God's will is liberty

Real Will, or God's Will is top-down will (it is descent-of-the-dove will). Self-will is bottom-up will (our first inclination, to act from the flesh, from our desires and fears and resentments and so on). Acting from God's will or top-down will or higher will is liberty (and it requires 'waiting on the Lord', i.e. not our first inclination). Self-will is bondage to this world of death and darkness.

Here's a main point: if you equate God the Father with a human, in effect a slave master, you will think acting from God's will is slavery. Yet God is Spirit (I'm speaking of God the Father). He is the source of all that is good and holy. You become a real individual with real liberty when you act from God's will.

One pithy way of seeing practically how we act from God's will is this: we take nothing more seriously than the teaching and commands of God in His living word.

This is also how we 'walk after the Spirit' rather than walking 'after the flesh.'

But to see it more fully you have to see that a regenerated individual with a new heart has a different relationship to the teachings and commands of God. They are not a chain about our neck that we *have* to follow though we might like to do something else. They are rather something that emanates from our new heart itself, so they are as natural to us as oranges are to an orange tree.

And Jesus summed up the law in the two great commandments: love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. That sums up the two tables of the Ten Commandments, or the moral law, which is the only law that is binding on us after the theocratic state of national Israel became defunct upon the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.