The Other Emancipation Proclamation: The Gospel

"It's a free country."

That's what people often say when told to do or not to do something. It is a way of saying that one refuses to comply with rules or expectations. America is a free country, so people don't tell other people how to live their lives and everyone is okay. But is that what freedom really is?

Many people would define freedom as living under absolutely no authority. People believe freedom is the right to do whatever we want with no consequences and no dissent. If one is truly free than there are no rules and expectations that have to be met; we can run wild and do as we please whenever and wherever we feel like we want to.
 
In 1863 with the establishment of the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in the south were declared free. By no means did that mean they had the right to do whatever they wanted to do without justification or consequence. The opposite was true in reality. For a century after that, people of African-American descent were considered less than what they were- people, that is to say.

This is, in many ways, an accurate analogy to freedom as it stands today. To me, freedom is exactly the opposite of having no authority. Freedom is the act of submitting to God’s authority. Much like the slaves in the 1860s, freedom is being released from slavery. In Christ we are free from sin, death, and hell. We are free from God’s wrath, which is what we deserve. We are free to live in such a way that glorifies the only one who truly deserves the glory: our one, true, living God. Before we have Christ in our lives, sin owns us. We are under the control of sin, and that is how we live. We don’t know any better because we are in darkness, and we do not know light. Through God’s grace Jesus came into the world and not only gave us light, but taught us how to be lights and to walk in the light.

In the Civil War era, slaves very rarely knew how to read. If you put a sign in front of them that said, "You are free," they wouldn't know what to do or how to respond. Sometimes Christianity works the same way. We know we are free from sin, but we don't know what the next step is. One solution I can think of is to thank the one who freed us. Our job when we are freed is to glorify God in everything we do. If the only thing we ever received from God was salvation, we have to understand that what we have been given is more than we deserve.That alone should always be enough to tell us what the freedom we have been given should be used for.

The answer is not in being free to do whatever suits us in the flesh. When one understands the depth of the love of the Father, what they want most is to please Him. Because sin is still a part of the world we live in, sometimes our "want to" seems broken. It is hard to admit the fact that we don't always do the best job of honoring God, but we need to understand that we have been forgiven and we are free. Though on this earth we will never be perfect, we become more like Christ as our faith in him grows, and we are always free from the power of sin even though we aren't always free from the presence of sin. Through this process we become more and more free from the presence of sin until the day of glorification when we will stand before God in Christ's righteousness alone. That is true freedom, and it comes not when we rebel against authority, but when we submit to the authority of God.

"Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God." -1 Peter 2:16