Set Free Through Christ-John 8:31-32

    "To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free." " -John 8:31-32
   I have a friend who keeps using these verses to explain how Christians should live their lives and why.  Her meaning of the passage seems to be serve the Lord and be free from sin and eternal death.  I have two problems with that interpretation.  First of all, we will never be free of sin as long as we live.  I understand that if we live in faith we will be free of sin eventually but not immediately.  Every Christian hopes for a long and probably difficult trip to Heaven.  That means that we are living around sin, fighting it daily for years, in the hope of eventual freedom from sin.  That thought leads to my second problem about how to spend every second for years avoiding a lot of momentarily fun or pleasurable things for an abstract award years from now.  I'm not good with abstract ideas, I need some sort of goal or promise to aim for.  (Yes, it does occur to me that kids go to school for (stereotypically) sixteen years of school in the hopes of getting their dream jobs and people work for years to make dreams come true and there are many other examples of people working for an abstract.  I just need to think this through, not debate it.)  So what type of "freedom" was Jesus referring to in that passage?
    Hm, wow, I just reread the passage following (John 8:34-47) and Jesus is referring to everyone being slaves to sin.  It is a long metaphor of fathers and slaves saying that Jesus frees us from sin since we cannot free ourselves.  A slave does not hold his own papers and cannot legally free himself.  Even if he runs away and claims to be free, his master can still come after him with his papers showing that he is a slave.  The only way a slave can be free is if someone else buys him and legally changes the papers to set him free.  Jesus bought us in His Father's name and set us free of Satan and sin. 
    I was going to talk about Galatians 5 and the freedom of Christians from the Old Testament law and the fruits of faith.  I guess I should have reread the context before I planned out my post.  Now I have some thinking to do.

    What does "Christian freedom" or "freed through Jesus" mean to you?

 Here is an awesome song by Micheal Card which I think is applicable to this blog post: "Known By The Scars" on youtube.  "Marks of death that God chose never to erase wounds of loves eternal war."