You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Do we want this much power? Several times Jesus sets our authority to offer or withhold forgiveness into a cosmic framework, saying that what we do in this world is mirrored in the heavenly realm. “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Yikes!
Maybe Jesus teaches this process of confrontation and reconciliation because there are such cosmic consequences to ignoring conflict and pain. When we bury our hurts, sweep our conflicts under the rug, not only do we stay bound, we keep the perpetrators of hurts bound to us. No one is free.
I believe that what God wants most for us is freedom. I have seen the process of healing and forgiving result in amazing freedom for people, huge releasing of energy and giftedness, new ability to see, to hope, to live. As I reflect on this, stories of survivors of sexual abuse and trauma come to mind. (The next two paragraphs contain nothing explicit, but if this is a sensitive area for you, read with care.)
I once prayed for months with a woman who had endured sexual abuse throughout her life – people who have been victimized as children often suffer similar abuse in adulthood. This woman saw herself more as victim than survivor, and engaged in self-harm as well. Once I said something to her about moving toward forgiveness. She turned on me in fury and said, “They told me in my support group that I don’t ever have to forgive!” I backed down, thinking, “That is true – but then will you ever be free?” Forgiveness cannot be rushed, but to close ourselves to it leaves us bound to people who have hurt us.
Years later I prayed with another woman. She and her two sisters had been sexually abused throughout childhood by their father and grandfather, who were still alive and in the family. She had done the excruciating work of addressing those wounds and moving toward healing, and had come to forgive her abusers. She did not trust or get close to them, and was vigilant to ensure the safety of children in the family system, but over time she released the awful burden of their crimes. And then she was no longer psychically connected to them – forgiveness meant freedom from them. Her sisters refused to do this work; one was deeply alcoholic and the other suicidal. As brutal as it is to work at healing from trauma, it is a movement toward freedom, toward life.
Few of us experience trauma this severe – but we might feel bound in some way by a hurt we have suffered or anger we continue to hold. Usually the anger is justified, but it can still be corrosive over time. Today, can we let some of those stuck places come up in our mind, and pray about forgiving people who have hurt us, or ask forgiveness of those whom we have hurt? If we ask the Spirit to show us those things, they often emerge from the muck.
Inner healing is a powerful process of bringing the love of God to bear on our emotional wounds. I have witnessed tremendous transformation result from the healing of memories and specific areas of woundedness. (If you want to know more about this process, please contact me.) As we release that healing stream of God’s love and power to soak into hidden wounds and resentments, life returns to parched places, and old knots become unwound so that peace can flood in.
“It is for freedom that Christ has made us free,” Paul wrote. Jesus has won for us freedom to release ourselves and others. Let’s set the captives free.
© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
Showing posts with label freedom in Christ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom in Christ. Show all posts
8-24-23 - Keys To the Kingdom
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
I’ve always pictured an oversized key, like an honorary Key to the City. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said to Simon Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
He has just called Peter the “rock on which I will build my church.” And now the keys to the Kingdom? We can only guess at what he meant – that is how theologians and biblical scholars make a living, after all. But we might get a hint of what he intended when we think about what keys do. They lock things, and they open them. They make them inaccessible and accessible.
The Kingdom of God is a reality that Jesus described through image and metaphor, and demonstrated through healing, teaching, and transformative actions that look to us like miracles. It is the realm of God, the reality of God, the Life of God as it unfolds in our own plane of reality. It is power and energy and boundless grace. To be given the “keys” to this reality is to be given power to unlock, release the energy of heaven – or to withhold it. Hence, “…whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
We are heirs to this gift, this promise, this frightening spiritual authority. We can keep the realm of God, with all its power and promise and peace, locked up simply by not talking about it, or not exercising the power we’ve been given. Or we can use these keys to open it to everyone who is thirsty for God.
We can keep people bound by withholding forgiveness, and loosed by exercising grace. Jesus gave us these gifts not to be locked away in a safe deposit box, but to be spent, drawn down, exhausted… only to find the them constantly replenished, like a waterfall.
In prayer today, imagine sitting with Jesus and having him hand you a set of keys. What do they look like? What do they open? Who has the keys to your heart?
There are some things that need to remain bound, I suppose – the power of evil to wreak destruction in our world, for one. Racism, materialism, consumerism, nationalism… there are a few. And so many more things and people and communities that need to be released, set free. I believe God wants us in the “loosing” business, one lock at a time. That's what the keys to the kingdom are for.
I’ve always pictured an oversized key, like an honorary Key to the City. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said to Simon Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
He has just called Peter the “rock on which I will build my church.” And now the keys to the Kingdom? We can only guess at what he meant – that is how theologians and biblical scholars make a living, after all. But we might get a hint of what he intended when we think about what keys do. They lock things, and they open them. They make them inaccessible and accessible.
