Independence? Gospel Thoughts for the Week

As we approach Independence Day, I contemplate what ‘freedom’ really is. In America, we suffer from a false sense of freedom. While I very much appreciate the God-given freedoms I enjoy every day (paid for by the shed blood of countless brave men and women), I also sense that many people who think they are ‘free’ are under the heaviest yoke of slavery.

Yes, in America, we pretty much have the ability to pick and choose what we want to do, go where we want to go, decide who we want to hang out with, buy what we want to buy and vote for what people we want to lead the country. And yet at the same time, we are held in bondage by those same things. We don’t own our houses - our houses own us. We try to impress people we don’t like by buying things we don’t want or need, and so we work too many hours and forfeit family time. We put corrupt people into power and then complain that our taxes are too high and nobody in Washington cares about the burden on the poor and middle class.

The truth is that freedom in its purest sense is not whether or not you live in America. Freedom is only found in being released from the chains of your sin. Someone who has not turned from their sins and put their full trust in the finished work of Christ on the cross is a slave, no matter what kind of house, friends or job they have. The Apostle Paul said in Romans 6:16-18, "Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness." And again in Galatians 5:1, "It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery."

Do you see?! The slave becomes free by becoming a slave! The slave of sin confesses and forsakes his sin, and becomes a slave of righteousness, which really is the freedom that he or she had been longing for. For the one who turns from their sin, Independence Day can have a new and infinitely more meaningful view of freedom. For the one that gives his life to the Master, this is the one that has deliverance from the guilt of sin, the power of sin, and the pollution of sin. No document in the National Archives and certainly no bureaucrat in Washington DC can promise THAT kind of freedom.

But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. - Romans 6:22