I want you to turn or try to turn to the book of Haggai. Haggai means festival, so you just have a party trying to find it there in your Bible. The book of Haggai, chapter 1. I want to talk to you tonight about the key of freedom. The key of freedom. My son Drew and I were blessed last week to go to Washington, D.C. and spend a whole week together. Walked down to National Mall. We went to Ford Theater. We went to Mount Vernon. We stayed at the Watergate Hotel. I even got a pencil that said, I stole this from the Watergate Hotel. I was like, well, nice. They say you don't even have to break in anymore to stay there. It's really nice. So we saw so many things that I'd wanted to see all my life I'd never been. So many different things touched my heart and one of the things that really touched my heart and kind of is the diving board for this message for me in my mind and in my soul, we were taking a night tour of the capital of D.C. and one of the places that they took us by was our nation's capital. And on top of the U.S. capital is a statue. It's called the Statue of Freedom. the largest standing statue in all of Washington, which if you've been there, you know there's a lot of statues there. And so the tour guide was telling us about her and one of the things that she said was that the Statue of Freedom always faces east. And she paused and somebody asked why. And you could tell that she was waiting for that wow moment because she said in America, the sun never sets on the face of freedom. Can I get an amen? And I like that. I really rejoice in that. But it made me think more about our spiritual freedom. And I'm so glad that where our true freedom stands, at the right hand of God, the sun neither rises nor sets on His face, for there is no sun there, hallelujah. For He is the light and the glory of that place. He is the light of the world. The Lord Jesus Christ is the true face of freedom, and He's no statue. He's a living, breathing, holy God-man that stands for us forever to be free. But what is the key of freedom, especially of spiritual freedom, in our lives, how hard fought it was to be one. You know, when you tour Washington and you see that statue of freedom and you hear that speech and you're moved, but then you go out to Arlington National Cemetery and you see row after row of the graves of the brave young men and women who over The centuries now have died that we might be free. You walk up that long hill, like the hill of Golgotha where the true price of freedom was paid. You walk up the long hill of Arlington Cemetery and at the top is the tomb of the unknown soldier. You see in silence hundreds of Americans watch the placing of the wreaths and and the changing of the garden, and your heart is just stirred with gratitude and with appreciation for the price that has been paid for our freedom. But the greatest price was paid 2,000 years ago when our Savior was suspended between heaven and earth and poured out His blood and His life, the ransom price for the freedom of His people. That's true freedom. That's the true key to freedom. And if you know Him, if you know the Son, then you are truly free. You are free at last. You have the key of freedom. Then you go across the river into Virginia, and they take you by the statue of the men at Iwo Jima who raised the flag of freedom on foreign lands and know the cost that was paid there. And so as I was viewing all these things and thinking about all these wonderful historic places, it really stirred in my heart to think about Christ and the freedom that He has given to us. And I don't know about you, but I often find myself enslaved to different things unnecessarily. It's foolish to think that a free person allow himself to be enslaved. But you look around you and look in your own heart and you see how many fetters are still there from the world or from the old man. And you know that you need that key of freedom and you need freedom to ring in your life. You need Jesus to say to you tonight, like he said to the woman, Thou art loose. Thou art loose. We are free. Just like Brother Lewis said, we're unified. Well, beloved, we are free as well. We hear the key of freedom in the message of God. That's the key to freedom is to believe God's message. That's it. You remember when God's people had been enslaved in Egypt for many years, for several centuries, And you remember, God raised up a baby, saved from abortion, right? Oh, how we ought to fight for that. Who knows how many Moseses there are among us? But he was saved and he had to learn a lot in his life, but God called him to the burning bush. He revealed to him who he was and he sent him back to be a deliverer for his people because he had heard their affliction. He had seen their imprisonment and God's heart was to deliver them, to set them free. Do you remember Moses' first message in front of Pharaoh? He said, God said, you finish it with me, let my people what? Go. You hear the message of