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PROGRAM D-7611
It’s July Fourth, and we’re celebrating the birth of our country and the freedom that is ours because we live in the United States.
We are blessed to live in a free country, but none of us is truly free until we have been set free from our sins. Sin keeps us in bondage but when the truth of the Gospel dawns upon our hearts, then, as Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
I trust you have known and accepted the truth about Jesus, the Son of God, who “loved us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.” (Revelations 1:5-6). That is freedom to truly celebrate, and until you know freedom from your sin, you never really know freedom.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). Did you ever realize that even after you have been set free from the bondage of your sin, you can let yourself go back into bondage? How does that happen? Well, it happens when you allow some sin to have control in your life and you are again in bondage to that sin. Sin creeps back into our lives when we let down our guard, when we are not fortified by studying and knowing God’s Word, when we go back to those places of temptation and once again subject ourselves to the slavery of sin.
Notice that we are not to let ourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. In other words, it is our responsibility to put needed boundaries and disciplines in our lives that will keep us from sin. The Psalmist said, “I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Psalms 119:11).
So, once we are set free from our sin through faith in Christ, we must stand firm in that freedom, because “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” Then the Apostle Peter reminds us that we are to “Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God” (1 Peter 2:16). We are set free to be servants! Sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? But the truth is, our greatest joy comes when we use the freedom from sin that we have in Christ not as an excuse to do what we want to do, but as a reason to serve God all the days of our lives.
So, as you celebrate our national freedom, don’t forget to celebrate the freedom you have because of Jesus.