Meditation 1: Freedom

Truth can become stale but meditations can bring fresh revelation. In that spirit I'm looking forward to bringing my attention to important truths about Christianity that we ought to keep fresh. Freedom. Last I considered freedom in this blog post about the Passover Feast. The Jewish people remember the Lord who led them out of Egypt. We remember Jesus who led us out of spiritual slavery. But, there is a difference between being free and staying free.  That is the subject of this meditation. We cannot obtain freedom on our lonesome. When we try on our own we feel confined and get depressed at how much bondage we may still experience. This verse from Romans 8 (The Message) spoke to my heart:

"Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them ---living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life."

To live a free life we need correct focus. In some ways this is a question of magnification. Consider the heroic stories of faith from Hebrews 11. These people did great things because they magnified a magnificent God. That is, they paid less attention to themselves and more attention to God. My meditation is simple: We remain free when we magnify God more than ourselves and our problems.