The Song They Couldn't Chain

In the summer of 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer stood before the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention and told the world what it cost to register to vote in Mississippi. She had been beaten, shot at, and jailed. But before she spoke, and after she spoke, she sang. Her anthem was the old spiritual "Oh Freedom" — a song born in the fields of enslaved people who had every earthly reason to believe freedom would never come.

The lyrics are staggering in their defiance: "Before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free." Those who first sang those words owned nothing. They controlled nothing. Yet something inside them was already unchained. They had discovered what the apostle Paul knew when he wrote from a Roman prison that nothing — not trouble, not hardship, not persecution — could separate them from the love of God.

That is the scandal of Christian freedom. It does not wait for circumstances to improve. It is not permission granted by any earthly authority. The freedom the Almighty gives takes root in the one place no oppressor can reach — the human soul anchored in Christ.

Fannie Lou Hamer's captors could lock her in a cell, but they could not stop her from singing. And every time she opened her mouth, the chains got a little weaker.

Some of you are waiting for your situation to change before you feel free. But the God who liberates does not start with your circumstances. He starts with your heart.