I offered these reflections this morning as part of a call to worship. Enjoy!
This weekend we celebrate the independence, liberty, and freedom we enjoy on a daily basis as citizens of the United States of America. However, it is important to remember that while we enjoy many benefits as part of a nation that cherishes freedom, the Christian community shares a more robust understanding of both “freedom” and “liberty” than folks in the broader culture.
The Christian community understands that God is the only free being. God is free because God’s will and God’s actions are in complete harmony. What God wants, happens. There is no outside force or internal compulsion that distorts what God wants and what God does. By contrast, we experience complete and utter bondage. We are fundamentally alienated from ourselves because our desires and our actions are not aligned. As even the Apostle Paul confessed: the good thing we want to do we do not do, but the evil thing we do not want to do we do. Who will save us from this wretched state? (Romans 7)
As we worship this morning, praise God that God freely takes on flesh in Jesus Christ to demonstrate authentically free human existence. Jesus Christ, while fully human, consistently pursues and chooses to enact God’s will. And, as we see in the gospels, Jesus lives freely. That is, he consistently embodies God’s self-giving love as a natural outflow of his being. Jesus is not driven in his ministry by fear, political motives, or some other internal compulsion. Jesus’ life stands as a model for his disciples; a pathway to free living.
However, we also praise God today that through the crucifixion and resurrection of the incarnate Son, God vanquished the powers that enslave us to our wretched condition. As the Apostle Paul explains, the power of sin that constantly turned us toward death is broken in the cross of Jesus Christ. Therefore, we are no longer slaves to sin, but slaves to righteousness! We are no longer dead, but truly alive. In Christ, we experience true freedom and true liberty. And, oddly, we do not find our freedom and liberty through independence, but through absolute dependence upon and obedience to God’s will as revealed through Jesus Christ. As the Apostle John writes in his gospel: If the Son has set you free, then you are free indeed! (8.36)
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