Called to Freedom

A Sermon on the 250th Anniversary of America

Hey friends. I wanted to share the sermon I preached yesterday at church—it’s an attempt at doing some political theology, something I think Wesleyan Christians need to become a little more practiced at. Hope that you all enjoyed your Fourth of July weekend and dodged any and all fireworks that might have come your way. Happy Monday!

-Cambron

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Called to Freedom Galatians 5

Preached at Asbury Methodist Church on July 5^th, 2026

The 250th anniversary of our country has been really interesting and fun. In some ways that’s a long time, but in many ways we are still really a very young country. Put it this way: if you are 50 years old, you have been alive for 1/5th of our country’s history!

I want to think about our country for a moment today and what we mean by freedom as Americans, and then talk about the even greater and better freedom we find in Christ.

But I do love America. I find our history fascinating; I admire the founding principles of our constitution; I love the way we have attempted to bring people from all over the world together into one nation. Part of my family has been here since the 1600s, some were Quakers, and other parts of my family were Irish Catholics who came from Ireland during the potato famine, and made a new life here. One of them, my great-grandmother, married a Methodist minister and here I am, an heir to that spiritual legacy.

It’s been cool watching the World Cup, too, and seeing how all the world is here in our country, and not just seeing our movies and TV shows, but seeing what Americans are actually like, and seeing that though we are not perfect, that there is still a lot to celebrate about who we are. Seeing the German guy going crazy over going to Buc-ee's, it just makes you happy. Hearing a whole stadium singing John Denver (country roads, take me home, to the place where I belong)…I felt that that is such an American sentiment. Because we have attempted to be a nation where many different kinds of people can find their way here and find their home, where they can belong, and that’s such a unique and amazing thing.

But the one thing, if we are trying to wrestle with our identity as Americans, the one word that we’ve focused on, is: freedom. We were founded 250 years ago, and there’s lots of nuance we can add, lots of cynical explanations we could offer, but when we strip that away, the very basic desire that formed our country, was a desire to be free.

250 years ago, Thomas Jefferson penned these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Our country is founded upon the belief that human beings have been given unalienable rights to life and liberty, and the pursuit of what we believe will bring us happiness. Unalienable means that these rights can never be taken away from us; they are a part of who we are, as bearers of God’s image. Though some argue that our country was not founded as a Christian nation, the foundation of human rights is the deeply Christian belief in the Imago Dei, that all people are created in the image of God.

56 men signed this declaration of independence from Great Britain, at great risk to their own lives. And for five years, until the battle of Yorktown in 1781, Americans fought to establish a new kind of country, rooted in the principles of human rights and self-government.

And our country’s history, as I look at it, is a 250 year old argument about what freedom is and how we live it out. 48 of the 56 men who signed the declaration, putting their life on the line in the name of political liberty, went home to whip their slaves; men, women and children who were bought and sold and treated as property, and not as human beings. That contradiction at the heart of our country, apparent to everyone involved, would lead us to have a Civil War about a century after our forming, where historians estimate about 700,000 soldiers died, fighting to preserve this unstable union called America, fighting over what it means to be free and what we should do with our freedom. That struggle continued into the 20th century through two world wars, the Civil Rights movements, and the various social and political struggles that have come and gone: the struggle has been, and continues to be:

what does it mean to be free?

As Americans, when we talk about freedom, usually we are talking about civil liberties, freedom FROM oppression and state control, a negative freedom, initially freedom FROM a king an ocean away; that’s why we have the freedom of speech and worship and assembly, freedom from state control over our lives; this makes possible a positive freedom, to govern ourselves in a democratic republic, to pursue our dreams, to pursue our happiness in the way we believe is best.

I believe that the political freedom we enjoy as Americans is something worth fighting for and protecting. We should be immensely grateful for our political liberties, and for those in our past who fought for them. And I hope we still today have the courage and the grace to fight for these basic civil liberties, even for the liberties and rights of people we disagree with.

