FREED | The Call to Freedom - Jon Tyson
Church of the City New York
COTC NYC
4.8 • 919 Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This Sunday, Pastor Jon opened the new series "FREED" by putting our cultural moment under pressure. We are the freest people in history, and among the most anxious. The freedom we've been promised has not delivered the peace it advertised. What we got instead was exhaustion, comparison, and a quiet sense of fragmentation.
The Bible's definition of freedom is entirely different. The question is not whether you're free to do whatever you want. It's whether you're free to become who you were made to be. Paul, writing to the Galatians, doesn't treat freedom as a footnote to the Gospel, he puts it at the center. From there, Pastor Jon traced what Christ sets us free from: condemnation, religious performance, the pull toward lawlessness, and what we're freed into: a new identity as sons and daughters, the Spirit, a community where we actually belong. Freedom, in this reading, has a direction and a destination.
The invitation of this series is honest work: name what has you bound, reject the lies that sustain it, receive the grace of Jesus, and learn to walk in step with the Spirit alongside people telling the truth.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You could stay standing for the reading of God's Word. |
| 0:04.4 | Our teaching text this morning comes from Galatians chapter 5, verses 1, 13 through 15. |
| 0:12.1 | It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. |
| 0:16.3 | Stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. You, my brothers and |
| 0:22.8 | sisters, were called to be free, but do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh. Rather, |
| 0:29.0 | serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command, |
| 0:34.8 | love your neighbor as yourself. If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. |
| 0:41.5 | This is the word of the Lord. |
| 0:43.5 | You guys can take a seat. |
| 0:45.5 | Good morning. |
| 0:48.4 | I'll never forget when I first moved to the United States attending a baseball game. |
| 0:55.0 | Didn't understand any of the rules. |
| 0:58.0 | And what I didn't understand is the singing of the national anthem before the game. |
| 1:03.0 | You guys ever seen that? |
| 1:05.0 | I didn't know the national anthem. |
| 1:08.0 | Forgive me for not knowing America's national anthem when I didn't live here. |
| 1:13.2 | Okay. |
| 1:14.3 | But when that line, you know, when that line came out, land of the free. People still, exactly, exactly, something in the American heart. Before it's |
| 1:35.7 | even finished, people are on their feet clapping, cheering, land of the free. I remember thinking, |
| 1:43.5 | gosh, the Americans love their freedom. |
| 1:46.0 | Australia started as a penal colony on the bottom of the world. |
| 1:52.0 | There was a revolutionary war a couple hundred years ago, |
... |
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