Freedom, Godliness and Saving Faith

On Monday we observe Memorial Day. It isn’t just the beginning of summer, a day off from work and school. It is a holiday set aside to honor the memory of departed loved ones, especially those who died in the service of our country.

Freedom isn't free. Our liberty has been bought and preserved at a great cost to those whose memory we honor again on Memorial Day.

Freedom and liberty are such precious gifts that we should never take them for granted. We should hold them with a solemn sense of gratitude and responsibility, for liberty without responsibility quickly becomes license to do evil.

Words like freedom and liberty are used to justify the right to promiscuity, pornography, suicide, abortion, and every kind of perversion, the right to say anything without considering its effect on others, and the right to stand toe-to-toe with anyone and say "In your face."

But that's not really freedom. That's slavery, slavery to our old Adam. How sad to think that in a free country so many choose to live in spiritual slavery!

Citizens who are slaves of sin are not a blessing to themselves or to their nation. They live only for themselves, at the expense and inconvenience of others, and they undermine public morality and thereby bring God's displeasure on their nation.

The Bible tells us "righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people" (Proverbs 14:34). The destruction of the world in the flood, of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Canaanite cities, and the city of Jerusalem in the days of Jeremiah, show that God brings judgment on nations who disregard his law. By our lack of civic righteousness, our nation could lose the freedom God has given it through the blood of those whom we'll be honoring this month.

But we shouldn't be concerned only about public morality. Although civic righteousness exalts a nation, it doesn't save anyone. More important, "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord" (Psalm 33:12). That's the Lord, the God of salvation, who loved the sinful world so much that he sent his own Son to be our Savior. Only the gospel of his Son can bring us to call God our Lord. Civic righteousness can produce an environment in which the gospel can be freely proclaimed, and that's pleasing to God. But only through the righteousness that is ours in the gospel can sinners be reconciled to God.

As we celebrate Memorial Day and enjoy the freedom preserved by our veterans, let's see to it that liberty does not become a license for sin. Then those buried beneath all those white crosses will not have died in vain.

Let's devote ourselves especially to spreading the news of the spiritual freedom bought by the blood of Christ, so that others may enjoy that freedom with us. Then he who died on Calvary's cross will not have died in vain.

The Gettysburg Address
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task of remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
- Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863