I think that freedom vanished after the fall of Adam and Eve. Sin ruined every aspect of our being. Check some verses of the scriptures :
Psalms 51:5 Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
John 3:19-20 says: "This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed."
Ephesians 2:1-6 says: "And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,"
How could people who love darkness, with a deceitful and wicked heart and dead in our transgressions, shapen in iniquity could ever choose God? well, the only way we could ever do that, its by divine intervention. God choosing us and putting faith in our heart so we could believe in the Son. This is all by God's grace. is not that we loved him first, but we love him because he loved us first.