freedom. And for 400 or so years they had been there in Egypt. And isn't it amazing as they were delivered in mighty, miraculous ways and signs and God delivered them with a mighty hand that at different points along the journey to freedom, they would desire to go back to Egypt to where they had been slaves and were in chains and servitude. The message of God has always been about liberty and freedom for His people. I think about Jesus' first sermon that He preached in His hometown. Do you remember it? Do you remember the message of Christ as He began His public ministry? Turn with me. Hold your hand in Haggai. Don't lose that. But turn with me to the Gospel of Luke. And we read what Jesus said as He opened up the book of the prophet Isaiah. We would know it as Isaiah. And he said this in verse 18, and let this speak to your heart today. Let freedom ring. I love that old speech by Martin Luther King Jr. He said, let freedom ring. I say, amen. Let it ring. It rang so hard in Philadelphia that they broke the Liberty Bell. I don't know if you've ever seen that. Oh, that we would have freedom ring in our lives like this, and Christ here is speaking the message of freedom. He says, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty them that are bruised. Do you hear the message? Do you see and do you hear the key of freedom is actually to believe the message of God? God wants you to be free. He just doesn't want us to use our liberty as an occasion to sin. In the book of Haggai, we read in the first chapter about the message of God. We said that the key to freedom is believing the message of God. Here in this chapter it talks about the message of God being delivered by God's messenger. That's when you know when you're preaching good. You're God's messenger preaching God's message. But before I read that, I want to remind you of an old story. Old story about two men who had just visited the Palace Beautiful. They had enjoyed it so much, and they had been instructed on their way to the Celestial City to make sure that on the way they stopped at the Delectable Mountain. Does anybody remember this story? Pilgrim's Progress, right? And so on their way, at first it was so easy. They were traveling by this river and it was so cool and the grass was soft upon their feet, but then as they journeyed, the way began to get harder and harder. And as they were thinking about the hardness of the way, they saw this little sign that said, By Path Meadow. And there was a little path that went alongside the way, and it looked that it was so much comfortable and so much better than the way that they were in. And they thought about it. Even Hopeful, who was the younger Christian, tried to talk Christian or Pilgrim out of doing it, but Pilgrim said, well, it can't be that bad because it's right beside the way. So they get into Bypath Meadow, Of course, for a while everything is going good, but then all hell breaks loose for them. And they find themselves where they can't go forward and they can't go back. And they are captured by this huge giant. Does anybody remember what his name was? Despair. Giant despair. He captures our two characters, Christian and hopeful, and he takes them to his castle, which is so much different than the Palace Beautiful that they've just been at. But this doubting castle, they're imprisoned, they're chained, they're put in the dungeon, and they're beaten every day, and they're encouraged to take their own life because they're never going to get out of there. They're never going to get out of Doubting Castle. They're never going to get away from the giant despair. Is that resonating in your life and in your heart at different times? You feel that way. We feel that way. We all experience that. The irony of that story, and we'll get to the climax in a minute, is that John Bunyan, who's writing this story, where is he writing the story from? From prison. from bed for jail where he spent 30 of the best years of his physical life. And so he knows what he's talking about as he's writing about this and he's experiencing it. I know what I'm talking about when I'm talking to those of you that know that there are things in your life that are holding you captive and keeping you from a fullness in your relationship with Jesus Christ. of fullness in your usefulness in His kingdom. Even tonight, as you are trying to sing, as you are trying to worship, there are things that are trying to hold you down and pull you back. You need the key of freedom. Anybody remember the name of John Despair's wife? Anybody? Her name was Diffidence. Diffidence. And she would talk to the giant every night and she would say, why don't you just kill him? She said, why don't you just take him out and show him the bones of all the people that have never made it out of here that you killed and maybe they'll just off themselves. And so Christian and hopeful were in that place. Do you know what diffidence means, by the way? I see some