Week 4, Day 22 - The Sound of Liberty

"Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants."                  Leviticus 25:10

REFLECT

If you travel to the city of Philadelphia today, you can visit a historic eighteenth-century building called Independence Hall. In the Assembly Room inside this building is where, on July 4, 1776, men signed the Declaration of Independence. In 1787 the Constitution of the United States was drafted. A huge bell, which we know now as the Liberty Bell, hung in the bell tower there. Inscribed on its side are the words of Moses written a few thousand years earlier declaring a year of Jubilee: "Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants."

They rang the bell in that tower before the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, as they had rung it on important occasions before. But only decades later did the bell become a kind of icon when it was first depicted on the cover of a new magazine called Liberty, a publication devoted to the cause of the abolition of slavery. Freedom in this new nation was not just freedom from the taxes of the king of England. It had to be freedom for every man and woman, boy and girl - freedom that is the God-endowed dignity of human beings created in the image of God.

When God told the Israelites in Leviticus that they should observe a year of Jubilee every fiftieth year, one of his purposes was to teach the people again that he, the living God, stood for freedom. In the year of Jubilee, the Israelites were supposed to let their slaves go free - a hint that one day slavery would be abolished altogether.

We know that liberty is important to God. The Bible talks over and over again about the Exodus from Egypt as God's great act of salvation and the hint of his ongoing liberating work in the world. God knows we all have taskmasters. One person is enslaved to drugs or alcohol, another to a domineering person. There are others trapped in guilt and shame imposed by life's experiences, choices, and environment; another is in the bondage of being the taskmaster - an addiction to control.

The truth is there is not a single person who does not need to hear the sound of liberty ring loud and clear through their heart, mind and soul. And only the living God, the Creator God, can deliver that kind of liberty.

MAKE IT REAL

Try to think of forces at work in your life that hold you in bondage. Take a few minutes to listen to the Holy Spirit in prayer and ask God to release you. Pray with the confidence that God is able and willing to release you. Claim the promise, "I can do all things through Him who strengthens me."

Day 23