My friend Rich Dixon is helping me out here, with posts that come just at the right time and just with the right challenge for me.

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Our team completed an unconventional bike tour last week.

In the spirit of opportunities and blessings discovered during COVID-19, we did team devotions via Zoom. We heard from amazing people across the U.S. about human trafficking, biblical justice, freedom, and finding God and hope after surviving a horrible plane crash.

Dick Foth began his conversation with Jesus’ words:

“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

So there’s a chain: obedience –> truth –> freedom.

Jesus says we don’t discover truth simply by reading and studying. We have to hang out with truth, live and experience it, to really know it. And knowing truth, Jesus says, is the path to freedom.

To reinforce the link between truth and freedom, Dick jumped to the Bible’s first untruth:

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

See it? They were never told they couldn’t touch the fruit, only that they couldn’t eat it. But Eve embellished God’s simple instruction, shaded it ever so slightly.

The serpent used her lie. “Did God really say that?”

She thought doing her own thing would make her free. Turns out there’s another chain: her disobedience, ignoring God’s simple truth, led to bondage.

How often do you and I do something similar? How often do we add (or subtract) to transform His truth into ours?

What might happen if we simply tried to know Jesus and follow His teaching?

Maybe we’d be disciples. Maybe we’d know the truth.

Maybe we’d be free.