Steve West: Celebrating true freedom this Independence Day

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, July 4th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: WORLD Commentator Steve West on the current state of American liberty, and God’s amazing faithfulness in a fallen world.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: Like many Americans, this Independence Day may find you having a backyard bar-b-que, enjoying fireworks, or simply enjoying a day at the pool or beach. Yet we might also take time to contemplate the promise and peril of American liberty and our place, as citizens of another Kingdom, in a world in rebellion.

We rightly celebrate the vestiges of ordered liberty that our country’s Founders wrote into our Constitution and which was carried forward in the Bill of Rights. As recently as last week, our Supreme Court confirmed that a web designer like Colorado’s Lorie Smith can now follow her Christian convictions and not be forced to design websites for same-sex weddings. And in another ruling last week the court said employers will have to work harder to accommodate religious workers who object to sabbath work or other workplace requirements. In previous rulings, the court has also moved to ensure that Christian adoption and foster care agencies and religious schools are treated fairly when it comes to governmental benefits and allowed to follow their convictions.

This is a Supreme Court of promise, one that has helped restore First Amendment guarantees to their rightful place as first liberties. And yet there is peril, as we Christians find ourselves estranged from a country and culture that we no longer recognize, one profoundly post-Christian. Some governmental officials seek to shut down speech with which they disagree, and a less religious society often seeks to undermine religious liberty in the face of a push for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Like the Apostle Peter reminds us, we are “aliens and strangers” in the world. Yet rather than lament our immigrant status, alienation, and estrangement, we can embrace it.

Peter tells us in his first epistle to live our “time as foreigners here in reverent fear.” He is saying: Be strange. Be alien. Remember you don’t belong here. Remember your homeland. Remember you are exiles.

Throughout their letters, Paul and Peter call us to non-conformity, to an alien, counter-cultural, even otherworldly life. In God’s Kingdom we don’t celebrate a declaration of independence, but one of dependence. As Christians, our constitution doesn’t begin with “We the people” but with “In the beginning, God.” We live here but our true citizenship lies elsewhere.

Fellow exiles, the Lord directs us as he did the Jews in Babylon to “build houses and settle down,” to work for the good of our place of exile. And in the same way that John 3:16 reminds us that the Father loves the world that He made; we are to love it too.

Even in unsettling and evil times, amongst people in rebellion, He seems to be saying: “Settle down. Commit to the future of life here. Meet your neighbors. Watch the fireworks. Celebrate all that is good about the country where you live. Wait for me. I will deliver you, if not in life, then in death. Much is at stake, much more than you realize, but I will never forsake you.”

Happy Independence Day. May it find you ever more dependent on our gracious Lord.

I’m Steve West.

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