"It's my life, and I'll do what I want to."
Most people define freedom as license, as in pursuing whatever a person wants to.
However, this line of thinking produces more bondage than freedom.
How do we really know what we want, unless we know who we are?
For the many who have chosen to do "whatever they want", who have chosen to go their own way, the result is a life full of bitterness and fear, one in which, so desperate to connect with and find purpose in something, they end up engaging in the same conformity which brings weakness of character and thinness of thought.
No matter how brazen a man may be, he needs to depend on something, he has to find a source, a sense of stability in a world which never stops shaking.
The rising number of people receiving something from government is an element of the trend in which people need security, but because they have despised the traditions of their elders or have dismissed the wisdom of the ages, they settle for whichever institution commands the most force and enforces immediate results.
"It's my life, and I do what I want to."
What is your life? Who are you? If those two questions do not get settled, then how can you know what you want? How can you understand the life that you have received?
The matter is not forcing people to adapt or adopt a prevalent opinion, or to get in line with the latest fad. We seek to identify with something whole and certain, a safe spot, and landing from which we can take off in times of exuberance and flee to in times of storm.
Without the certainty of certain things, there is no peace, there is no resource,, and life becomes an amalgam of needs and uncertainties which are never resolved. There is not life to live, to do what you want if you do not know who you are, if you do not know the reason why you are here, if you do not know the One who has made you, who has called you by name, who longs to make you His!
In seeking to be free, in seeking to strip ourselves of any boundaries, we then have nothing to depend on but ourselves. We can never rest, restlessly looking for stability and acceptance in a world which offers neither, and has no interest in providing either.
Not bondage, not arrest, but a definition, that is what every person needs. We need to confine ourselves, to identify with something in order to establish the "I", so that we can then flow into a life in which we do the things that we want to do.
First identity, then stability, then activity — this pattern must be followed if man wishes to be free.