The Great Gift of Liberty

Leviticus 25:10 | July 4, 2026 — Sermon for the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence

"Freedom is not license, and freedom is never free." — George Weigel

There is a bell in Philadelphia that has not rung since 1846. It sits behind glass, cracked and silent, visited by millions who come not to hear it but to read it. Encircling its crown is an inscription from the book of Leviticus: Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.

That inscription was not chosen at random. In 1751, the Pennsylvania Assembly ordered the bell to mark the fiftieth anniversary of William Penn's Charter of Privileges — itself a document born from Quaker suffering, written by men who had crossed an ocean to practice freedom of conscience. The choice of Leviticus 25:10 was deliberate: the Jubilee passage, marking a fiftieth year, was chosen to commemorate Pennsylvania's own jubilee of religious and civil liberty.

The bell was not even called "the Liberty Bell" during the Revolutionary War. That name came from abolitionists in the 1830s, who pointed out that a bell inscribed with liberty to all the inhabitants rang hollow while one-sixth of the population remained enslaved. The crack, in other words, was not merely physical. It was prophetic.

As we mark 250 years of the United States, that bell still has something to say — about the foundation beneath our freedom, the threats against it, and the only mission that can sustain it.

Getting It Right

There are two ways a church can get a patriotic Sunday wrong. The first is to ignore the occasion entirely, as if our faith has nothing to say about ordered liberty. To ignore it is to act as if our society, our land, and our nation have no impact upon us and we make no impact on it; that we are disembodied spirits floating through the nation without responsibility for its well-being, gratitude for its blessings, or respect for those whose sacrifice purchased those blessings for us.

The second is to idolize it — to turn the service of God’s worship into something more about America than Jesus, as if the Kingdom of God and the United States share the same borders.

Our Founders would have recognized both errors. Thomas Jefferson, no orthodox Christian, nonetheless wrote: "God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."

The right posture is to recognize our dual citizenship — honoring our heavenly citizenship precisely by taking our earthly responsibilities seriously. Exile people can celebrate their nation. They must. Not with blind loyalty, but with the honest, grateful love of a patriotism that can speak the truth because it is not afraid to hold to the truth.

Reclaiming the Covenant Foundation

The deepest roots of American liberty are not found in Enlightenment philosophy. They run through the Bible. The very word federal comes from the Latin foedus — covenant. The Mayflower Compact, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution of 1789 all carry the structural DNA of biblical covenant: binding promise, mutual obligation, and accountability to a standard that transcends the parties making the agreement.

The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s was America's first truly inter-colonial event. Before there was political union, there was spiritual union. The revival's insistence that every believer stood equal before God made the radical claims of political equality plausible. The drive for religious liberty against ecclesiastical tyranny fed directly into the movement for civil liberty against political tyranny, as well as ecclesiastical tyranny. Before the events of 1776, there was the revivial of 1740.

And beneath it all runs the Jewish contribution to America's moral grammar: the imago Dei — the image of God stamped on every human being, conferring worth that no government grants and no government may revoke; the covenant pattern of promise and accountability; the Exodus — liberty understood not merely as the absence of chains but as deliverance toward worship, responsibility, and community. Founder John Dickinson put it plainly: "Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness… we claim them from a higher source — from the King of kings, and Lord of all the Earth."

When the Declaration states "We hold these truths to be self-evident" — that is theology. The contrast with 1789 France makes this unmistakable. The American and French Revolutions were born thirteen years apart, both invoking liberty, and they produced opposite fruit. The American founders worked within an assumed transcendent moral order; their revolution issued in a constitutional republic with rights endowed by the Creator. The French Revolution severed liberty from any transcendent referent, enthroned Reason as a goddess, and devoured itself in the Terror within five years. A liberty unmoored from covenant becomes a liberty that devours its own children.

Two English Congregationalist ministers, Andrew Reed and James Matheson, toured American churches in the 1830s and wrote home: "America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud." This sentiment, long misattributed to Tocqueville, actually originated with these British outsiders — which makes it more striking. They located the secret of American vitality not in geography, commerce, or constitutional genius, but in the fruits of redemption in the shared life of the nation.

Restoring the Message of Freedom

Enemies of liberty are not new, and they come in three recognizable forms just now.

