The Living Faith

By celebrating Independence Day happily and colorfully American citizens demonstrate our pride about our heritage of enlightenment and freedom, through which our modern civilization has been blessed with technology, science and material possessions. True it is, we are so creative that we discovered so many ways and styles to find pleasures at their maximum. Nonetheless we also should acknowledge the dark side of our ‘independent’ lives. We, knowingly or unknowingly, have built up and maintain a culture of death, depression and anxieties; we are experiencing a culture of reverse values; a culture of disbelief and violence; a culture of poverty of spiritual contentment. Due to our wrong management of unbridled human pleasures, they have turned out to be pernicious to our prosperous and healthy life.

The evils are simply our own making from the atrocious contract we make with Evil Spirit of unbridled freedom. Unquestionably freedom by itself is the greatest gift the Creator has shared with us. This freedom brings forth independence; independence automatically produces individuality; and because of individuality we differ from each other and consequently there exists the variety, diversity and division. While we enjoy this remarkable blessing of freedom, we are anxious about our survival among those individuals around us; we compare and contrast ourselves with them; we are afraid to face their competition when we hunt for fulfilling our basic needs of food, shelter, sex, love, safety, selfesteem, and self-actualization. Our weakness compels us to prefer a safety network, namely a group of our own based on the only anthem: “Salute me, help me, and support me and if need be, play and fight with me”. To build and manage such safety network, we intelligently make use of cunningness, lies, and some artificial groupism-glues of race, color, creed, caste, class, including blood and clan.

Indeed God appreciates the beautiful differences existing among us but wants us to make the best and fruitful use of our divisions in justice, truth and mercy; on the contrary, due to our cranky and unlevelheaded and biased presumptions, we make the human life miserable, deplorable, thus evil takes its throne slowly but steadily in and around our lives and deforms our colorful and awesome ‘independence’.

The result of such darkened freedom, we are freaked out by certain kind of superimposing but very artificial and fake paranoid assertions, such as: “We are Greater ‘cause I am the Greatest, but they…not even great; “I am ok, you may be ok but they are not ok”. This pinheaded and overinflated resolve and attitude toward individualism came out of the remains of World Wars and even Cold War.

There is nothing wrong about our individual efforts not to lose heart and to maintain one’s equilibrium of heart and mind, thinking highly of oneself; uphold self-esteem and self-respect as large as possible. God’s Spirit in the Bible stresses this fact and offers us certain positive holdings about our individual greatness. “You are the light of the world; you are the salt of the earth”. “Don’t think you are born to slavery but to freedom. You were once no people now you are holy people, holy nation, and separated from others.”

However our Triune God never expects from us the maniac roundup of the most astounding blessing of freedom. He offered our independence personally, socially and nationally at a high cost of inspiring some of our forebears even to shed their blood. We should be law-binding citizens. Many consider that they are truly law-binding persons because they are very careful in observing the traffic rules and paying faithfully our taxes. That is not sufficient explanation of ‘law-binding’. America has been founded on the God’s Great Law, which is a package of moral, social and spiritual commands. These Commands are the rudder for keeping us on the right course, the protection that keeps our salvation secure.As they instruct the receptive minds of believers on earth, they lead safely to the kingdom of heaven. If we fail in them, we know the results from the Babyboomers’ shaken and toxic history as well as from the horrible stories we hear today of our children-the millennials.

Historian David Goldfield, in his book “The Gifted Generation”, explores in details how some of our leaders in the past, despite partisan differences, possessed a deeper, richer vision forAmerica the Great.According to him, Presidents like Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, considered America as a beneficial force in the globe, with its commonwealth ideal of mutual responsibility that strengthens individualism by promoting equal opportunities for all its citizens. “These leaders too believed”, Goldfield writes, “that America could not be whole until everyone had the opportunity to succeed. They knew from personal experience that government was not only good but also necessary to address society's inequalities.”

This is exactly the echo of the Gospel values Jesus had been sowing for two millennia into our hearts. Our nation is very grateful, not only for its Founders and their Constitution, but also for so many leaders and prophets breathing and preaching, even bleeding for maintaining such nobility and greatness of our nation. Through His Word he continues to emphasize to us: If we want our individual freedom bear abundant and valid fruits, we need to know and live with the disciplined (not unbridled or licentious) freedom as the crucial parameter for making right choices for the prosperity of our nation and thus make it ‘the Great and the Beautiful’.