Live Free
When we got to
the stage where we knew this was going to take off, I asked the Lord to give me
a picture of what he was going to do through the Sabbath year, where he was
taking us. He showed me a picture of a birdcage with the door open and birds
flying out, and the words ‘Live Free’.
He took me to
the story of the children of Israel leaving slavery and journeying through the
wilderness to reach the Promised Land. He told me very clearly, this is about
learning to ‘live free’. The Israelites had lived in slavery all their lives.
They got out of Egypt fairly quickly, but it took 40 years wandering around the
desert to get Egypt out of them. God wanted a people who were free inside as
well as out, people who knew who they were created to be, people who could
value freedom more than garlic and cucumbers, people who had the laws of God
written on their hearts, and loved the voice of God more than to worship golden
calves.
You know the
feeling of being a slave – to addiction, to fear, to depression, to apathy, to
bondage, all the things that keep us from being all God created us for, to live
free? Investing your life into building something for someone else that you’ll
never see the fruit of, building someone else’s pyramids? Picture yourself,
remember yourself like the Israelites, back bent, whip being cracked above your
head, unable to think straight or see a way out of here, let alone fight off
your oppressors.
Then finally,
God sets you free, Jesus saves you and you can leave Egypt, start moving
forward to a new life, only to face right in front of you an impassable wall of
water. Despair hits again, and you feel like the glimmer of hope that things
might change was wasted energy, you start heading back to the pyramids.
Exodus 15 tells
the song Moses and Miriam sang in celebration of God parting the Red Sea and
leading them to freedom on the other side. God told Moses to stretch out his
hand, and the waters part and miraculously a way appears in front of them. The
people make their escape to the other side and breathe a sigh of relief. God
opens a door for you, you make it through, and then you catch those old
oppressors snapping at your heels, those Egyptian chariots chasing you through
the seaweed strewn sea bed.
Then what? God
breathes, just blows, and the seas drown and cover those oppressors:
‘Pharaoh’s
chariots and his army
he has hurled into the sea. The best of Pharaoh’s
officers
are drowned in the Red Sea. The deep waters
have covered them;
they sank to the depths like a stone.’ (Ex 15:4-5)
But can God
really do that? For me, for now? Not just in the Bible, but stretch out his
hand in my life?
Isaiah 59:1 asks
the same question: ‘Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save?’
He answers his
own question later in the chapter (v 19, 20)
‘For he will
come like a pent-up flood
that the breath of the Lord drives along. The
Redeemer will come to Zion.’
Did you catch that? Like a flood. Some other
translations get the comma in the wrong place and put it like this: When
enemies come in like a flood, / the Spirit of the Lord will put them to flight.
But it’s designed to be a parallel
account with Exodus 15, a remembering of what God has done in the corporate memory of the
Israelites.
You split the
sea so I could walk right through it
You drowned my
fears in perfect love
You’ve rescued
me and I can stand and say
I am a child of
God.
As we’re
learning what it looks like to be free people, we’re doing some dreaming about
what God has in store for us after we finish our Sabbath year. We’re already
noticing that God has expanded our capacity to dream, from desperate hopes
about what our life together should be, moving on to scheming and dreaming
about reaching out and impacting and serving our town in exciting ways. As we learn
to live free, as God sorts through our internal life we’re already noticing so much
more his fruitfulness and power in and through us, even before we’ve started ‘work’.
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