Friday, May 29, 2009

The Way to Free - May 29, 2009

Good Friday morning! A major holiday weekend has just passed; where are you going this weekend? Oops, I added some pressure to your life! :-) We often feel pressured to do, or to have, or to buy, or... anything and everything else you can think of in this life. Somewhere along the way, the United States became a demanding place to live. We have more than most people and yet we find no happiness in our abundance. Many of our fellow Americans will die this year from stress related causes. What's up with that? Slavery was abolished more than 100 years ago, and yet we have become almost slaved to our jobs and paychecks. Don't think that is true? Physically, you are correct, but mentally - where the stress reigns - we can easily find ourselves in jobs where much of our time is spent thinking about work, even during the night. And these are often called the "good" jobs!

As children, you and I were raised in the belief that this was and is the land of the free. We are not free from our stress, and none of us can free ourselves in our own strength. The unfortunate part of calling our nation "the land of the free" is that people think freedom is something we are somehow granted at birth. When we grow up to find that we have been born enslaved to sin, and that sin has made this world a very stress-filled place to live, we tend to become disenchanted with God. This is of course, quite unfair to God. He didn't decide to disobey and let sin loose in the world. Well, neither did you, or me, or George over on the next block! Be that as it may, the first humans, our ultimate ancestors, Adam and Eve, did make that decision. Now we are born into the result and all this stress and rushing about is where we have arrived.

Good News! God paid the price of that long ago disobedience and we now have a way to be set free! The way is in God's own Son, Jesus Christ.

Look to Jesus to pay your ransom and set you free!

Bucky

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