity already knowing the road mankind would walk.

But He also knew that a son cannot truly be a son except he is tried and comes to love on his own. As it says in Hebrews of Jesus — and us in Him as well — “he learned obedience through the things he suffered.” Freedom gives us the opportunity to come to a real consciousness through an interaction of opposites, to learn “no” and “yes” by experience, and we are “bruised” in the process but come out pure gold in the end.

Otherwise, without the bumps and falls and scratches, we really do not come to true consciousness. God could “make” us so, but then we would be automatons and not true sons who do the will of the Father from the heart and understanding. He can make rocks obey him, but rocks cannot be sons.

We all make such a big deal about who is right or who is wrong and what is right to believe or what is wrong to believe when the real truth is it is ALL necessary and God means it to be. It isn’t correct head knowledge or even right doctrine in the end that saves or causes us to walk in the right way, but heart and love only as the background, foundation, and basis for the whole thing.

I used to have a hard time understanding why Saul, who just kept some animals to sacrifice, was rejected, and David, who murdered a man and stole his wife, was accepted, until I saw the heart thing. Saul was presumptuous of self, and that is abomination to God. David responded to temptation and suffered accordingly, but his heart smote him because his true heart was God’s. Saul was only after his reputation and worldly power.

The thing about setting people free and loosening the borders, is that the truth will out. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” (Who we are inwardly is who we are outwardly, and we are here speaking of spirit-source [Spirit of Truth or spirit of error], our true foundation without pretense, the essence of being, but not “thinking” in the rational sense.) That is a fixed truth. God is the author of all that. He’s got the perfect system, with freedom at the very heart of it.

Let people go. The truth will rise to the top. Just like the two sons, the first said he’d do the will and didn’t, and the 2nd said he wouldn’t but ended up doing it. The truth always comes out. This is the patience of the saints.