Tuesday, February 1, 2011

"Yearning to be Free"

Have you watched the news from Egypt the last few days? It's all pretty scary! This morning I watched thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands of people carry signs, yelling and generally expressing their extreme displeasure with the government of Hosni Mubarak.

These images from Egypt aren't far away and irrelevant to our life here. Have you filled your car with gas recently? Well, the sticker price for gas continues to climb. For that reason alone the stability of Egypt has significance for all of us who put gas in our cars. 2,000,000 barrels of oil travel through the Suez Canal every day. Instability in Egypt just might dramatically impact the price of gas in Pennsylvania or wherever you live.

What's the deal with all these screaming, rioting people in Egypt? Are they just "crazy Arabs"? In her poem - "The New Colossus" - Emma Lazarus talks about the "... masses yearning to be free ..." That's the deal in Egypt. It's the "yearning to be free"!

The "yearning to be free" is built into the heart of every man, woman and child who has lived, who lives and who will live. It's a part of being created in the image of God. God created us to be free. Jesus said, "You will know the Truth and the Truth will set you free." He said, "I am the Truth ..." Blase Pascal - the French physicist of 2 centuries ago - said that we all have a God shaped vacuum in our hearts. It's that very God shaped vacuum that causes the "yearning to be free" because we only find true freedom in Jesus. He alone satisfies the yearning of the heart to be free!

Tyranny can only clamp the lid on freedom for so long and then the "yearning to be free" bubbles to the surface, sometimes at the boiling point as we see on our TV screens streaming live from Egypt.

This "yearning to be free" is ultimately a heart issue. God put into our very DNA this "yearning to be free" that also paradoxically is only fully fulfilled when Jesus the Truth sets us free to be all that God created us to be. That's the Gospel! That's the Truth! And that's the truth!

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