people trying to Google it. What does diffidence mean? It means that you are timid, that you don't have assurance. We see when you leave the way, when these things are in our lives that are shackling us and chaining us, we lose our blessed assurance that we have and we lose the joy of the freedom that we have in Christ. That's what diffidence is all about. Well, they have been in there a long time. and they could hear the giant and diffidence talking at night and he just said, well, I'm just going to kill them in the morning. They began to sing and they began to pray and they began to think about their state. And all of a sudden, Christian or pilgrim, he says, what a fool I've been! What a fool, what a fool, what a fool I've been! He said, in my bosom is a key. Anybody know what the name of the key was? Promise. The key of promise that had been given to him. And can you quote this with me? And all the promises of God in him are what? Yea. Amen. Any Christian says, I don't know if it will work, but I'm going to take it out and I'm going to try it in these locks. Opens the lock. Hopeful says, do me, brother. opens his lock, they open the door to the dungeon, they open the door to the gate and they escape and they make it all the way back and they build a sign to warn other pilgrims to be careful not to go into that way. They found the key of freedom, the promises of God, the message of God. Here in Haggai chapter 1 verse 13, Then spake Haggai, the Lord's what? Messenger. Preachers, we don't need to be the Lord's lecturers. Can I get an Amen? We need to be the Lord's messengers. Young men, when you get up to preach, have a message for the people of God, from God. Dear Spake Haggai, the Lord's messenger, in the Lord's message unto the people, here it is, here's one of the keys to freedom, the message of the Lord saying, I am with you! Say it to the Lord, hallelujah! That ought to set you free tonight. I want to tell those sweet little churches in Russia, the Lord's with you. I want to tell those sweet churches that are here tonight, that are meeting every Sunday, and maybe you might be discouraged, the message of God is that He's with us. He is, Emmanuel. God with us. One of the things that gets people in such despair and such trouble as that they think, and the devil convinces them that they're all alone. But we're not alone. The Lord of hosts is with us. What a soul-freeing message. I am with you. You know, your freedom, even your freedom here in America, is not a gift for men. Our freedom is a right. an inalienable right, and a gift from our Creator God. It is a gift from Christ. And you know that tonight, you and I are most free when we are in His presence. When Adam and Eve chained themselves in the Garden of Eden with their fig leaves, what did they try to do? They tried to what? They tried to hide from His presence. But beloved, true freedom is being always in the presence of God. If you take a journey up the Potomac or down the Potomac, I'm not sure which way that flows in from Washington, you come around a bend and up on this beautiful hillside is Mount Vernon. I got to visit it. It's the ancestral home of the father of our country, George Washington. A beautiful site, a beautiful old home that they maintained and preserved. So they take you in and they show you these beautiful paintings and they show you the antiquity of the place. But in the hall, in the middle of the hall of the house, hanging on the wall, is a beautiful old iron key. and it's enclosed in brass and glass. And it's called the key of freedom. And what it is, it's the key to the Bastille. In France, during their revolution, all the people that were fighting for freedom in France, the revolutionaries, they were imprisoned in this prison called the Bastille. Well, the inhabitants of Paris, they banded together, they overran the Bastille, they took the key, and they set all the prisoners free. Well, guess who they gave the key to? A young man named Marquis de Lafayette. Any of you know your American history? He was under General Washington and helped us win our independence. And so, he took the key to the Bastille and he said, I know the man that needs to keep the key of freedom. And so he had it delivered and sent to George Washington. Do you know it was one of George Washington's most precious possessions? And it still hangs in Mount Vernon in that hallway today. The key of freedom. A place where a key that set prisoners free. Let's go to 1 John and hear another message of the Lord. The first message of freedom is the Lord says, I'm with you. Now, in 1 John 1, verse 5, there's another time when we see the key of freedom in the Word of God. This, then, is the what? The message. What do we say the key of freedom is? It's believing the message of God. You must believe that the Lord is with you if you want to be free. Christ is the only one that can set you free. You're never going to set yourself free. But also you must believe