Wednesday - Remember the Nation and the Sacrifice

READ:  Nehemiah 7:70–73; John 15:13

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” – John 15:13  

Two hundred and fifty years ago, this was not a country. It was thirteen colonies under the thumb of a king an ocean away — until a handful of ordinary men looked at everything they had and decided some things are worth fighting for. “Give me liberty, or give me death,” Patrick Henry said. That is the spirit this nation was born in.

And do you know what they were fighting for? They wanted to worship God without a king telling them how — an open Bible, a pulpit the crown didn’t own, the Bible as the sole authority for their faith. This was a country that bled for the freedom to worship, the very freedom you are sitting in right now.

Because freedom has never once been free. Somebody paid for it. Somewhere a man you’ll never meet left home and never came back. Somewhere a mother folded a flag instead of holding her son. Row after row of white stones — name after name after name — just like the list Nehemiah read, and every one of them was somebody. Even the rebuilding in Nehemiah’s day took sacrifice: the leaders and the people gave freely out of what they had to restore what mattered (Nehemiah 7:70–72). Freedom and faithfulness always cost someone something.

How easily do you enjoy your freedoms — to gather, to open a Bible, to pray out loud — without remembering what they cost? What would it look like to receive them with real gratitude this week instead of taking them for granted?