Freedom to Grow
Freedom: Part 4
July 26, 2026
You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses but serve each other through love. All the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: Love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour each other, be careful that you don’t get eaten up by each other!
~ Galatians 5:13-15
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After slavery ended, plantation owners used sharecropping to maintain their labor force. Landowners still controlled the houses, determined how much of the harvest workers received, and could take everything away if someone stepped out of line. The legal status had changed, but many sharecroppers remained trapped in conditions not much different than slavery.
Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917 to a sharecropping family in Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children. She picked cotton from the age of six and received only a sixth-grade education, the highest level allowed for Black children. In 1962, at age forty-four, she discovered that as an American citizen she had the legal right to vote. The system had intentionally kept that knowledge from her.
When she tried to register, she failed the literacy test designed to disqualify Black applicants. Although her application was denied, her landlord found out and threatened to evict her if she did not withdraw it. In a single night, her family lost their home and their livelihood.
Over the next several years, she was shot at, her home was attacked, and she was arrested while returning from a voter registration workshop. In jail, she was beaten so badly that she suffered permanent kidney damage and a blood clot behind one eye. The system was determined to make an example of her.
Hamer later helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the all-white state delegation. She also established the Freedom Farm Cooperative, a 680-acre plot of land where former sharecroppers could own land together without fear of eviction.
Fannie Lou spent much of her life possessing freedoms she never knew she had. Despite her legal rights, she still lived like a slave.
Similarly, the Galatians were free in Christ but continued living as slaves to the old system. They argued over which laws still applied and, as Paul says, they “bit and devoured one another” over their disagreements. Their community became marked by jealousy, division, rivalry and conflict. Instead of living into their freedom, they turned against one another.
Hamer’s story reminds us how systems of power are designed to keep people fearful, divided, and struggling just to survive. Yet even in this hardened soil of struggle and oppression, the Spirit produces the good fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
Christian freedom is not the freedom to win, to dominate, or to protect ourselves. It is the freedom to love our neighbors and to serve one another.
Practice: This week, choose the harder question.
When you encounter a difficult issue, in the news, in a conversation, or in your own thinking, resist the urge to reach for the quick answer. Sit with it for a day before deciding what you think. Ask yourself what you might be missing and whose perspective you have not yet considered.