NOTES for Rom 8:15
The limited nature of freedom is an unavoidable experience for every person in this world. Voluntarily or under compulsion, we submit to very many things: the laws of physics, the laws of society, the law of God... These countless laws entangle a person, and the best years of life are spent learning to accept them. This is normal and even, yes, right. But in the soul of a person under law, a kind of conditioned reflex eventually forms, so that without law, an impersonal external regulator of life, we can no longer live. Living in fear of violating something, whether the law of universal gravitation, the administrative code, or the law of God, a person nevertheless tries to find laws for himself in order to submit to them. Sometimes we simply declare our own desires to be the law of the universe; sometimes we find something more exalted. But then we try to force everyone around us to submit to it, and totalitarianism is born from a passion for law.
Law attracts a person because law is impersonal. You can conform to it or violate it, if you can, without entering into personal relationship with it. Thus arises the sense of the world as an objective reality given to us by God in our sensations. And because all laws are impersonal, the person himself remains the only acting subject in his own life. This half-voluntary submission to impersonal law is what the apostle Paul calls the spirit of slavery.
But in reality, besides laws, there is the Lawgiver, and it turns out that we are not strangers to Him. Therefore you can build a personal relationship with the Lawgiver, and the keeping of laws, generally speaking, happens in some way by itself. This is the alternative that the apostle Paul called the spirit of adoption. And the choice between law and the Lawgiver is one of the key choices for a person.