But we are here today first not as Americans but as Christians, as followers of Jesus. Our primary devotion and allegiance, as baptized Christians, is to Jesus above all things. Amen? Jesus of Nazareth will not play second fiddle. He is everything to us or he is nothing. He demands, as the king of kings and lord of lords, to reign over our hearts. Everything else: family, country, tribe, nation, politics, party, self, must bow to him. If we ever place something or someone above him in our hearts, that is called idolatry, the root of all of humanity’s woes and sins. We are a part of the global church, a church of and for all nations, and our national and cultural identities, though they are important and central to who we are, must always yield to our identity in Christ and in the Church. So though we love our country, we must always love our Lord first and with all of who we are.

And so, like I said, the political liberties that America was founded on are important and good, but what I want us to know today as Christians is that there is a greater freedom. There is a more basic, a more foundational freedom, a more important freedom, than what we might call American freedom, which is good.

Think of the moment you felt the most free. I think about when I first got my driver’s license, and you are told by your parents when you need to be home, and you can just go wherever you want! That’s a great feeling, a great freedom; but it’s only as good as where you end up going.

And that’s the limitation of American civil freedom: it’s only as good as WE are! It frees us to pursue happiness, but it doesn’t give us happiness. It frees us to do what we will, what we want, but doesn’t tell us what is good to pursue. If you look to the history of our country, we have often used our freedoms to pursue things that harmed us and enslaved us, or others. Some people have envisioned American freedom to mean, I get to do whatever I want! I am in charge of myself, and I don’t have to worry about anyone else! I decide what’s true, I decide what’s real, I decide what’s right. Who are you to tell me what to think or what to do. I’m free!

The Christian would wonder, are you?

American freedom says, I can do whatever I want to do!

But there is a greater freedom than American civil liberties. It is the freedom of a Christian. In Christian freedom God says: you can become who I have created you to be.

In the letter to the Galatians, Paul writes with great fervor about this freedom. The context of the letter is that there are Jewish followers of Jesus who are arguing that the Gentile Christians must become ethnically and religiously Jewish to be Christians. In other words, to become Jesus-followers, the men must be circumcised, and they must follow the laws of the Torah with its prescribed dietary laws and days of observance.

Paul, with great passion, says NO. Jew and Gentile both have found a new freedom in Christ, not based on ethnicity, not based on rules, not based on our performance, but based on what God has done for us in Christ. We’re a new creation! And a new creation calls for a new kind of freedom.

He says, It is for freedom that Christ has set you free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

So we must ask: what have we been freed from in Christ? We have been freed from the law; we have been freed from this obligation to prove ourselves to God. We do not have to hustle for our own worth. We do not have to stay awake at night, wondering what our status is before our Creator.

Christian freedom is the freedom from fear over your eternal soul. It is the freedom from worrying about what God thinks of you. It is the freedom from this great divide between you and God that existed because of sin. It’s the freedom of being filled with the Holy Spirit and knowing that nothing can separate you from God’s love. When we confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, when we ask for forgiveness, when we are baptized and washed by the waters, we are free!

Christianity is about freedom! Just like how the story of Israel begins with people enslaved in Egypt, and ends with them crossing the river Jordan into the promised land, where they would be free…the same thing happens with us. We are enslaved to the law, enslaved to sin, enslaved to death, enslaved to our wills and our own passions, and by the death of Jesus, these are all defeated. And we, in the Jordan River of baptism, we cross into the land of freedom.

And this freedom is NOT like American freedom. It is NOT the freedom to do whatever we feel like…that kind of freedom, to do whatever we want, isn’t that great if it leads us to hell! And Paul warns us about this:

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. (Gal 5:13-15)

Christian freedom is not the freedom to do whatever I want.

It’s the freedom to become who God wants me to be.

Benjamin Crosby writes in Plough magazine:

True freedom for the Christian isn’t about making our own will or desires the measure of our reality; it isn’t really about exercising agency at all. Rather, it is about embracing the truth that our standing before God rests not on who we are but who God is, and what God has done for us in Christ. And then it is about responding to that glorious good news with gratitude, embracing our freedom from earning salvation by living for our neighbors with Christlike love and service.

Here is what I would say, on this 250th anniversary of our country, the place God has planted us. We are obviously very divided, culturally and politically. There are people and movements actively working against the hopes of Christians and the teaching of the Church. We should be engaged politically, voting for and working with people to put policies in place that work toward the common good, especially at the local and state level. We can make a good difference. We should be using our voices as Christians and citizens to advocate for justice, for decency, for traditional family values, for the protection of life, for the human rights, dignity, and welfare of all peoples. Yes, we should be doing this, as citizens who are also Christians, as wisely and as lovingly as we can.

