Have you ever stopped
to think about the notion of freedom?
As an American I have
fond childhood memories of celebrating Independence Day but never really
grasped the magnitude of freedom until I spent a summer in Romania. It was 1985 when Romania was still under the rule of
Nicolae CeauSescu and very much a country marked by communism and oppression. I was a college student at the time, traveling
from city to city, meeting many beautiful Romanian citizens. On that July 4th I along with several other American
student were sitting around a bon-fire
with a dozen or so Romanian students when the KGB broke up our camp and took my
new Romania friends to be interrogated. Apparently
back in 1985, for a national to be engaged with Americans was such a threat to
the government that they were breaking the law by simply being with us. As you can imagine this was a defining moment
in my life. It took me being half way
around the world for me to appreciate all that I had been given by merely being
born on American soil.
How
do you define freedom? The dictionary defines it like this:
free·dom - the
state of being free or at liberty rather
than in confinement or under physical restraint.
While this
definition well describes our physical state the Bible clearly defines freedom
from a spiritual perspective.
- John
8:31-32
Then Jesus turned to the Jews who had claimed to believe in him. "If
you stick with this, living out what I tell you, you are my disciples for
sure. Then you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth
will free you."
2. 2 Cor 3:17
Where the spirit of the Lord is there, there is Freedom.
What I failed to
mention about my time in Romania
was that I was there on a mission trip teaching people in Romania about
having a relationship with Christ. For
those who were Christ followers it didn’t matter that they lived in a communist
country behind an iron curtain. They
were free in the truest sense of the word because of a living, active
relationship with Christ.
While our society
says freedom come from independence the Bible says it comes from being
dependent on the One who created and preserves life.
Now that is
something to celebrate!
