Comedian and Hollywood actor Russell Brand commented on his Christian faith in a video posted to his 4.4 million Instagram followers on Wednesday, saying, “I don’t belong to myself anymore, and that is true freedom.”
“There are times when I’ve told you that I felt far for Christ,” Brand began in his video. “This is a verse that brought me back into connection with our Lord. It’s from Isaiah. ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name. You are mine.'”
Brand went on to explain, “My feelings of faith have altered lately, because I’ve had the sense that through fear I might take back my self will, that I might — through fear — think I have to be in control of the situation.”
“If you feel that you are being attacked, if you are under threat, it seems obvious, rationale, sensible, to take back control,” the Forgetting Sarah Marshall star continued. “But the sensation of faith — allowing Christ in His sub-molecular potency, right down to the granule, right out into the cosmological, to order all things, for we are dealing with the King of eternity.”
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“This is something I never understood before I was a Christian — that you are stepping out of the cubic reality of fortitude by materialism, and rationalism and into a transcendent realm where you are given grace, where once I’ve accepted sin, and surrendered, and allowed Him to carry me, I am granted a new freedom,” Brand added.
“I don’t belong to myself anymore, and that is true freedom,” the actor concluded.
As Breitbart News reported, Brand was baptized as a Christian in April, noting that baptism was explained to him as “an opportunity to die and be reborn, an opportunity to leave the past behind and be reborn in Christ’s name like it says in Galatians — that you can live as an enlightened and awakened person.”
“I know a lot of people are sort of cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God, but to me, it’s obvious,” he said at the time. “As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all of our lives within us and around us. And for me, it’s very exciting.”
In December, Brand told his followers he was reading the Bible and “The Problem of Pain,” a 1940 book by C.S. Lewis that explores the meaning of suffering in human life.
Earlier this year, the actor said he was reading Rick Warren’s “The Purpose-Driven Life,” adding that he desired a “personal relationship with God.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.