So on my morning run this weekend of much choice liberties, I was finally warmed up after about 2 stiff miles, and reminding myself how liberating exercise is after a period of bondage to sedentary habitats. I always love the parallels that the harsh climate of bodily training and our spiritual lives form. This is a weekend where we remember our, not so currently but usually wonderfully run, country.
Several centuries later we recognize our freedom's and rejoice in them as people who always long for freedom from any sort of bondage or hindrance in our lives.
The words from Martin Luther King Jr. for some reason echo in my mind, as he stated at the end of a terribly hateful time in history, "free at last! free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!" Those words could be echoed amongst many people for various reasons throughout our world of billions. However there are many who even today cannot claim that victory. Whether involved in slavery in foreign countries abroad; whether involved in some intense warfare under extreme dictatorship; or whether stuck in the middle of a bad situation of abuse and bewilderment of why we end up in the situations that we do; there is certainly not global freedom, of which will likely never be the case. As sadistic as that sounds, I am also a realist, but bring a proclamation of truth to our world as a whole, from the only freedom that I believe has the power to save us all from our trials and tribulations.
I don't know much, and the more I know, the more I realize I don't know, as is often said. I know three simple things though; that God is God; I am not; BUT I know His truth can set me free from the bondage of sin.
That freedom may not even declare me free for the rest of my life from physical bondage, whatever case that may be. I will continue to struggle with sin, as I believe Paul was somehow stating in Romans when he said that "For I know that in me nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice....o wretched man that I am- who will deliver me from the body of death? I thank God- through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but the the flesh the law of sin."
I thank God His righteousness is laid on my account, because of my inability to fulfill a perfect law. That is true freedom, and the only freedom that we all can take hold of in this life- "for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain" Paul also said, and must be made true as we may be in bondage to money, to people, to life's every abounding obstacles- but we are free eternally from spiritual bondage.
In the book of John Jesus tells us that he came "that they might have life, and that they may have it more abundantly!"
