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Galatians 5:1 says that freedom is the very reason Christ set us free. One of the most powerful scenes in the movie Schindler’s List occurs after Germany surrenders. Oskar Schindler is now considered a war criminal and has fled while the Polish-Jewish refugees he kept alive are standing on a train track, liberated, stunned and unsure of where to go. That scene strikes at the core of what many of us struggle with, what to do with our hard-fought freedom. We fumble around with it, abuse it, deny it, but the Bible says the whole point of freedom is freedom!

The first freedom we are offered is our liberation from the kingdom of darkness (God has “delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Colossians 1:13-14). He rescues us, redeems us, forgives us. He set us free!

Now what? Now we learn to live in this new kingdom, the Kingdom of God’s Beloved Son. Most of us have carried so much baggage from that kingdom of darkness that we rarely get to experience the freedom Christ died for us to have. Every once in a while, I watch a show called House Hunters International. You will see a couple in a 17th-century villa in Italy and the woman will complain that the kitchen is just not as big as her kitchen in America. Or the man will gripe about not having a shower in the bathroom. I want to yell out at my TV, “You’re not in America anymore! Stop comparing!” Whether you are wistfully looking back at what was or just locked up in old habits or ways of relating, you will never get to fully drink in the freedom of your new Kingdom until you burn your ships and scream out, “I’m all in!”

My prayer is that you are set free. For some of you, that means salvation, letting go of religion or preference and becoming a child of God, a follower of Jesus. For some, it means beginning the process of no longer being identified by old chains. For others, it means finding your role in taking freedom to others, proclaiming this liberty to the captives all around us (Isaiah 61). My hope is that as many women as possible in our church and in our city will drink deeply from a big cup of Freedom. It was for this very reason that Christ set us free.