{"id":1862,"date":"2014-05-19T16:22:57","date_gmt":"2014-05-19T20:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/?p=1862"},"modified":"2014-08-14T12:52:24","modified_gmt":"2014-08-14T16:52:24","slug":"freedom-isnt-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/?p=1862","title":{"rendered":"Freedom isn’t Free!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\t

EXERCISE YOUR FREEDOM OF RELIGION <\/span><\/p>\n

…THIS SUNDAY!<\/span><\/div><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whenever a pastor’s family celebrates a wedding or a baptism, the congregation naturally asks the pastor if he is going to officiate or if he is going to defer to another pastor.<\/p>\n

A pastor announced that he was planning to travel to China to attend his son’s wedding. A parishioner asked the inevitable question… “are you going to officiate at your son’s wedding?”<\/span><\/address>\n
The question may not have been out of the ordinary, but in this case the answer was. <\/span><\/address>\n
“No,” said the pastor, “I can’t perform the wedding or even assist in the ceremony. Christianity is not legal in China.”<\/span><\/address>\n
\u00a0<\/address>\n

\u00a0It’s Illegal to Worship God<\/span><\/h3>\n

Those words are hard for Americans to grasp.\u00a0 We’re so used to our freedom of thought, speech, and religion that the notion of not being able to assemble in our church is unthinkable.\u00a0 But the freedoms we enjoy are not shared by everyone across the globe.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0 we celebrate Memorial Day, let it be more than a holiday weekend at the shore.\u00a0 May we gain a new-found appreciation of the fact that our freedom\u00a0 to worship was bought at a high price.<\/p>\n

But even more than the freedoms enshrined by our country, we need to constantly grasp the depth of the freedom from sin and condemnation that God has offered us through Jesus the Christ.\u00a0 Freedom and forgiveness from sin came at an even higher price.<\/p>\n

Let’s take advantage of the freedoms given by our country to worship the God who gives us even greater freedoms.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0+\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 +\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 +\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 +\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 +\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 +<\/p>\n

For other Signboard Messages, Click Here<\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Whenever a pastor’s family celebrates a wedding or a baptism, the congregation naturally asks the pastor if he is going to officiate or if he is going to defer to another pastor. A pastor announced that he was planning to travel to China to attend his son’s wedding. A parishioner asked the inevitable question… […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1863,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,51],"tags":[103,109,89],"class_list":["post-1862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-godprints","category-signboard","tag-freedom","tag-usa","tag-worship-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1862"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3186,"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862\/revisions\/3186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pitmanumc.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}