Over the last several years, it’s become fashionable to decry the failures of the United States of America.  That’s not terribly hard to do.  Just like any nation filled with broken sinners, there are bound to be things which demonstrate that depraved nature we all harbor within us.  Sadly overlooked in this headlong rush to burn down the form of government begun this day in 1776, is that there is something so essentially wonderful about America.  It resonates within not only our hearts this morning, but it also rings in places around the world where freedom isn’t a realizable commodity.

What is wonderful is simply this – freedom!  It shouldn’t surprise us that freedom from governmental overreach was part of the DNA of the Founding Fathers.  Where did this dominant emphasis on freedom find its source.  What were the headwaters from which the Founders were sipping?  The answer is, very clearly, that they many of them were well-steeped in the knowledge of the Word. There, in Galatians 5:1 we hear the first echo of freedom – “It is for freedom Christ set you free.”

But it’s more than that.  Stretching back all the way into the Book of First Samuel, we hear the perils of tyranny.  You see, the people of God were struggling.  Following their own ways and not the Lord’s had seen them encounter difficult with surrounding nations.  In light of these struggles, the people fashioned what they thought would be a great solution.  A king who could bring with him a government and an army.  Ah, but God instructed Samuel to tell the people this in I Samuel 8:10-18: “So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him.  He said, ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots.  And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants.  He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants.  He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work.  He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.  And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.’” 

  What God knows is that humanity is fallen, broken by the power of sin.  As such any government will be entirely made up of, you guessed it, people who are themselves, deeply flawed.  Armed with the power of coercive force, a government always falls prey to the inescapable human dynamic articulated by Lord Acton, not Machiavelli as many people assume.  The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:  “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Great men are almost always bad men.”

Jesus Christ came bringing a new kind of freedom.  One that was far more precious than freedom from the Romans.  Jesus Christ came to liberate us from our two worst enemies.  Jesus Christ became human and died upon a cross to free us from sin and death.  And it points to the very heart of God’s nature that such a thing simply had to be done because as His creation, we need to be free.  God alone created us.  He made us in His image.  If He’d wanted to, God could’ve designed us to be mere puppets, programmed to do precisely what He wished.  But God didn’t do that.  Instead, He created us to bear His image.  And you see, God is utterly and completely free to do anything He’d like.  Being fashioned in His image means that we should, as humans, always breathe free.  Freedom is stitched into every fiber of our existence for no other reason than we are utterly God’s creation.  But as we’re all painfully aware, something happened which warped us, stripped us of our freedom.

Being God’s good creation, not puppets but free in every regard, we chose to sin. Sewing our oats, we used our freedom to flaunt God’s sole prohibition in the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve partook of that bitter fruit.  From that point forward until Jesus Christ, we were no longer really free.  We were held in slavery by sin.  Sin distorts us to the point where we can no longer, of our own accord, will ourselves to do right.  John Calvin calls this total depravity.  St. Augustine, generations before called it the brokenness of our free-will.  By this he meant that our wills are no longer FREE because apart from God, we’ll always do the very things which distort God’s image within us.

But Jesus Christ changed the dynamic.  Christ came and unleashed us from the captivity of sin.  He freed us from bondage to anything and everything.  Any power that tries to exert a hold over us no longer has the means to do so.  “For Freedom, Christ has set us free.”  And yet the history of our Christian lives illuminates a different picture, doesn’t it?  Freed from sin, we still find ourselves longing for our old ways or our familiar vices.  It’s the reason, as Paul writes in Romans, that we can know the good and yet in the very same moment choose not to do it.

And it shouldn’t surprise us really.  The Bible shows us how quickly God’s people find themselves gravitating back to their former ways.  We either take Christ’s freedom and try to NEGATE it by binding ourselves in fear to rules and regulations, or we think that we can do anything we’d like, whenever we’d like.  As they say, old habits die hard.