Editor's note: Enjoy this devotion from Lecrae's Set Me Free.
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Freedom is in our spiritual DNA.
It was the ontological plan of Yahweh for us to inhabit a lush world and take care of it and one another. In the beginning, there were no statutes or tablets of stone; no prophets’ warnings, no cycles of disobedience, judgment, mercy, and deliverance. The family tree of humanity had just begun to bloom. In the beginning, there were walks with God in the cool of the day. There was no shame. Only one prohibition existed: don’t eat the fruit of that tree.
After our ancestors ate the fruit, the strife started in body and spirit. We covered ourselves and learned to hide from one another. We learned to separate and seek our self-interest first. We quickly discovered we could fault God for outcomes we created for ourselves. We learned to blame rather than confess. We created hierarchy. We learned how to kill. We learned we would die.
Other elements added to our DNA: trauma, fear responses, epigenetic stamps of what happened to our ancestors during wars and monarchies, enslavement and assault — comingling with markers for eye color and hair texture. Our grandmothers’ sorrow, our great-grandfathers’ PTSD, our parents’ addictions were tattooed on our strands, and our environments, communities, and daily practices could activate or inhibit trauma in our genomes.
Freedom became a recessive gene in the kingdom of this world — a rarity.
But the truth is, freedom is ours. Our stories — the beautiful, the painful, the regrettable — can unearth the ways that God is at work to redeem the shackled parts of our lives, and through examining them with humility, curiosity, and most of all with the Spirit of God, we can claim the freedom that God is offering us.
I am a descendant of Adam and Eve, of enslaved people and enslavers, of freedom and bondage.
My great-great-grandmother was Mandy Barnes Williams. She was enslaved. Her father was a white slave owner named Mr. Langston. Her son, John Wesley, worked in the home of the Langstons. After the Civil War, her descendants were freed. They stayed on the land. John Wesley married Alia in 1893 in Shelby County, Texas. He hauled logs and farmed to support his family and was “given” some land by the Langstons — his direct relatives, though they never admitted it.
Those are the facts but not the whole story. Assault, adoration, enslavement, abuse, emancipation, grit, and perseverance fill out the body of my bloodlines. So much of what my ancestors experienced is lost to history, but my DNA bears witness, through my frustrations, addictions, griefs. My responses to challenges in my life are my own, but also echoes of trauma that God wants to surface so they can be healed and liberated too.
But I had to want that liberation.
Jesus found me through a college ministry in Texas. I loved what I saw in Jesus — He never missed a good dinner party; He healed lepers and blind people; He gave hope and honor to Samaritans; He evicted demons — He set people free. I wanted that. I knew Jesus offered me that.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.1
- In His love, I was finally free. But I didn’t live that way.
Unfortunately, I was given more chains along with Jesus, add-ons that came with the kind of Christianity I was discipled into. We — Black young people — were taught to scathingly critique Black churches for their eisegesis and paltry theology. “Good” churches had solid, academic theological stances, websites with sprawling doctrinal statements, pastors who spent hours poring over systematic theology books and commentaries, proper views on women in ministry. We mass-exodused from the faithful churches in our communities. The folks that discipled me had me side--eyeing Martin Luther King Jr. (Never Jonathan Edwards, though.) I bought into the inferiority complex of the Black church because I was hurt by my broken home in my broken neighborhood that was full of Black churches. I wanted freedom and belonging that looked like prosperity, respectability, peace. I thought my efforts to be different — more scholarly, more theologically astute — would make me worthy. I wanted to pull myself up by my theological bootstraps.
I tucked in my shirts and pulled up my pants. I kept my hair in a neat fade. I enunciated every syllable when I was offstage. I read their books, I learned their ways. I felt like Moses, a Hebrew living among the Egyptians. Also, like Moses, I was pulled between the culture of my origin and the culture of my faith upbringing. I was constantly under a microscope; never quite good enough, but entertaining and useful. When I wore the mask, I got Pharaoh’s praise. My music reflected my bondage, but I loved being embraced by the people enamored by my “exotic” delivery of their theology. I felt like I finally belonged — which made it all the more detrimental when I wasn’t affirmed, when my blackness wasn’t affirmed.
Terrible. It’s terrible to admit this.
I was chained to a lie, and I wrapped those chains around me willingly.
My ancestors fought to take off chains, and here I had gladly shackled myself.
One thing about living in Pharaoh’s house, though: there’s always someone reminding you that you ain’t them. You still got that Hebrew accent that others you. You are reminded that you are a Hebrew, fortunate enough to be plucked from the rivers of ignorance and placed into Pharaoh’s opulent, benevolent care — as long as you act right. But at any time, if you act “wrong,” criticizing oppression, greed, or apathy for the plight of the people suffering right in front of them, they will no longer claim you as their own.
That time came for me when I saw a fellow Black person named Trayvon Martin murdered. I spoke up and was rejected by the community I was part of. It was devastating and disorienting. I had to leave this community if I wanted my soul intact. Exodus.
The blowback I received, the violent excitement of the pile-on of people who were in my corner as long as I never spoke up about racial violence and racialized disparities in this country, sent me to the wilderness of myself. I found myself examining everyone and everything: Does God love me, as I am, a Black man? Who and what do I believe? What am I willing to stand for? What lies and beliefs must I tear down in order to experience freedom?
My time in God’s Word has taught me the wilderness is a faith-strengthening place and a place of testing. The wilderness is where the Hebrews waited before their deliverance into the promised land. It’s the place of Jesus’s testing, before calling His disciples and beginning His ministry. For me, the wilderness is where I wrestled and contemplated and confessed before stepping forward, freer. I’m not going to claim that I am living fully free — not yet.
It takes a lifetime to undo the intricate bonds of the Enemy, the self, and the oppression of society — but I know that Jesus has set me free, and I wanna live in the truth of that liberation more and more each day.
Freedom is in our DNA — it’s God’s intention for us, it’s empowered by the Spirit, and we have access to it on this side of the fall through Jesus. If you haven’t accessed the freedom that’s yours, that’s okay — there’s hope for you inside these pages. I pray that the poetry and essays here can help you identify the hurt of your past or present or recognize the chains you were taught to wear to be godly. And if, like me, you have mistaken Pharaoh’s house for the good God who loves you, I hope this book can help you to start separating the one from the other in order to move to freedom.
Let this book take you on a journey through the wilderness, sorting through your questions and relying on God and discernment to figure out where to go next.
Set Me Free contains poems and reflections — grouped by themes of confession, lamentation,
resistance, and persistence — on what kept me in chains, how I am getting free, and thoughts to challenge you to reflect on your own journey, in hopes you are led to freedom. Set Me Free is not a map for the wandering, but insights, thoughts, and cautionary musings from my soul, to reassure you that you’re not alone in your disillusionment, your anger, your worship, your questions. We are on a journey, not to freedom but to believing in the freedom that is in our DNA.
Excerpted with permission from Set Me Free by Lecrae, copyright Lecrae.
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Your Turn
Are you living fully free? Are you learning to undo the bonds and lies of the enemy? You’re not meant to live in bondage. Freedom is in our spiritual DNA! ~ Devotionals Daily