The Spirit of Liberty
I. Opening & Text:
In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
• Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Central to life and the pursuit of happiness is liberty. The Bible has much to say about liberty. It has much to say about release from bondage and freedom. At the beginning of the ministry of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke we read.
Luke 4:16-21 (KJV)
"And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up: and, as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read. 17 And there was delivered unto Him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written,
18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He hath sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. 20 And He closed the book, and He gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on Him. 21 And He began to say unto them, This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears."
2 Corinthians 3:17 (KJV)
"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
• Jesus's self-description of the purpose of His ministry is to bring liberty to the entire person, the community of faith, and the world through the Power of HIs Spirit.
• I want to talk to you this morning on the topic, "The Spirit of Liberty."
II. Introduction:
• The thing that has made the American experiment great, though the founders and all who have followed, have not always gotten it right is the acknowledgment that human rights are not given by human governments, but by the Creator God. These rights include "life." It is the Almighty whose borrowed Breath we inhale and exhale from our first breath until our last. The LORD gives and the LORD takes away.
• These unalienable rights also include happiness. The innate desire for happiness is something that God has placed inside every human life. God does want you to be happy, that is why He placed the longing there. It was Blaise Pascal who said that there is a God-shaped vacuum in each human heart that only God can fill. Just as God gave us the gifts of thirst and hunger to keep us living, so He has created a longing inside that nothing can truly fill but Him, the longing for happiness.
• Central to life and the pursuit of happiness is liberty. Liberty is a word that we will see much of today and tomorrow. Emblazoned in red, white, and blue. Written in beautiful letters under a portrait of the majestic bald eagle, the national bird, whose way of life symbolizes our highest value, will be the word "liberty." Flags will be flown that remind us of the words "give me liberty, or give me death!" Liberty has been defined as "the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views." Without liberty, there can be no true life. Without liberty, the goal of the pursuit of happiness can never be realized.
• We value liberty. The founders of our nation valued it so much that they willingly fought to obtain and keep it. Later men fought and died in the Civil War to liberate those who had been oppressed by the slave trade because America had not lived up to its highest ideals. In some of your lifetimes, you watched as others struggled still in the civil rights movement to find the fulfillment of America's noblest of ideals that all men and women are created equal. Liberty is something that America has struggled towards. There is much that has been done and always more work to do, but we've come a long way!
• Liberty is an awesome privilege and a wonderful responsibility that we can easily take for granted, often on a daily basis. This morning we chose to get up and drive to church. This morning we drove to church with no fear that we might be the victim of a military assault. We can work where we choose to work. We can live where we choose to live. We have freedom of mobility. Thank God for liberty!
• While we are grateful for the promise of liberty in our great nation, we know that there remain all types of oppression and bondage ever in places where freedom reigns. The apostle Peter speaks of those who "promise liberty while being themselves the slaves of corruption" (2 Peter 3:19).
• Paul warns that we should not use liberty as an occasion to indulge in the baser passions that we are prone to in Galatians 5:13 (NRSV): "For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another." Our freedom ought to lead us to seek to free others.
• Nelson Madela, who spent over 27 years in a South African prison and eventually helped to topple apartheid said, "For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."
• When I am truly free, I will care about the freedom of others.
• The great promise of the Bible is liberty.
• God's people have always been characterized by the liberty that they have found in leaving their old oppressive world behind to embrace the new world under the reign of Christ.
• Abraham left the Ur of the Chaldees. He left the bondage of polytheism and false gods.
• Israel left Egyptian bondage behind in The Exodus. God heard their drownings for liberty and came down and delivered them! God anointed Moses with His Spirit to confront Pharoah and lead Israel out like a shepherd.
• The Judahites left Babylon. At the declared time God delivered them from the consequences of their sins and brought them back into the promised land to rebuild. God anointed Cyrus with HIs Spirit to release the Jews and declare their liberty.
• The Jews of Jesus's day were longing for liberty from their Roman occupiers and oppressors. They were looking and longing for someone anointed by the Spirit of God to come and deliver them. They called the figure they were looking for The Messiah. Messiah means an anointed One. In the OT economy of God when someone was chosen for a special role in the kingdom a priest of the prophet would take olive oil and pour it over their head as a symbol that God's Spirit was now upon them to fulfill that function.
• David is the best-known example of this. When God chose David, He sent Samuel to anoint him. The Bible speaks of the way when Samuel poured the oil upon David, "the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day." David experienced the liberty to do what God wanted him to do and to be what God called him to be. Your highest and best worth is to give your life to the Lord and allow the working of HIs Spirit in your life. He has chosen you for a purpose that can only be fulfilled in the freedom and liberty of the Spirit!
