At Dallas Leadership Foundation we hope you are and your families and communities are celebrating our nation’s birthday. The Fourth of July commemorates liberty. Liberty was hard fought at our nation’s inception, and liberty is still being fought for – from sea to shining sea – 241 years later. So over the barbecue and during the fireworks, we hope you remember the sanctity of living as a free people. We hope you respect and defend it.

Jesus followers know a thing about liberty. We know how important it is to love people enough to walk among them and not at a distance. It’s a privilege to speak out, vote and fight so that others can experience freedom. For Jesus followers, we also understand the breadth of liberty because it reaches beyond our personal and political freedoms to the endlessness of eternity.

The crux of the Gospel is that love led Jesus to live, die and rise again so that any human being could have the chance to receive His gift of a free life, a gift tailored for the human soul. When any human being accepts this gift, they experience a freedom that not only encompasses body, mind and spirit; it defies time, matter and space. In other words, with the Son of God, we receive mega-liberty.

Every single day, Jesus followers should be in the business of sharing mega-liberty. We may support the American tenets of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but we must be mindful of a greater constitution, the superior covenant provided by Christ Jesus. Our template is not a political party, but the love of Jesus. Race-centered politics, worldliness or self-interest never should drive our actions. Authentic and lasting freedom sprouts from God alone because Jesus set us free for freedom.

On this July Fourth, let’s remember the Apostle Paul's plea to the Jesus followers of his generation. He asked them to remember the only "pledge of allegiance" that will matter forever:

Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:1-6, NASB)