Our consumeristic culture comes with rhythms that reinforce bondage. The winter seamlessly moves from “Turkey Thursday,” where we give thanks for excess, to “Black Friday,” where we buy more things we don’t need, into a year of slaving away to pay it all off. An intense appetite for stuff combined with boundariless spending has left most shackled to debt.

That is partly why it is hard for us to grasp freedom. We have gotten so used to the shackles of slavery, we can’t imagine living an unbound life. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In Christ we can be made free and we can live free.

In a season, highjacked from the one who “came to set the captives free,” I pray we find release from the norms that bind. May this Christmas find you and I looking to the chain breaker, fully embracing the way of the one who declares our Debt Cancelled.

Colossians 2:14 “He canceled the unfavorable record of our debts with its binding rules and did away with it completely by nailing it to the cross.”

John 8:36 “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

Romans 13:8 “Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

- Micah McElveen