“For you are free…” 1 Peter 2:15
There are several places that I have been hiking in California. Whenever I go someplace new, I marvel at some of the natural beauty: color of the sky, color of the sunset, natural rock formations, colorful wild flowers and other unusual things. I remember walking into this one place with a group of jr high students. The thing I remember most is on the way in we didn’t see this one thing, but on the way out we did. It was a granite rock that looked like a human face.
I don’t know if it was the angle of the rock on the way in- or the angle of the sun that made it appear. But I am confident that we didn’t see it on the way in. Here’s another strange thing – I have been on this hike several times before – and I never saw it on the way in or the way out any of those times. I missed it. It was so cool to see it. I wish I had a picture of it – but I can’t show you one because I just made this story up. It sounds much more impressive than seeing a tree stump on the hike out and not on the way in.
So, here’s the point. When we take or listen to a different point of view or even take a second look – we see more. We capture some things we never saw before. Maybe we missed it because we were looking down, coughing, thinking about something else, or just plain were looking the other way.
1 Peter 2:15 “For you are free, yet you are God’s slaves, so don’t use your freedom as an excuse to do evil”. We often sing hallelujah to a verse like this. Those first four words are incredible, and it is so easy to stop and not see or read the rest. YET WE ARE GOD’S SLAVES. Our freedom is not only about us doing what we want to do, but following God’s instruction of holy living and being a servant.