Each month of the year has a day or days in which some event is celebrated. In January we celebrate the New Year. The New Year is a new beginning; an opportunity to start over. February contains Valentine’s and President’s Day. The days of celebration just keep on coming. For citizens of the United States, July 4th is a very important day. On that day the Declaration of Independence was signed declaring that we were no longer citizens of the British Empire.

The Declaration of Independence was a list of grievances against the tyrannical government of the king. The key to the Declaration lies in the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to those ends, is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

The earliest Declaration of Independence was written in Galatians 5:1 “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

What both St. Paul and Thomas Jefferson were saying is that we have been set free from tyrants. Christ has set us from our Spiritual tyrant, the Devil, and Jefferson was saying that we have been set free from earthly tyrants. But in both cases the key lies in a word that does not appear in those writings and that word is responsibility.

As followers of Christ we are responsible for living as the children of God. That means we are set apart to serve and love God and our fellow human beings. It means we must not fall back into the bondages of sin and death and we do that by worship, by prayer, by studying God’s Word, by participating in the Sacraments, and by serving. That is our responsibility.

When it comes to earthly freedom it is important for us to remember that our rights come from God, not from government. That “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are God’s gifts to us, not the government’s gifts. We are called upon to be responsible and to never let our government tell us that it grants us “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. We are to be vigilant, responsible, and to never believe that our government is what has given us our rights. We are free from Satan’s power and the power of corrupt governments.
 

Veritas - Curt