• In our text from the opening chapters of Luke we read Jesus's inaugural Scripture reading. He declares to those in the synagogue of His hometown of Nazareth that He is the long-awaited Messiah. He reads from the prophet Isaiah a description of what He came to do. He understands the purpose for which the Spirit is upon Him. Mark Twain said, "The two greatest days of a person's life are the day they are born and the day they figure out why." God has placed His Hand upon you. He has anointed you with His Spirit and one of the reasons that you have been in a dry place is because He is prompting you to figure out your "why." After Jesus's baptism, He was immediately led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. The enemy questioned His identity and purpose. When Jesus came out of the wilderness, He came out in the Power of the Spirit. He came out convinced of God's purpose and the result was this text.
18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor;
• Jesus came to preach the good news to the poor. Historically most commentators have taken the extremes in interpreting this verse.
• For some they see the "poor" as referring to those who are somehow spiritually poor. For others in our capitalist society, they have looked interpreted this to mean those who are on the lower end of the economic spectrum.
• The truth is that "the poor" in the Gospel of Luke are those who society has deemed unfit for the kingdom of God. Jesus walks through the Gospel of Luke tearing down the barriers that have kept people outside. The Gospel is for whosoever will! Whoever is thirsty can come and drink of The Water of Life, freely! He came to liberate us from ethnic and religious exclusivism. He tears down the ethnic and religious barriers. For the religious Jews of Jesus's day, no one could get to God but them. He tears down the social and economic barriers. The Jews of Jesus's day relegated women to a lower status. Those who were poor, disabled persons, those who were oppressed by the devil -- to all of these Jesus preached the Good News! To the religious elite, who thought so highly of themselves, Jesus called out their poverty. They thought they were rich, but they were as impoverished as others. They all needed the Spirit of the living God. He came to preach the Gospel to the poor!
He hath sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
• The book of Proverbs says that the spirit of a man will sustain him, but a wounded spirit who can bear? (Proverbs 18:14).
• A broken heart is hard to bear. When our hearts are broken, we are bound. We are not free. We do not enjoy the liberty that God intends for us to have and thus we live a life less than what God has for us. We find ourselves unhappy. Jesus promised to give us life and life more abundantly! When we are brokenhearted we can find ourselves drifting towards things that do not truly satisfy. Jesus said that He was anointed to heal the broken-hearted.
• What can repair your broken heart is being filled with the Spirit of God!
to preach deliverance to the captives,
• There is freedom from sin. Sin is that principle in the world and in us that causes us to have the propensity to do things that we know are wrong. Sin is described in Romans 6 as a cruel slave-master. Like Pharaoh, satan rules over the world system that is immersed in the slavery of sin.
• Jesus steps on the stage of the world like Moses who walked into Egypt and cried out, Let my people go!
• Jesus's word to you today is, you are delivered! You are freed! The Passover Lamb has been slain! The Blood of Jesus has been applied! You have been baptized in water and Spirit!
• Sin does not have dominion over you! You are free!
• You are free from the condemnation of the Law which was a yoke that those under it could not bear, and a word of condemnation!
• There is deliverance today!
and recovering of sight to the blind,
• Jesus opened the eyes of the blind in the Gospels, both physically and spiritually.
• There are many reasons why someone may be blind physically. Sometimes it may be those who were born blind. Others have some type of defect or have lost their sight due to an accident or even serving our nation. Physical blindness can sometimes be repaired by means that God has graciously given us. For others they learn to live as sightless persons.
• For them, we should seek justice. We have Brother Wade in our church who has done that for many years...
• Jesus healed physical blindness in the Gospel of Luke. He still does today. But, when He doesn't heal physical blindness there is a type of blindness that He is always willing to heal -- spiritual blindness.
• My great grandfather was a godly man. He prayed and read the Bible consistently for years. He worked for many years at the school for the blind in Mississippi. In the later years of his life, he experienced blindness himself. The things he had learned as he preached liberty to the blind as a young man he was able to use as an old man to help himself.
• Sometimes your liberty is wrapped up in preaching liberty to others!
to set at liberty them that are bruised (Isaiah 58),
• A bruise is an internal wound.
• In another place Jesus said that He fulfilled the prophecy that said that He would not quench a smoking wick or crush a bruised reed.
• Not all our wounds are visible to others. There are things that we can't get to fix. Deep things. Jesus said that by the Spirit of God, He can search out those deep things.
• We can be bound by our bruises. The Greek word translated "bruised" actually means oppressed. Our bruises can cause us to accept oppression from others. One of the reasons we are sometimes beaten down and stay in relationships where we are not free is because we are bruised.
• Jesus came to set at liberty the bruised, the oppressed!
19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
• Jesus sums it up by referring back to a part of the cycle of the calendar that God gave to ancient Israel in the Law. Every fifty years was the year of Jubilee.
• It was the year following a series of seven years times seven. It was the year after what symbolized completeness. During that year everyone who was in slavery had to go free. In that year all debt was released!
• In John's vision He saw a Lamb that had seven horns and seven eyes which represented the Spirit of God!
• Liberty!
20 And He closed the book, and He gave it again to the minister and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on Him. 21 And He began to say unto them, This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears."
• Rom. 8:21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
