Today we celebrate our Independence as a nation. I am grateful to those who have fought for freedom of choice and government and to those who take a stand to maintain a sense of justice today. I am humbled to think of the freedom from the bondage of sin Christ offered on the cross to reconcile us to God.
What is this thing called bondage of sin? What exactly do I need to be reconciled FROM? As the human race, we need to be freed from thinking we are the highest standard of truth, of love, of mercy, of justice. I KNOW I'm not the perfect standard of truth or love. Ask my husband, my children, my siblings, or my co-workers. We are imperfect and yet we try to glorify and praise ourselves as if we are the highest standard by which to live. What if MY standard of love, truth, or mercy was the ideal for everyone? What a sorry thing to strive for! I am grateful that it isn't. I have a perfectly loving, perfectly just, perfectly faithful, perfectly sovereign, perfectly truthful God who doesn't want to let me settle for glorifying and setting my sights on anything less than the perfect standard and only true reflection of these things. I have freedom from thinking I am to be glorified, I am to be praised. I am free to know that God is greater than this pitiful semblance of perfection I try to create and I am free to personally know him. I am only free to know this because God sought to make my broken relationship with Him right through Christ.
Years before Jesus was ever identified as being the reconciling link between humanity and God, his saving death was predicted in Isaiah, a truth of freedom that I find poignant today. "But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed." Isaiah 53:5
Reflecting on my freedom in Christ today.
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