05/25/2026
Today serves as a reminder that true freedom requires sacrifice: it requires payment of blood.
I would encourage everyone to re-read the Declaration of Independence today. If you study it well, you'll see that it contains a philosophy that the Founding Fathers were willing to die for: individual liberty. They derive their belief in personal freedom from the God who created us. For the sake of freedom, they were willing to fight and die. They carefully calculated the cost and found their cause worthy. In fact, they put the lives and livelihood of their posterity on the line in pursuit of a new nation, conceived in liberty. In the near 250 years since, many more have died to protect our freedoms. Memorial Day remembers the sacrifice of those people.
This Memorial Day, let's also remember a deeper kind of freedom that cannot be altered or threatened by foreign or domestic threats... a freedom that tyranny has tried to quench for millennia, but has never succeeded. This is the very freedom that God Himself, in His infinite love, purchased on our behalf. Jesus Christ bore the punishment of our sin debt on the cross and was buried. However, Christ arose from the grave on the third day, victorious over the enslavement of sin and death, so that all who believe in Him alone may be set free. For the one who simply believes, the Blood of Jesus washes away their sin. Salvation is free gift that could never be repaid because it cost an infinite price.
If you truly believe, how are you using the liberty for which our Savior died?
"We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him." Romans 6:6-8 (ESV)
