Live in freedom, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God.
Well-doing is the fruit of Christian freedom, not its enemy. The Greek is plain: do not make your liberty a veil for wickedness, but rather serve God through it. He gives us principles, not escape routes; the instincts of Christian liberty itself teach us duty and love.
AI summary
Men seize on Christian liberty as a license to live for themselves, but that is a doting opinion I must correct. True freedom harms no one and injures none; it is bondage to sin removed, that we may obey God more readily. We gain liberty precisely to serve Him, not to escape all yoke. Our consciences are freed, yet we remain subject to God and to men.
AI summary
Christians were made to feel themselves children of God, redeemed and free from sin's bondage, equal before Him. That freedom is no fiction: they truly are freemen in the highest sense. Yet to claim Christian liberty as cause to rebel against civil authority is to forget that their subjection to magistrates flows from their very redemption and dignity in Christ.
AI summary