Liberty and Bondage

We have, through life, a fluid understanding of what constitutes bondage and what brings freedom. Sometimes we feel relatively bound; sometimes free. As children, we want to have the rules relaxed and an open frontier to do what we want. We don’t realize all the time that some adventures can result in very painful restraints once we have overstepped. As young teens, for example, we want the liberty of mobility, that is, access to a car, without realizing the responsibility that must come with the risky circumstances of driving. In the adventurous years of adolescence, so many of the tough spots we created for ourselves, started as carefree fun.

It is not as though adults are immune from those miscalculations. We all, time and time again, find that we miss the mark in life, and through our sins suffer a kind of bondage that keeps us from the abundant life promised by God—keeps us from knowing the beauty of liberty. It comes to us as irony that, doing what we want, ignoring the guidance of the Spirit, leads not to freedom, but tangles us in sin. Ironic too that to abide as a branch in Christ the vine is truly the most freeing thing possible. Serving God reveals our perfect freedom. Look at this gorgeous prayer, that comes to our hearts on the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany:

Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Let this beautiful request of God be our request today, that we may here and now enjoy the liberty of the abundant life:  precisely the hope that Christ had in coming to us.