In his sermon “Christ Our Life—Soon to Appear,” Charles Spurgeon wonderfully captures the tension we feel in this life. We are new creatures in Christ, yet we still are bound.

Do you ever feel like those lions in the Zoological Gardens, restlessly walking up and down before the bars of their cage, and seeming to feel that they were never meant to be confined within those narrow limits? Sometimes they are for thrusting their heads through the bars, and then for dashing back and tearing the back of their dungeon, or for tearing up the pavement beneath them as if they yearned for liberty. 

Do you ever feel like that? Does your soul ever want to get free from her cage? Here is an iron bar of sin, of doubt, and there is another iron bar of mistrust and infirmity. Oh, if you could tear them away, could get rid of them all, you would do something for Christ—you would be like Christ! Oh, if you could but, by some means or other, burst the bands of this captivity! But you cannot, and therefore you feel uneasy. 

You may have seen an eagle with a chain upon its foot, standing on a rock—poor unhappy thing! It flaps its wings—looks up to the sun—wants to fly right straight ahead at it, and stare the sun out of countenance—looks to the blue sky, and seems as if it could sniff the blue beyond the dusky clouds and wants to be away; and so it tries its wings and dreams of mounting—but that chain, that cruel chain, remorselessly holds it down! 

Has not it often been so with you? You feel, “I am not meant to be what I am, I am sure I am not; I have a something in me which is adapted for something better, and higher, and I want to mount and soar—but that chain—that dragging chain of the body of sin and death keeps me down.” 

Now it is to such as you that this text comes and says to you, “Yes, your present state is not your soul’s true condition, you have a hidden life in you; that life of yours pants to get out of the bonds and fetters which control it, and it shall be delivered soon, for Christ is coming, and when Christ shall appear you shall appear—the same appearance that belongs to Him belongs to you! He shall come and then your day of true happiness, and joy, and peace, and everything that you are panting for, and longing for, shall certainly come.”

O for the day when we will be free! But may we live in light of that day now.