The Pattern Of Freedom Series

If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, today’s passage comes out of the book of John, chapter 8, starting at verse 31. We will get to it eventually, I promise. But we are going to start off with a little bit of an introduction. As most of you know if you have been here a while, we are going through the summers series called “Do not Conform. Be Transformed.” Again, it comes out of this passage found in Romans 12 which actually says “Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The idea behind this series is that we would look at various patterns of the world that attempt to shape us into its particular mold. Then we look at the consequences of doing so and then make a bridge to some sort of a biblical response.

Today, being that we are leading into the Fourth of July week of the Independence Day Celebration, I thought what I would do is look at the pattern of freedom. As most of you know, the Fourth of July isn’t simply about the banks being closed and the post office being closed and the businesses being closed. It is not about just stuffing yourself full of picnic food or shooting off fireworks. The Fourth of July, also known as Independence Day, is really meant to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence by our forefathers. Really it is a declaration of independence from those stuffed shirts and tea-drinking people we call the British. That is what it was independence from. One thing I can be relatively confident in is that the British will not be invading America anytime soon. I think they are done with invading us. The last invasion was in the 60s when the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Who made their way over here and invaded us with their music. That wasn’t such a bad thing. The bad news is that when we think about the Fourth of July, I suspect that most of us don’t really think much about the British. I don’t. We are really not thinking about it. That is okay because really the Fourth of July is not so much independence from the British but it’s a celebration of freedom. In the United States of America, we value freedom. So much so that if anyone tries to come against or challenge our freedom, we are going to defend ourselves. We are going to defend other nations, our allies, against any oppressive government that would seek to challenge the freedom of the United States of America. As we know, hundreds of thousands of lives have been given for the cause of freedom.

Today, what I wanted to look at is really what is freedom. What is the meaning of freedom at least in America? But really the question I want to consider is freedom really even possible? Is complete freedom really possible even in the United States of America? When we think about the meaning of freedom, especially when we think about freedom in the United States of America, we know that first and foremost, because we have a strong military, we know that we are pretty much free from any foreign invasions where a foreign country would come in and take over the United States of America. That is one freedom that we have. Really, the freedom extends not just from the large level of the United States but really down to the individual level through a document called the Bill of Rights. Spelled out in the Bill of Rights are some core freedoms. Things like the freedom of religion. Things like the freedom of speech. The freedom of assembly. The freedom to bear arms and the freedom against unreasonable search and seizure. Those are inherent freedoms in what we call the Bill of Rights. Those freedoms actually imply some other freedoms. They extend down into the freedom of just being able to come and go as we please. To move anywhere we want to move across country. It involves the freedom to marry or not to marry. It gives us also the freedom to pursue education. The freedom to get a good job or pursue a career and to take the money we have from that career and pretty much spend it in any way we want. To buy the things we want to buy from whoever we want to buy them. Really what we are talking about here is we have the freedom to pursue our own happiness. That little bit of freedom is spelled out in a clause that we find in the Declaration of Independence. Some of you may be familiar with it. It says “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.” As we consider this clause for a minute, it says these rights are given to us by their creator. By our creator. As a side note, some people think freedom of religion means no mention of God in government. All you have to do is go back and read some of the documents of the Founding Fathers and you will see that the mention of God is all over those documents. Visit the monuments in Washington, D.C. and you will see God’s name all over the place. These rights are given to us by our creator. These rights extend even farther out. They extend to just our individual actions. We have the right to be generous with our money or to be stingy with our money. We have the right to be forgiving or not forgiving. We have the right to be healthy or unhealthy. We have the right to be kind to other people and complete strangers or we have the freedom to be mean and nasty to people. We have that freedom. We have that particular right. It really even extends even farther to how we think. If anything we have the freedom of is really just how to think. What is going on in our mind. We have the freedom to be able to think very good and positive things and things that are beautiful or some bad and negative things to the point of even ugly or horrific things. We have those rights and freedoms within us. Those freedoms are not given to us by the United States Government. They are affirmed in many ways by the United States Government but they are given to us by our creator. Again, our creator created us with a sense of free will which basically means that we are not robots. He is not up there trying to control us like a robot. He gave us the freedom to choose to make our own decisions even if that decision means walking away from God. He loved us so much that he gave us that complete freedom.