Hi there and welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread.

Our reading titled Live in Freedom was written by Lisa M. Samra.

In Texas, where I grew up, there were festive parades and picnics in black communities every

June 19th.

It wasn't until I was a teenager that I learned the heartbreaking significance of Juneteenth

celebrations. June 10th commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas learned

that President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation,

giving them their freedom, two and a half years earlier. Inslave people in Texas kept living

in slavery because they didn't know they'd been freed. It's possible to be free and yet live as

slaves.

In Galatians, Paul wrote about another kind of slavery,

living life under the crushing demands of religious rules.

In this pivotal verse, Paul encouraged his readers that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.

Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

Believers in Jesus had been set free from external regulations, including what to eat and who to befriend.

Many, however, still lived as if they were enslaved. Unfortunately, we can do the same thing today,

but the reality is that Jesus set us free from living in fear of man-made religious standards

the moment we trusted in him. Freedom has been proclaimed. Let's live it out in his power. Today's Our Daily Bread devotional

scripture reading is from Galatians chapter 5 verses 1 through 7 and 13 through 15. It is for freedom

that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

Mark my words. I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all.

Again, I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised

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