1 Peter 2:16 “Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.”
America. What is this country, this singularity, this oddity among nations in the history of the world? How rarely contemporary citizens step back to marvel at its strangeness. Maybe it helps, as in my own case, to live just one generation removed from a national experience of crushing totalitarianism and Marxist suffocation that my father, grandparents, and most of my relatives experienced under communist rule in Hungary. And those decades of calamity started immediately after my family suffered under communism’s mirror-twin of Nazi oppression.
Freedom is never easy. It cannot simply be willed into existence or achieved through repetitions of a slogan. The enemies of freedom are too strong, too crafty, too venomous to stand by without a fight. Freedom costs lives and treasure. So it was in America’s Revolutionary War for which we celebrate Independence Day, and the Civil War for which we are resuming widespread remembrance of June 19, 1865, also known as Juneteenth, when the last American slaves were set free.
Yes, America’s history contains tragedies, error, and much sin that extends far beyond chattel slavery. Even today, after science has shown us – in high-resolution – clear evidence of human life in the womb, America is still ravenous in its wholesale slaughter of society’s most helpless and innocent human beings. And yet, and yet … what other country is the example of purity, truth, beauty, equality, and harmony that America can aspire towards? It is regimented North Korea? Quirky, old-fashioned Cuba? Self-assured and dominant China? The political marvel of Venezuela? Is it the childless and quaintly fading European continent? These and any others are desirable only if you willfully blind yourself to reality.
Enthusiasm for Marxism has captured the hearts and minds of many, especially the young and naïve in American society. Wherever this cancer goes, it attempts to destroy truth and extinguish the Christian faith. Here’s all you need to know about Marxism: Havana, Cuba lies just 85 nautical miles from Key West, Florida. Across that stretch of shark-infested water, thousands of Cubans pay everything they have to smugglers and risk their lives to cross over to America. Hundreds have died trying over the years. Yet, in all of history, not one American has ever paid a smuggler and launched a raft to escape in the opposite direction.
Father, your Son, Jesus Christ, paid the ultimate price to buy my freedom. He shed his blood to emancipate me from my bondage to sin. Time and time again, I have seen Jesus utterly transform lives from hatred to love, from turmoil to peace, from alienation to unity. Please help my fellow citizens value and preserve the freedom we have, and turn from pursuing evil to following Jesus. He is the only way out of the mess we’re in.