Daily Verse
Monday, June 29, 2026
Freedom in Christ
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Monday's Reflection
John 8:36 — If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.
John Bunyan was a poor tinker in seventeenth-century England — a man who mended pots and pans for a living, with little education and no social standing. After a long, tormented conversion, he became a powerful lay preacher among the nonconformist believers in Bedford. But in 1660 the law changed, and preaching outside the established state church became a crime. Bunyan was arrested. The magistrates offered him a simple deal: promise to stop preaching, and you can go home to your wife and children today. He refused. He told them plainly that if they let him out that day, he would preach again the next. So they kept him. For twelve years.
From inside Bedford jail, Bunyan did two things. He made simple tagged shoelaces to earn a few pennies to support his family — including his blind daughter Mary, whose helplessness broke his heart more than the prison ever did. And he wrote. In that cramped cell, cut off from the pulpit he loved, he began writing "The Pilgrim's Progress" — the story of a man named Christian journeying from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. It would become one of the best-selling books in the English language, translated into more than two hundred tongues, read by millions for over three centuries. The man the authorities had silenced ended up preaching to the whole world.
What is striking about Bunyan is that the freest man in Bedford was the one in chains. His jailers could lock his body in a cell, but they could not touch his soul. He had a freedom they did not understand and could not take away — the freedom of a man who belonged entirely to Christ and was therefore afraid of nothing they could do to him. That is exactly the freedom Jesus describes. Not freedom from prison walls, but freedom so deep that prison walls cannot reach it. When the Son makes a person free, they are free indeed — even behind bars.
Prayer: Lord, give us John Bunyan's kind of freedom — the freedom that no circumstance, no opposition, no prison can take away. Make us so wholly Yours that we fear nothing the world can do to us. Amen.