The Kingdom of God is a reality that Jesus described through image and metaphor, and demonstrated through healing, teaching, and transformative actions that look to us like miracles. It is the realm of God, the reality of God, the Life of God as it unfolds in our own plane of reality. It is power and energy and boundless grace. To be given the “keys” to this reality is to be given power to unlock, release the energy of heaven – or to withhold it. Hence, “…whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
We are heirs to this gift, this promise, this frightening spiritual authority. We can keep the realm of God, with all its power and promise and peace, locked up simply by not talking about it, or not exercising the power we’ve been given. Or we can use these keys to open it to everyone who is thirsty for God.
We can keep people bound by withholding forgiveness, and loosed by exercising grace. Jesus gave us these gifts not to be locked away in a safe deposit box, but to be spent, drawn down, exhausted… only to find the them constantly replenished, like a waterfall.
In prayer today, imagine sitting with Jesus and having him hand you a set of keys. What do they look like? What do they open? Who has the keys to your heart?
There are some things that need to remain bound, I suppose – the power of evil to wreak destruction in our world, for one. Racism, materialism, consumerism, nationalism… there are a few. And so many more things and people and communities that need to be released, set free. I believe God wants us in the “loosing” business, one lock at a time. That's what the keys to the kingdom are for.
7-4-23 - Home of the Free
You can listen to this reflection here. Sundays readings are here.
Today is America’s Independence Day, which many will celebrate by being freed from a day at work. Independence means something different in the Christian life than it might politically. The kind of liberty Jesus calls us into is strongly inter-dependent. He invites us to be tethered to God, to one another and to serving the world, not because we are forced, but by our free choice.
Paul writes in Romans that we have been set free from sin so as to be enslaved to God, being made holy (“sanctified”) in the process. Would we voluntary enslave ourselves to anything? Well, yes. Our lives are full of ways in which we yield our freedom – on a limited basis – to achieve a goal. We become employees working under the policies and procedures of our employers; we pay personal trainers large sums to make us perform painful and arduous exercises; we follow certain diets.
And we voluntarily take on the yoke Jesus offers, which he says is easy. Which it is, when we truly trust him; it is only when we pull away that we find it chafes.
I believe God’s greatest desire for us is freedom, to be free from all that holds us back and makes us less than who we were intended to be, less than who God already knows us to be. That freedom does not make us independent, however – it makes us interdependent.
We are asked to become more dependent on God, to throw all our weight and trust on this One we cannot see but discern in our lives, and around us. As we grow in that relationship, we learn the ways that God is depending upon us to be the vessels by which her/his transforming love and healing power are enacted in the world. We cannot do it without God; God will not do it without us.
We are also invited to become interdependent with others in our communities of faith, and with those whom we would serve. And we are interdependent in service to the world, willing to be served as well as to serve. We will see peace and justice reign when we truly understand that to seek the good for our neighbor will create good and security and plenty for us. Even better will be the day when we don’t think in “us” and “them” terms at all – as U2 sings in Invisible, “There is no them; there’s only you, there’s only me.”
Today I wish you a day of perfect freedom and fun – with the prayer that, as we celebrate the unfathomable liberties many – though not yet all – of us enjoy as a nation, we find a pattern of “tethered freedom” in Christ that allows us to be truly free.
Today is America’s Independence Day, which many will celebrate by being freed from a day at work. Independence means something different in the Christian life than it might politically. The kind of liberty Jesus calls us into is strongly inter-dependent. He invites us to be tethered to God, to one another and to serving the world, not because we are forced, but by our free choice.
Paul writes in Romans that we have been set free from sin so as to be enslaved to God, being made holy (“sanctified”) in the process. Would we voluntary enslave ourselves to anything? Well, yes. Our lives are full of ways in which we yield our freedom – on a limited basis – to achieve a goal. We become employees working under the policies and procedures of our employers; we pay personal trainers large sums to make us perform painful and arduous exercises; we follow certain diets.
And we voluntarily take on the yoke Jesus offers, which he says is easy. Which it is, when we truly trust him; it is only when we pull away that we find it chafes.
I believe God’s greatest desire for us is freedom, to be free from all that holds us back and makes us less than who we were intended to be, less than who God already knows us to be. That freedom does not make us independent, however – it makes us interdependent.
We are asked to become more dependent on God, to throw all our weight and trust on this One we cannot see but discern in our lives, and around us. As we grow in that relationship, we learn the ways that God is depending upon us to be the vessels by which her/his transforming love and healing power are enacted in the world. We cannot do it without God; God will not do it without us.
We are also invited to become interdependent with others in our communities of faith, and with those whom we would serve. And we are interdependent in service to the world, willing to be served as well as to serve. We will see peace and justice reign when we truly understand that to seek the good for our neighbor will create good and security and plenty for us. Even better will be the day when we don’t think in “us” and “them” terms at all – as U2 sings in Invisible, “There is no them; there’s only you, there’s only me.”
Today I wish you a day of perfect freedom and fun – with the prayer that, as we celebrate the unfathomable liberties many – though not yet all – of us enjoy as a nation, we find a pattern of “tethered freedom” in Christ that allows us to be truly free.
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