June 29, 2020 | Dan Low

We take tremendous pride in our freedom as Americans. What we celebrate on the 4th of July is what we easily take for granted, yet truly prize, every other day of the year.

In this particular moment, we have become more passionate that every American enjoys this freedom. Being liberated from sin and death through Jesus, we also want our nation to understand the extraordinary cost of true spiritual freedom. Framing it in legal terms, Peter declares that the righteous died for the unrighteous to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18).

Blessed with God’s righteousness, we are now privileged and equipped to serve as instruments of that righteousness. Being right with God, he calls us to do right toward others. We faithfully love our God by compassionately loving our neighbors. This translates into caring about issues that we tend to misunderstand or even ignore—issues like racism, racial injustice, food insecurity, homelessness, poverty, domestic/sexual abuse, substance addiction, and human trafficking. Becoming a church who genuinely loves our neighbors requires a willingness to learn from others, listen with open minds, confront and change false assumptions, step out to do things that feel uncomfortable, and blaze a new trail for us to courageously practice the gospel we confidently proclaim.

Anchoring our hope in a God who will reveal his righteousness by making all things new in eternity, we must also do whatever we can today in our not-yet-fully-redeemed world to demonstrate that he is just—a defender of the weak, a protector of the vulnerable, a deliverer of the helpless, a provider for the needy, and a voice for the marginalized.