Memorial Day

Yesterday we celebrated Memorial Day in our country and honored the many people in our history that have served in the military.  It is usually a time where we also celebrate the beginning of summer with a three-day weekend and barbecues at the lake.  But it should always be a time to remember the high cost of sacrificial service and make somber reflection of the cost of freedom.

The freedoms that we Americans enjoy have always been costly simply because freedom is never free.  Every nation in history that seeks freedom must do so at the expense of the ones who enjoy that freedom.  This cost of freedom can only be attained if we understand that mankind is “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”.  We know this because in each of our consciences we understand an innate sense of truth and justice and a longing to be free from oppression and tyranny.  This desire to be free and its acknowledgement as a right “endowed by their Creator” is what has made America the greatest nation in the history of the world. 

The phrase “endowed by their Creator” however has nearly been forgotten in our postmodern American culture.  Could it be that in our freedom we have lost sight of the ultimate source of our freedom?  Or is it that in our freedom we have deliberately sought to be autonomous altogether?  It can be a short step between autonomy and tyranny.  But it is only from a Christian worldview that a transcendent understanding of freedom can be accepted, as Christianity teaches unique doctrines of man and of God.  Left to ourselves we cannot be free because we lose the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator.  Without acknowledging the Creator and the potential for our own tyranny we forget our history and we lose the freedom that has been so sacrificially given to us. 

Memorial Day therefore is also a time to give honor to the truths upon which our nation was founded.  If we can remember the tyranny of a misguided English monarchy that oppressed our first colonies, let’s remember the “unalienable rights" endowed by our Creator that give us our national freedom.  Let us also recognize the potential for tyranny in each of us and a misguided democracy that has forgotten that Creator and his “unalienable rights”.  

No man has the right to impose personal beliefs upon anyone else.  But by calling upon the Creator and his unalienable rights to all mankind, we do not impose oppression upon others, we acknowledge a universal truth that gives freedom in a Christian worldview.  Jesus gave the ultimate expression of truth and sacrifice in his own life to provide a salvation from tyranny and death.  He is the Creator that gives both the “unalienable rights” of national freedom and he is the truth that "will set you free” (John 8:31-32) in personal salvation, if we call upon him.  He is the one who can set us free indeed, and he is the one that can bless a people with national freedom.