Pastor's Blog: The Constraint That Sets Us Free
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Under the category of “the only real constant in life is change,” I was taken by the news this week of the Nabisco Company’s recent decision to change its traditional red and yellow Animal Crackers package to reflect a more animal-friendly image. If you’ll remember, the traditional package features four cages in which a lion, bear, gorilla, and elephant are confined. Now, when you go to pick up a package of Animal Crackers, you’ll find those same four animals, along with a zebra, in a free-range area that respects their right to roam as God created them to do.
So, why the change? The biggest part of it stems from lobbying efforts by animal rights groups, who have persistently argued for greater sensitivity on the part of Nabisco to how their packaging allegedly perpetuated mistreatment of animals. But I can’t help but believe that underlying the change was something more culturally telling – a more subtle but nonetheless powerful societal impulse toward removing all constraints that would seek to hold us humans down.
Such an impulse toward universal liberation sounds nice, but at the end of the day is impractical, at least for us humans. An argument can be made that we hapless, two-legged creatures are constrained to some degree, whether it be by pressure from others, or our environment, or even our own desires. Certainly the Bible can speak to what happens when people are set free to follow their own impulses. It never ends pretty, considering how self-centeredness inevitably robs us of the life God created us to know, a life of mutual concern where not only humankind but all of creation flourishes.
But it can end pretty. If we opt to be directed by God’s love for us shown supremely in the cross of Jesus Christ, we discover an inexhaustible supply of mercy and grace that delivers us from the bad choices that have imprisoned our souls and redeems us so that we may reclaim the image of God in which we were created.
So, if you feel on the inside as if you are living behind bars that keep you from experiencing the abundant life you yearn to know, there’s a way out, but only one way out. It’s not to follow the herd and it’s certainly not to follow your own heart. It’s instead to follow the example of Jesus, who was obedient unto death on Friday and raised to life on the third day. Only they who walk along his straight and narrow path will come to know his unchanging truth, which as he promised would alone set us free.
“For Christ’s love constrains us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).