This Monday, we’ll be celebrating the freedoms we have here in the United States thanks to the sacrifice and courage of so many who have given their lives to secure our future. There is probably no better time to also consider the source of an even greater Freedom that is afforded to us only through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The apostle Paul probably says it better than any other could in Romans 6:

You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!

I’m using this freedom language because it’s easy to picture. You can readily recall, can’t you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing – not caring about others, not caring about God – the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God’s freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?

As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end.

But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master. – Romans 6:16-23 (MSG)

As we go from place-to-place over the next few days, and see yellow ribbons and American flags everywhere, it will be easy to remember the sacrifice of the people who have secured our external personal freedoms. But it will be all too easy to forget that we have a much greater freedom than the right to vote, own property, or speak freely. We have the freedom to approach the throne of God, the freedom to live without regard for tomorrow because we know that our eternal future is secure. Like the freedoms we celebrate this Monday, July 4, 2005, these great freedoms were secured by sacrifice, blood shed, and death – the death of Jesus Christ.