From the left, Marxism and socialism magnify the state as savior — promising liberation through redistribution and delivering it through coercion. When the mediating institutions of family, church, and voluntary association are weakened, the state expands to fill the vacuum, not as liberator but as regulator of conscience. The dissolution of freedoms follows in its wake, along with the brain drain of a once bright civilization as its most brilliant innovators move towards the places where their work can flourish.

From the right, fascism magnifies the nation or its leader as savior, demanding that individual identity dissolve into the glory of the tribe. Christian Nationalism is a subset of this error: it baptizes political power in Christian language while collapsing the Kingdom of God into the American state — giving Caesar precisely what belongs only to Christ. Anyone who doubts the destination of unchecked power should visit Dachau, Auschwitz, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, where more than 800 steel monuments represent the counties across the South in which over 4,400 documented lynching were murdered.

From within, radical secularist individualism magnifies the self as savior. But freedom without boundary is not freedom — it is tyranny over others, anarchy dressed as liberation.

All three errors share a common root: they misdiagnose the human person. Fascism and Marxism collapse the person into the collective; radical individualism inflates the person past all accountability. Only the gospel holds both truths simultaneously — real image-bearers with genuine dignity and freedom, and real sinners requiring limit and accountability. From that double truth flows the only form of government that actually serves liberty: one that restrains power because power corrupts, and makes room for the church to do what no government ever can — proclaim the true message of freedom.

World Cup visitors to the United States this summer have marveled at what we take for granted: air conditioning, free refills, sandwiches the size of Connecticut… Buc-cees! But consider the American military cemetery at Normandy — row upon row of white crosses and Stars of David, marking men who gave everything for people they would never meet. Where did that love come from? Not from a social contract. It did not arise from a desire for an easier life. It came from a civilization shaped, however imperfectly, by the gospel of Jesus Christ who taught us that there is no greater love than the one the lays down its life for a friend.

Renewing the Christian Mission

The Jubilee of Leviticus 25 was always pointing beyond itself. When Jesus stood in the synagogue at Nazareth, opened the scroll of Isaiah, and read "He has anointed me to proclaim liberty to the captives" (Luke 4:18), he was announcing that the true Jubilee had arrived in his own person. Paul takes up the same theme in Galatians 5:1 — "For freedom Christ has set us free" — defending that freedom on two fronts: against legalism and against license. The gospel promotes neither collectivist coercion nor autonomous self-expression, but freedom under grace, exercised in love.

If the church possesses the only liberty that cannot be cracked, revoked, or voted away, then the church's mission is not patriotism — it is evangelism. Proverbs 14:34 says that righteousness exalts a nation. We do not proclaim liberty to the land by political means; we proclaim it in the land by gospel means, and trust that its overflow shapes the public order — as it has, however imperfectly, for two hundred and fifty years.

A Bell That Cannot Ring, and a Word That Cannot Crack

The Liberty Bell has not rung since 1846. And perhaps that is fitting. The liberty this nation has pursued for 250 years was never going to be rung into permanence by any bell, secured by any constitution, or guaranteed by any army. Bells crack. Constitutions get amended. Empires fall. Reed and Matheson were right — greatness vanishes like a morning cloud the moment goodness is no longer rooted in God himself.

But there is a freedom that does not crack. The Jubilee that Leviticus 25 foreshadowed, Christ announced as fulfilled — in the flesh, at Nazareth, with the eyes of everyone fixed on him (Luke 4:20). That liberty does not hang in a glass case, for the simple reason that it hung on a cross, rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and will come again in glory. It is not a relic to admire but a gospel to proclaim — to every captive, in every land, in every generation, until the ultimate and greatest Jubilee comes and every bondage is undone forever, announced not by a bell in Phildephia but by a trumpet blast from heaven.

So we give thanks today — as kingdom exiles who love a flawed but beautiful and remarkable home. We name the threats honestly. And we go out as free men and women carrying the message of freedom for all: the kind that is everlasting, purchased by the blood of Christ, witnessed by the blood of martyrs, and preserved by the blood of men and women who counted liberty worthy of their sacrifice.

Freedom is not free. It never has been. It never will be.

Let freedom ring.