A New Devotion - Freedom from, Freedom to

Here's a new devotion that I wrote. You can find a recording of this devotion at the bottom of the page.

1 Peter 1:13-16, 22-25

Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed. Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, "You shall be holy, for I am holy."

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God. For "All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever." That word is the good news that was announced to you.

Freedom from, Freedom to

Although I’m in no way suggesting that it’s good or minimizing the very real sacrifices some people have been forced to make, COVID-19 has freed us from some of those repetitive tasks we complained about six months ago. For example, students have been freed from having to go to school and from having to come up with new excuses for why their homework wasn’t done. And employees have been freed from all those boring tasks that are just part of the job and employers have been freed from watching their workers just go through the motions without the passion and pride owners feel for their businesses. We have been set free. But this freedom means nothing if we don’t do something with it. I mean, even though we may have more time to spend with our families and more time to improve ourselves in some way, that time can be easily squandered if we choose to make life right now as repetitive and as boring as school or work. Freedom only has value when we decide to use it.

And I’ll tell you, I think that’s the point Peter was making in the passage we just read. You see, through Jesus Christ, we’ve been set free, free from all those thoughts and fears we may have experienced before we decided to trust in God and his love. But that actually means nothing, unless we use that freedom to live in a way that reflects some of God holiness. In other words, our new freedom from all those things that messed us up in the past is only made complete when we use it to love God and one another. In a real way, our freedom from offers us the chance to claim our freedom to.