Susie Larson in “Blessings for Every Day” writes: “It is for freedom that Christ has set you free. May you refuse to be subject to any yoke of slavery–slavery to sin, fear, legalism, or striving. May you rest in the knowledge that Jesus paid it all so that you could walk free and whole. May you boldly live the abundant, fruitful life He had in mind from the beginning. You are everything to Him.”
That statement has so many applications for our lives. In our nation, we are still free to speak, although Woke and commentators will try to debate each statement and may do a bit of yelling if they don’t get their way. We are free to come and go, especially becoming more so with COVID vaccinations and less stringent measures that limited our freedom for a while. I think we’ve all learned that limited freedom of access, of travel, and of running businesses successfully has made most of us more determined than ever that freedom is to be cherished. But Christ is talking about more than freedom of speech, access, and movement.
Through Christ, there are no distinctions of gender, race, status, and position. What a revolutionary idea that was and still is. He has broken the chains of discrimination and told us about each person’s endowed worth. He has raise the humble and shown us the beauty of lives lived in service to others because we choose to value others. And He has allowed a thirteen year old, imprisoned in the annex attic in the Netherlands that “there are no walls, no locks that anyone can put on your mind.” He has allowed us to listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” so very necessary still today for our citizens and for the aliens within our gates: “
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
Based on Christ’s principles, may it be so.
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