July Reading from The Message
What comes to your mind when you think of freedom? Fireworks? Parades? Pool parties and barbecues? God tells us that freedom is more than just our physical liberation, but it applies to our spiritual state as well. Here, in 2 Corinthians 6, we are reminded that true freedom comes from Christ alone.
Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!
Don’t become partners with those who reject God. How can you make a partnership out of right and wrong? That’s not partnership; that’s war. Is light best friends with dark? Does Christ go strolling with the Devil? Do trust and mistrust hold hands? Who would think of setting up pagan idols in God’s holy Temple? But that is exactly what we are, each of us a temple in whom God lives. God himself put it this way:
“I’ll live in them, move into them;
I’ll be their God and they’ll be my people.
So leave the corruption and compromise;
leave it for good,” says God.
“Don’t link up with those who will pollute you.
I want you all for myself.
I’ll be a Father to you;
you’ll be sons and daughters to me.”
The Word of the Master, God.
Scripture Insight
Realizing Freedom
We live in a world awash with fantasies of freedom. But the world is sadly lacking the experience of freedom. Living in the land of the free hasn’t made us free. We live fenced-in lives. Lives that aren’t wide open and spacious. This is true even in the church. Assembling people in churches to listen to proclamations about freedom hasn’t made us free. For there are people in those churches who are in bondage to self, to materialism, to addictions, to power, to their jobs, to anger, to unforgiveness.
Fortunately, not everything that has to do with freedom is a fantasy. There are some bedrock realities. And one of those realities is this: When I center my life on myself, my freedom diminishes and the life I live is constricted, anxious, fenced in. But when I set God at the center of my life, I realize vast freedoms and spontaneities in an open and expansive existence.
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