00:00Hello, my name is Marjorie and I'm a minister in the north of England.
00:11Let My People Go is now the well-known theme song from the West End musical The Prince
00:17of Egypt, which documents Moses' call to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt into the
00:23Promised Land.
00:25Probably less well-known is the biblical phrase that follows in the original text,
00:30let my people go so that they may worship me in the wilderness.
00:35God sets his people free from something and for something.
00:41Ethics today struggles to define freedom.
00:44We have a huge value on freedom from enslavement as a society, and rightly so, but just being
00:51me and being true to me in this culture of you do you, may not actually allow for the
00:57freedom of others.
00:59The Bible helpfully defines that in our human state we are naturally slaves to selfishness,
01:05to sin and to anything and everything that we worship, the idols of our lives.
01:11By idols we don't mean golden statues, but anything and everything that has our affection
01:17and our devotion.
01:19And whenever we worship an idol, be that money, pleasure, power, it traps us.
01:26True freedom is never about having no boundaries or just doing what I want to do.
01:31That's chaos, not freedom.
01:33True freedom is being able to choose who and what we worship.
01:38And as we approach Easter and we reflect on the cross of Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection,
01:47we realise this offers us true freedom.
01:50Ultimately Jesus offers us the way to know God, as he himself said in John's Gospel,
01:57I am the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through me.
02:07Then we experience what Jesus calls the fullness of life.
02:17I am the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through me.
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