Bright Spot: Ignoring the small things can set you free

What do Dunkirk, “Braveheart,” July 4, Alcoholics Anonymous, Celebrate Recovery, Tiananmen Square and Normandy (the last two commemorated recently) all have in common? The same thing that most wars that rage around the world are fighting for.

FREEDOM!

Many I talk to today lament they are also at war to get free from so many “issues,” we euphemistically call them. They’re really painful “problems.” They long for freedom.

Their friends and family members so often can’t help them because they are stuck as well.

I see Jesus Christ as so free from the things in which we’re enslaved – what people think, money, sex, power, and …. That’s why he, both God and man, is able to relate to us AND set us free from the “chains that hold us captive.” Jesus defined his mission, given to him by God, this way: “He has sent me to proclaim good news to the poor…freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed….It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Luke 4:18-19; Galatians 5:1).

But so many use their so-called freedom only to serve No. 1 – themselves. Or their “freedom” to do as they please only buries them deeper into the mud that mucks up their lives, like the pig that stays in the sty wallowing instead of getting clean. Paul describes that tendency: “You my brothers were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather serve one another in love” (Galatians 5:1, 13). Paul not only diagnoses the disease, he prescribes the cure. Love sets us FREE!

Real life, love and LIBERTY starts with receiving God’s love. We can’t really love anyone the way they need love unless we first let God’s love into our hearts. Then we let it out: “We love [only] because He first loved us” (I John 4:19). We let Him into our lives through entering into a loving relationship with him who is invisible. We do this by prayer (us talking to Him) and reading the Bible (Him talking with us).

Since we can’t see Jesus, this all requires faith. We all exercise faith every day by driving a car when we don’t have a clue about how combustion engines work. We have faith other drivers will stay on their side of the road. But this work of faith launches us on the freeway to the freedom that we all hunger for, not just those fighting for their freedom and lives in so many places in the world today.

Rick Sams is pastor emeritus of Alliance Friends Church.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Ignoring the small things can set you free