Free Agents?

Much is made these days in the sports world of being a free agent. To be a free agent means you’re not bound to one team; you’re free to shop your talents to the highest bidder. Free agency is the big payoff for professional athletes. Of course the ‘free agent’ market is not just made up of top notch, in demand players. Anyone who can’t find a spot on a team is also considered a ‘free agent’. Come to think of it, in a technical sense I’m a free agent in every sport.

But, as D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones points out below, a Christian is never truly a free agent. Nor would we ever want to be, if we truly understand the privilege of being bound to God through our union with Christ.

Again one of the essential and most obvious things about a Christian is that (he) lives always realizing he is in the presence of God. The world does not live in this way; that is the big difference between the Christian and the non-Christian. The Christian is a (person) whose every action should be performed in the light of this intimate relationship to God. He is not, as it were, a free agent. He is a child of God, so that everything he does, he does from this standpoint of being well-pleasing in His sight. That is why the Christian, of necessity, should view everything that happens to him in this world entirely differently from everybody else.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, 20.