PENTECOST

Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.

-       John 7: 38

   The American Declaration of Independence was given some 200 + years ago; but the Declaration of Independence for all humanity came over 2,000 years ago. The former dealt with injustice & tyranny, but it did not deal with the fundamental causes of injustice & tyranny. It spoke of crime, but it did not speak of sin. It spoke of life, but said nothing about death. Violation of property or persons is a crime, but hatred is the sin.

   The only declaration of freedom from hatred & selfishness & death is the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. That Spirit is not cheap – it cost the blood of Christ – but He is free for all who will receive Him.

   Ostensibly we seek the freedom of the children of God while in reality we only desire free reign for our laziness & our earthly tendencies. Ostensibly we seek the spirit of holy joy when in reality we desire leisurely entertainment that spares us from sharing in the tears of our Lord & from true repentance.

Any attempt at declaring freedom is a half-hearted thing if it does not wrestle with the chains of sin & death. No matter how intelligent or prosperous we may be, our freedom hangs by a thread if sin & death are not faced squarely. The political institutions of which we boast rely on people who at the very best are weak & at the worst are vicious. That should make us shake in our boots. All temporal freedom is shaky.

   True freedom is freedom is freedom from sin & death. Jesus wants to know if we are strong enough to accept such freedom, which requires hardship. It would be nice to be with Thomas Edison when his first light bulb glowed without burning out, but could we have watched with him all those months in the dark? We would love to stand with Handel at the premiere performance of his Messiah, but could we have gone hungry & sleepless with him for 24 days as he wrote? Yet these men never knew such freedom as they did in those days & months of inspiration, waiting to see the light & hear the music.

   The Holy Spirit is the sourced of all inspiration. To the inventor He brings perspiration; to the composer, exhaustion. To the apostles He brought long missionary journeys & martyrdom, but to all of them He brought freedom with a joy that only comes from God. John the Baptist was so inspired that the only way they could stop him was cut his head off. Was he a fanatic? Only in the sense that Edison & Handel were fanatics.

   The apostles sorely lacked imagination, yet Peter & the others happily went off to labor & die in strange places. It is not imagination that we need, but the strength to accept the freedom that comes from the Holy Spirit. Still, it is the most demanding kind of freedom & so the most shunned. Time & again we hear the loudest demands for freedom from people who are so ostentatiously unwilling to accept responsibility. Let us thank the Lord for breathing on His church & giving us the Holy Spirit of that true freedom.  AMEN!