Happy 4th of July

Tomorrow is Independence Day. As a military family, it's a day that is very dear to my heart. I love America and what she stood for in the beginning.

As a gospel magician, various illusionists have inspired me, but the more famous of all was Houdini. Houdini was such a great escape artist that nothing was able to hold him, until one day he was placed in a jail cell that he couldn't figure out. He had tried all the various methods of escaping, but nothing worked.

He entered a jail cell-the heavy, metal doors clanged shut behind him as usual. Then, when he was alone Houdini quickly took a special lock pick he had designed-a piece of strong but flexible metal that he kept hidden inside his belt-and he set to work. But he discovered that something was unusual about this particular lock. I mean, for thirty minutes he worked and got nowhere. An hour passed, and still he had not been able to open the door. By now he was bathed in sweat and panting in exasperation, but he still could not pick the lock. He tried all the tricks of his trade but nothing worked.

Finally, after laboring for two exhausting hours, Harry Houdini gave up and in frustration he sat down on the floor. Then, as he leaned back against the door to his cell, it swung open and he discovered it HAD NEVER BEEN LOCKED IN THE FIRST PLACE! Now understand-he thought it was locked and that thought-that mind set-was all it took to keep him from opening the door and walking out of that jail cell-a free man.

Just like Houdini, we are free, but many times we don't act that way and we struggle to get out of the cell. When Jesus gave His life for us, He purchased our freedom, and whom the son sets free, is free indeed. However, we walk around in such a defeated frame of mind all the time.

America, the home of the brave and the free, right? But how free are we? Or how free do we believe we are? Every day when I watch what our government is doing I see our freedoms being taken away, one by one. Yet not many are brave enough to stand up and say enough is enough.

Man did not give us our freedom, Jesus did. Freedom always comes with a price, and Jesus paid the ultimate price for our freedom. I know many are saying, "But that was for freedom of sin." and you would be right, but I believe that freedom should expand to every aspect of our lives. We are free to worship the Lord. We are free from tyranny. (at least for the time being) There are so many ways that, because of the constitution, we have been granted freedom. But what happens when you see those freedoms destroyed?

For years Christians have stood back and allowed our elected officials (who are suppose to work for us) strip us of our freedoms, but there is a freedom that they cannot take away, because they are not the ones who gave them to us. We can have all the freedoms that Jesus purchased for us, but in order to hold on to those freedoms we have to put our faith in Him.

We live in both scary times and exciting times. I've said for several years that America will fall. I believe we are seeing the start of that now, but to me, that only means that we'll soon be united with the Lord. We can't just let our earthly freedoms be taken away from us, freedoms that are given to us under the constitution, God given freedoms.

The freedom that is a gift from God is part of the Creator's design of our Universe. The boundaries of the Design, the laws of nature, determine human freedom. We are not free to violate the laws of nature. Our role in the Design is to use our freedom within it to gain understanding of the laws of nature and harness them in the pursuit of progress. We do not know the goal of God's design. We do know we have the gift of freedom to seek that goal according to the will of God.

The distinction between God's laws and human laws is critical. God's laws are immutable. Human laws are temporary, lasting only as long as the institutions making and enforcing them. The challenge for humanity is to overcome our failings of character. God challenges us to use the gift of freedom to learn, change and progress towards perfection. Human institutions, our religions, governments and economies, and the laws they create, should serve to support our progress. Human history is the record of those institutions' success and failure. Successful institutions respect and sustain God's gift of freedom. Those that suppress human freedom fail.

The history of Western religion illustrates the point. Christianity grew from the work of an innovative Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. He faced resistance and persecution because he threatened existing religious and governmental power structures. Later, the Christian church split into the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches because of internal struggles for power and the decline of the Roman Empire. The Protestant movement of the middle ages in Europe was a result of some people's desire for spiritual progress, and freedom from the heavy hand of the Catholic Church. Religious persecution in Europe caused much of the migration to North America.

People possess great power because of the scientific and material progress of the past five centuries. Without corresponding spiritual progress in those centuries, however, much of that power is a threat to humanity and our role in God's design. To create spiritual progress, we must separate God and spirituality from religion and power. We must go beyond the idea of religious freedom to recognize the necessity of spiritual freedom. Religions, being inventions of man, have a purpose in God's design only to the extent that they serve to unite people in the pursuit of our purpose in the Design. When religions divide people and claim special access to God, they lose all legitimacy.

The challenge we face is to claim our spiritual freedom as part of our gift from God and use that freedom to accelerate spiritual progress. In that progress, we will find our unity of purpose in God's design of our world.

Happy 4th to you too!