This week we celebrated America’s Independence! Independence Day has to be one of my favorite holidays of the year. It’s warm outside, most of the ones I recall fall on a weekday so I get the day off, there are fun celebrations around and it is generally centered around family.
The 4th of July is a great reminder of our freedom. It’s a freedom we fought hard to have and a freedom that we will have to continue to fight hard to maintain. As they say, though, freedom is never free and there must be hard battles to be fought to maintain it.
John Adams once said, “The general principles on which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity.” This quote from John Adams came as a little bit of a surprise for me. I never heard this before but it makes a lot of sense. The bottom line of our independence is found in Christ and Christ alone.
The question is, what will we do with this freedom? Not just as an American but as a believer?
Are you willing to fight for Christ in your life… a living, breathing example of hope to the world? What are you willing to do as a believer to freely live for Christ? I’m not encouraging people to literally get up and fight others for Jesus (that would be really weird). But what I am encouraging us to do is to ask the question, do we really believe we are free in Christ and what will you do with that freedom? It’s an important question to ask because it will directly impact the way you live your life.
What you chose to do today will affect who you become tomorrow. How we live our life today will affect us tomorrow and next year and many years to come. I believe that loving God and loving others, many others will see a hope and a future, if I am faithful to choose to live for Christ. And, as a result, they will feel freedom!
So here is the challenge. What would it look like for you to be a living example to your family, to your children, to your neighbors, and to your community of what it means to have freedom in Christ? To live as a truly free person because when push comes to show you love God and love others. And out of that love for God and others you use the freedom you have to live for Christ to where, at the end of the day, you have no regrets.
My encouragement for you and your family is to use the freedom that we have in America and the freedom Christ has given us to live as free people and share Christ by the way you love Him and others today.