September 23

We are a free people. Our concepts of personal freedom and political freedom are as old as the American Revolution. That sense of liberty is graphically expressed in one of the flags of that era—the famous, “Don’t tread on me!” But before the concept of liberty came to fruition as the foundation for a nation, it was literally fleshed out in another way.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the second member of the Trinity, the One who is the living and only King of kings and Lord of lords took upon Himself the cloak of humanity and visited the people He had created. As the father of John the Baptist stated it in Luke 1:78, “The Dayspring from on High has visited us.”

When Jesus came, it was to set us free. We had been chained in the prison of sin. We were bound by our own proclivity toward rebellion against our Creator. But when Christ, our Dayspring from on High, made His sinless life a ransom for our own, our ransom was paid. We were bought with a price and given the opportunity to be free. It behooves us to appropriate that freedom for ourselves and to share that freedom with anyone who will receive it.

James stated it in chapter 2, verse 12 of his brief epistle—“So speak and act as people who are to be judged under the law of liberty.” We are no longer under the law of sin and death; we are under a new law of freedom that comes from the God who paid for our liberty with His own blood. He expects us to comport ourselves as free people. Long before national liberty was a concept of the mind, spiritual liberty was a reality in Christ Jesus.