Not long after the Apostle Paul’s Roman citizenship enabled him to escape being scourged by soldiers, a Jewish religious leader ordered him to be smacked in the mouth for declaring that his conscience was clean. Not partially, but completely.
It’s one thing to be born a free citizen, and so not subject to torture, but a very different thing to confess that you have no consciousness of any offence against God or man. Claiming a clean conscience can result in swift punishment, because ritualistic religious leaders reject the very idea of any such freedom.
They thrive on human bondage and subservience, and react at the very thought that a believer in Christ can live free from concocted rules and regulations. We were freed to remain free, not freed from bondage to sin only to be bound to religious legalism of any and every kind — including those on the treadmills of organizational fundamentalism.
“Free indeed” by definition is “free in deed” — not just free to think but free to act.