But the problems we face as a country, are not primarily political, and they cannot be solved politically. They are spiritual. America does not need more culture warriors or more partisans. We have plenty of those! America needs Jesus. Americans need the freedom that cannot come from a declaration or a government or by having the biggest army. Americans, just like every other human being all over the world, need what only Jesus can give: freedom in Him.

I mean, when I look, and I know as you look too, but when I look, the problems that we face, we don’t have solutions to. We’ve we’ve turned our eyes from the poor. You know, we've turned our eyes from people that are struggling. We’ve turned our eyes from people that are in situations where they don’t know what to do and and we’ve focused on things that are a little bit less important. We see people whose homes have been destroyed by drugs. Families have been broken, broken by ideologies that people have proclaimed as good. And there’s just division. There’s a spirit of division and hatred among people that have a lot in common.

And we can see all of these things, and the thing that needs to happen is heart change. Are you with me on this? Just tweaking political options will not work. It will not change it. And radical violent revolution won’t do it either, by the way, too. Right? Our human solutions will not get us to where we want to go.

But what will get us there is repentance. When you look to Christian history, many times when there was great need in the culture, what happened is that some small groups of people became willing to have broken hearts and they began to pray and they began to seek after the Lord. It’s happened many times in history. It happened in several times in Europe. It’s happened several times in our country, in the first and second great awakenings. We saw moments of it in the crusades of Billy Graham. You saw it with the early Methodists in England, when people said, “We don’t have solutions to the things going on, but we are desperate for the spirit of God to fall.” And what happened out of that desperation and the brokenness of people’s hearts, out of the life change that was happening in people’s hearts in these revival movements, suddenly culture began to be changed as well. Politics began to be changed as well. The late 1700s, what happens in England? Slavery is abolished throughout the British Empire because of the earlier revival movements.

Today slavery is thought of as a moral evil when all throughout history it was seen as a normal everyday thing! And it was the revival movement of God that changed hearts. And I think in our country we must be on our knees. We must be seeking God. I don’t know any solutions to the many problems we have. But I know the deep longing, the deep longing that so many people have. And the longing is for God.

So my basic question for us today, for you and for myself is: are you free? Are you free in Christ? If our so-called freedom has led us to hate our neighbors, if our so-called freedom has led us to only talk to one side of whatever the sides may be, if our so-called freedom has led us to hate people who are different than us, to hate people who look differently than us, to hate people even who worship differently than us, to hate people even who might even be working against us, then: we’re not free yet!

What Paul says in Galatians is that we are made free so that we can love.

We are set free so that we can love our neighbors. The good news is that Jesus wants us to be free. Jesus wants you to be free. Jesus wants doesn’t want any of us to harbor guilt, to harbor envy, to hold on to grudges, to hold on to resentment. Jesus doesn’t want us to think we have to save the world. Jesus doesn’t want us to be held captive by sin or captive by addiction. We believe as Methodists and moreso as Christians that the Holy Spirit can actually change our hearts. That’s what Paul says here. We don’t have to live a life indulging the flesh!

We can live a life in step with the spirit. And the spirit will produce fruit in our hearts. And the thing that the fruit is, it’s love, it’s joy, it’s peace, it’s patience, it’s kindness, its goodness, it’s faithfulness, it’s gentleness, and it’s self-control. And can you imagine what our country would be like if thousands of people had the fruit of the spirit pouring out of their life? It can happen with us if we come with repentant hearts to the Lord. Let’s pray together:

Holy God, thank you for the freedom you give us in Christ. Thank you. We praise you that we do not have to remain in bondage to sin or to death or to anything in our life that is keeping us captive. God, I pray that someone today finds freedom in you. I pray that someone today finds the freedom to confess what is holding them back and to find the joy that you love a repentant heart. God, we honor you and we praise you. We pray that you would have mercy on us. We pray that you would give us your spirit to guide us. We pray that you would produce your fruit in our hearts. Come, Holy Spirit, bring revival to us. and through us to your world. Amen.

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