Crazy day today, but wanted to quickly share something I have been thinking about a lot lately and something the Isaiah passage from todays lectionary passage (which can be found here: http://gamc.pcusa.org/devotion/daily/2011/1/7/made me think about again: Freedom.
The link to Isaiah is pretty tenuous, I read freedom into the talk about God redeeming us - which isn't a stretch, but my thoughts on freedom might be.
Basically, I have been thinking a lot and even questioning how much sense our talk about freedom as Christians makes. What I mean is that serving God, no matter how great it is still is serving and how can serving really be freedom? Right?
I don't think this is a new or unique question, I know. But it is one that I have just recently been really grappling with. I have always just accepted and put forth saying like: free, but not for ourselves for God; No longer slaves to sin, but slaves to Christ. But really how does slavery, how can any kind of slavery - even to Christ - be freedom?
Then yesterday I was distracted while driving (I know, but I survived) listening to the story of all those birds dying and I was watching a bird soar by out my front windshield. Free as a bird. I was watching that bird soar and thought that is basically the definition of freedom. But then I realized that all that bird was doing was living into what it was made and designed to do. It was made to fly and born to fly. Its what it was created to do.
So if that is the definition of freedom - if that is what we have been freed to do, be who and what we were created and designed to be. Being freed to serve God starts to make a lot more sense.
Maybe this is old news to all of you, but it was a new revelation to me this morning. Freedom is simply being who and what we were made to be and doing what we were created to do. Were were made to be in relationship with God. We were created to be children of God, invested in the family business of bringing grace, peace, love and salvation to the entire world. That is what serving God really is, accepting our true identity and living into who and what we were created to be. Anytime we seek to do anything else - even or maybe especially in the name of 'freedom' we are actually submitting ourselves in slavery to something outside of who and what we are supposed to be.
That isn't freedom. Free as a bird. Free to be who we are meant to be and do what we were created for, the thing we long for deep inside ourselves. But the thing is God made our hearts and put that longing inside of us. Freedom, true, real freedom is only found in submission and service to God.
Amen.
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