Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not
remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you
will be free indeed.
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a
yoke of slavery.
At the risk of sounding ungrateful—which I certainly am not—I say the following:
We get so wrapped up in THIS event or THAT decision, or we become infatuated with
“look what’s happening NOW that affects my rights and freedoms” that we fail to
appreciate what liberty truly is. Like most anyone else, I believe that God allows people
to make their own decisions and to experience the results of those decisions. In every
society, people in power—and at times the “mob” itself—make decisions that have a
deleterious effect on society as a whole. Although those effects may seem to us that
God is no longer with us (and he certainly has been “invited to leave” our schools and
the majority of our other public places), I am certain that God is always with his people,
regardless what the social or political environment may be. To think otherwise is to
dismiss the experience of generations of Christians who have gone before us, including
the very apostles who have brought to us much of this Book we have today. It is also to
discount the plight of contemporary Christians in other parts of our world—men and
women who labor for Christ under brutal, antagonistic regimes, daily at risk of their own
lives. Their governments have no thought for our God, but God is certainly with his
people there. And so we join our hearts together and beseech our great God to turn the
hearts of the people in this world toward him. We also thank God that he is faithful in his
promise to always be near those who are his, regardless of the circumstances that
surround us. Most importantly, we cry out to God that he will give us the courage and the
wisdom to understand that true freedom is not something that is determined by the
caprice of man, but rather it is an eternal gift secured through Jesus Christ—it can never
be taken from us.
–Ricky
