My Camino experience is over. My son Alex and I arrived in Santiago de Compostela after 12 days and about 96 miles of hiking. We had met many new friends on the hike and also some very serious pilgrims, who hiked 18 to 25 miles every day and who tried to make the whole distance of more than 465 miles on foot.

We took the freedom to skip the main portion in the middle and then did the last 30 miles on foot again. As I had mentioned in an earlier column here, we did not hike as a religious endeavour.

Being Protestant Christians we did not want or need a church-authorised indulgence, as we trust in the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Still, it was a spiritual experience, a journey to get closer with each other, meet self and meet God.

Freedom can be a scary enterprise. With freedom comes responsibility. As long as we are subordinate we can leave the responsibility with those who make the decisions, like when you work for a boss, she can tell you what to do, and that can override your concerns. One just has to make sure to follow instructions and do your best. If things go wrong, it is her fault.

Self-employed people know that they have to live with the consequences of every decision they make. Freedom thus is a risk that can backfire at you, or it can lead you to great success.

Martin Luther, the great reformer of the 16th century, wrote one of his most famous books about the risk and joy of being a free Christian.

In The Freedom of a Christian he has a thesis that is actually a paradox: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

How can those two ideas be said at the same time? Luther argues in the short book that the gospel makes humans free from all laws, works and earthly authorities in its concern for their salvation; it makes them free to serve their neighbour, free to love for its own sake, without it being a means to another purpose. He draws among other verses from two locations in 1 Corinthians.

The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:12: “All things are permitted for me, but not all things are of benefit. All things are permitted for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.”

And then again in 1 Corinthians 10:23 and 24, he repeats a similar principle regarding Christian liberty: “All things are permitted, but not all things are of benefit. All things are permitted, but not all things build people up. No one is to seek his own advantage, but rather that of his neighbour.” (NASV)

Those were revolutionary thoughts, both for the people at the time of Christ and Paul and for the Christians of the 16th century. People were used to follow the law in order to get right with God.

They tried to please God to avoid eternal punishment, whether in hell or purgatory (invented by the medieval church as a kind of intermediate Hell to be purified by fire to “pay for your sins” before you can be lifted up into God’s presence in Heaven). It was a kind of balance sheet idea, for every sin you had to do a good deed or religious work to balance it out.

So good deeds like giving alms or a pilgrimage to special places, like Santiago, where the bones of the apostle James, a brother of Jesus are believed to be buried, would be counted against your sins and thus shorten your time in the fire.

The idea to be actually saved by grace, by what Christ has done in your place already, seemed strange. In the Sermon in the Mountain (Matthew 5-7) Jesus tried to tell his followers that nobody is able to fulfil the law, as God can see right into our heart and knows our motivation and secret thoughts.

If you only do good to be rewarded afterwards, or if you don’t commit physically a sin, but actually think about it in your heart, you would still miss the intention of the law, and consequently be guilty.

After the parable of the camel walking through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25), his disciples asked Jesus who could be saved then and Christ answered (Mt 19,26; NIV): “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Out of this grace comes the freedom of a Christian. It is freedom from all kind of restrictions and law, but it is even more freedom to do what is right for no other reason than to help and do good.

To live by this freedom it requires some level of moral development. Modern sociologist Lawrence Kohlberg explained how moral reasoning evolves through six stages across three levels, moving from basic obedience and self-interest in childhood to universal ethical principles in adulthood.

On the lower levels the fear of being found out, or punishment, make a person follow instructions. At the middle level it is more the understanding of convention and good order that makes them agree more or less with expectations from society, while on the top level, which only few actually will reach, one’s moral depends on one’s deeper understanding of right and wrong in a universal sense.

For Luther and the other church reformers the law then had several different uses. Following Paul in Romans they argued the first use of the law is to let us know what God expects of us. The second use is to show us how miserably we fail, and then, once we realise that we can only be saved by grace, the last use of the law is to help us do what is right from a thankful heart and out of true love. That step is called sanctification.

It is the true freedom of a Christian to do what is right without fear, including the freedom to say no to some requests, to be assertive.

While we are free and subject to none, we voluntarily can make ourselves subject to all by Christian love.

• Karsten Decker was the pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Bermuda from 2010 to 2017, and after returning from Germany is now the temporary pulpit supply at Centenary United Methodist Church in Smith’s