this. This then is the message which we have heard of Him and declared to you that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. Why do men live in their chains? Because men love what? Darkness. Rather than what? in life. If you want your chains broken tonight, come to the light. That's where chains get broken, by the chain breaker, the Lord Jesus Christ. What's binding you? What's holding you back? Jesus has got a big old pair of bolt cutters ready to set you free. and make you free indeed. If the Son has made you free, what does the Scripture say? You are free indeed. God is light. What's in the darkness? In the dark, there is only change. Christ is the light of the world. If you want to be free from the chains of darkness that are in your heart, that are in your life, come to Christ. He is the life of the world. In the 5th century, there was a fisherman and he was captured by some sailors that had a ship in which, in this ship, it was a galley ship where you had to row on the oars. And he was made a prisoner and he was chained to an oar. And every day, of course, it was his job for years and years to row people around. Sounds pretty boring, doesn't it? Well, all around him, people were complaining about their conditions. People were complaining about how their lives used to be and how miserable that they were now. But he refused To buy into that and and to be chained that way Even though he was chained physically in the condition that he was in but what he decided to do he found a broken piece of an oar and He decided what he was going to do He was going to take that broken piece of the oar and he decided he was going to use his shackles to fashion and to shape and to chisel a key that would go into the locks of his chains and Thus, he would be able to get his freedom. Every day, every spare minute that he had, he worked on the key. Everybody around him, they laughed at him constantly. They said, our chains and the locks, they're rusted. I doubt even an iron key would turn that lock. You know, you're just wasting your time. He didn't pay attention to any of them. He just kept working on his key. He kept working on his key. for years. He worked on it. He made the key very ornate. He made it fancy. Even one of the guards that took pity on him and he took the key from him and he drilled him a hole in it and gave him a piece of leather and let him wear it around his neck. You know, they said, you know, why not? I mean, the guy's never going to get out of here, you know. Let's patronize him a little bit. You know, that's the way the devil tries to do us sometimes. But, you know, A day came when there was a rich merchant that had boarded the vessel and was riding on the sea with him and he asked the captain, can I go down into the galley and see the conditions that are down there? And so he went down there and he saw the miserable conditions and he looked at all the men and then he saw our fishermen. And he looked around his neck and he just sees this gaudy, ornate, wood and key. And of course he asked, all of us would ask, you know, why do you have this key? How did you make this key? And so he told him about how over the years, you know, he had worked on it. And so the merchant went up and he talked to the captain of the vessel and said, I want to buy that man's freedom. And he took him home with him. He used him as a carpenter and eventually gave him his freedom and he went back home. Just like the key of promise, just like the key of the Bastille, here is another key of freedom. The thing that he whittled on, the thing that he worked on, the thing that he strove on time and time again, it didn't actually unlock his chains, but it was the thing that God used to allow him to be free. So maybe tonight you're saying, Brother Nathan, I'm not free. I know you're talking about freedom. I know that God's people are free, but I'm not free. I want to encourage you, just keep whittling. Just keep pulling on those chains. There's one that's with you. There's one who is light, who can come. and rescue you and set you free. I love what Churchill told the Britons, the people of London, as they bombed them night after night. He came over the radar and he said, never, never, never surrender. Oh beloved, freedom is worth everything, isn't it? God has given us the key to freedom, the message of God Let's go to one last one. 1 John 3 verse 11. Do you know this one? For this is the message that ye have heard from the beginning, that ye should love one another. There's another, or the great keys of freedom. How does loving others produce liberty? Well, hate is a deep dungeon, my friend. Self is a lonely self. When we agape love one another, it sets us free and it sets others free. You know, the truth is, you can't help someone else get free if you're not free yourself. So tonight, I encourage you, my dear brothers and sisters, take freedom's key. and be thou loose. May the Lord bless you and keep you is our prayer.