It’s easy to get caught up in the traditional festivities surrounding July 4th and miss the true celebration. Don’t’ get me wrong. I love the fireworks, the picnics, and the parades as much as anyone. But it’s always good to step back and ponder the deeper significance of freedom: What it is and more importantly, what freedom is not.
The American revolutionaries gave us a tremendous gift. They cherished the cause of freedom so dearly they were willing to give of their resources and even their lives. Splitting from Britain couldn’t have been easy. Many loyalists were friends and perhaps even family. The battles occurred on American soil endangering the young and the infirm. Yet after weighing the cost, these Patriots gave their all, entrusting us with their hard-fought freedom which we still enjoy some 250 years later.
The Bill of Rights with its ten amendments to the Constitution defined what independence meant to our founders. The First Amendment protects those most cherished freedoms and the reason many travelers came to America in the first place. Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition are the first rights withheld by totalitarian governments both then and now. We must hold fast to preserve these but also realize that with this kind of freedom also comes responsibility.
We have the right to speak, print, or protest what we want. But not if in doing so it hurts others or denies them the same right. There is a fine line to follow and we need a moral compass to guide us. Otherwise, freedom degrades into self-promotion and an attitude that “anything goes.”
The early Christians dealt with the same dilemma. The freedom they found in Jesus opened up a whole new way of thinking. He lifted the heavy weight of hundreds of rules and regulations from their shoulders. But did this now mean anything was allowed? Certainly not.
It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?
Galatians 5: 13-15 Message Bible
Then as now, we must be careful how we choose to exercise our independence. It’s important to understand what freedom is not: back-biting, name calling, slander, vilifying others rather than engaging them in civilized discourse, and using the anonymity of social media to spew anger and vengeance. All these behaviors threaten to destroy our blessed freedom as we destroy each other.
But the opposite is also true. When we choose others over our own self-interest, lift people up rather than tear them down, and seek to find common ground with those whom we disagree, then freedom flourishes. Only in this way do we honor those who sacrificed so much on our behalf and avoid losing the hard-fought freedom they bestowed on us.
We stand at a crossroad of change and we cannot count on others to lead us in the right direction. Each one of us must make a decision either to work together . . . or not. The future of our freedom depends upon our individual choices and how we act upon them now.
