In Mumbai, India, a young girl who had been trafficked from the north and had been missing for three years was finally tracked down by officials and by an international justice organization. They rescued her from a brothel, where she had been held captive, and she said she had not seen the sun for three years.
In northern India, a man named Avtar Singh had ‘sold’ himself and his wife and son to a man to work as laborers in security against a loan. When Avtar died, his widow and son remained, kept in conditions of poverty so as to make repayment of the loan impossible while interest increased. They were captive, ‘owned’.
There are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world. The human-trafficking sex-trade is alive and thriving in South-East Asia, and even in our country. Slaves, including children, are bought and sold western Africa and other places. Cane cutters in the Dominican Republic, carpet weavers in India….
Slaves.
In the beginning, Adam and Eve disobeyed the word of God, under whose Lordship they were to order their lives. Thus sin entered the world, and as unholy sin must necessarily mar the image of the Holy God in whose image they had been made, they now bore the reality of sin in their very nature. Human nature was now sinful, and this nature was now in the DNA of humanity.
Adam & Eve’s son Cain murdered his brother. As an example of the ongoing sinfulness of Adam’s descendants, Genesis records Lamech gloating over gaining revenge on someone by killing a man. And by the time the reader gets only to Genesis 6, we read that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Humanity was now wholly enslaved to sin. Every area of their lives was not only tainted by sin, but captive to it. Sin was their default position. It was the defining reality of all they said, and did, and thought. It was their master.
Slaves.
God judged them for their sin with a great judgment in the Flood, but sin retained its hold on humanity, so that humans (at Babel), cities (Sodom and Gomorrah), and nations (Canaan) were again given entirely over to sin.
The New Testament talks of this explicitly in ‘slavery’ terms in Romans 6. You were once slaves to sin… you once presented your bodies as slaves to impurity… you were slaves of sin.
This is what that slavery looks like: I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate… I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
Have you ever been faced with an opportunity to sin, knowing you should not, wanting not to sin, and yet giving yourself to it, feeling like you could not say no. Have you ever said to yourself or someone else, ‘I couldn’t help it’?
Some of you might remember Flip Wilson’s ‘Geraldine’ character and her famous tag line: ‘The devil made me do it!’ Well, the devil hasn’t made you do anything. We were not captive to Satan but to sin. It comes from within. Even if I want to do right, sin does not let me.
‘The computer makes sin so available, I can’t resist.’ ‘That money is so easy to keep, maybe I won’t pay it back, maybe I’ll just not let the government know about that.’ ‘I’m in the right! I’m totally justified in my anger, my grudge, my dwelling on this wrong’. ‘So-and-so really knows how to push my buttons, I can’t help but lose my temper!’
‘I can’t help it.’ That is how it used to be. That is how it had to be.
And yet, in Jesus, things have become different:
Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. There is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
For us who are in Jesus, there is no longer anything called ‘I can’t help it’.
Think of the last time you sinned: an angry reaction to something or someone and you paid back in kind. You are stewing on an offense and feeling self-justified. You are shading the truth. In these and a hundred other ways, you had a choice. You could help it. No one ‘makes’ you so angry.
We begin to see this theme of rescue from slavery in the book of Exodus, which is the great Old Testament picture of the Gospel: A people enslaved, brought to freedom by a deliverer, God calling them his own special people, and God comes to dwell among them as they make their way to a new, beautiful land. That is the Bible story in miniature.
Exodus begins with Israelites in Egypt, as slave laborers. The Pharaoh has become afraid of their ever increasing numbers. Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities and Ramses… The Egyptians were in dread of the Israelites. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves. This goes on for a few centuries, and creates a nation of slaves.
God raises up a deliverer in Moses, and after a string of supernatural displays of the God of Israel and of Egypt and of all things, Moses leads them out, a free people. This event, and the soon-to-follow covenant with God, made at Mount Sinai, completed and secured their status as a nation of God’s chosen people.
But in the Israelite narrative, we quickly see that though they have been freed from the slavery of forced labor under Pharaoh, they are still slaves to that greater slavery, sin. Within days they are angrily murmuring against Moses and God, thinking even that Moses and God have conspired their deliverance just to kill them in the desert. After just weeks, even with the presence and glory of God visible before them, they build an idol and worship it. They disobey when God commands them to enter the promised land. Then they immediately disobey when God says, ‘Okay, then do not enter the land.’ They threaten to kill Moses and go back to Egypt. When finally in the promised land their repeated pattern is to reject God entirely, and become entirely pagan themselves: violently and morally depraved.
No longer under Pharaoh’s whip, they are clearly still enslaved.
But having delivered them from one slavery, God had already put into action his plan to rescue people from the real slavery.
With Israel in the wilderness, the Bible introduces the language of ‘redemption’. To ‘redeem’ means to pay a price to buy back someone or something that someone else rightfully lays claim to.
Sometimes, the one ‘redeemed’ originally belonged to God: God, for example, to whom was owed the ‘first fruits’ of anything, claimed as his rightful due of the oldest son in a family. Oldest sons were his. In theory this would have meant the sacrifice of this son, but God said that the life of the oldest son could be ‘redeemed’ by the sacrifice of an animal. The animal became the price paid in order to redeem the man’s life, and the man was then free to live, to marry, to build, to carry on business, to lie on the couch and watch football with a plate of nachos, and do all things men do.
A firstborn animal (a donkey, for example, if considered necessary to the livelihood of its owner) could be redeemed by a lamb. If a poor man in desperate circumstances sold himself as a slave for the sake of survival, he could be redeemed by someone. He could even redeem himself by eventually paying the ‘price’ at which he was valued. If land was sold in a time of poverty, the original owner had the right to redeem it, buy it back, within seven years, and the new owner was legally bound to sell it back.
In the book of Ruth, there is a man, a near relative to Ruth’s dead husband. This man, therefore, had rights to marry Ruth and take ownership of the land of the dead man. But Boaz buys those rights from him and marries Ruth himself. Boaz is Ruth’s ‘kinsman-redeemer’.
And so on. To redeem is to pay a price to release someone or something from someone else’s claim.
In our day: When someone, whom society thinks of having no value, gives of himself to do something good, we say he has ‘redeemed’ himself.
David observed in Psalm 14, affirmed later by the apostle Paul, that There is no one who is good. All have turned aside, together they have become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even one.
David, who recognized the enslaving nature of sin, also says, Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit.
Enslaved, but with no one to redeem us.
In Matthew’s gospel an angel says to Joseph: Mary will bear a son, and you will call his name ‘Jesus’, for he will save his people from their sins. ‘Save’ is the language of rescue. The name ‘Jesus’ (Greek) or ‘Y’shua’ (Aramaic) – means ‘the LORD saves’.
Jews expected a Messiah who would deliver them from Roman oppression, but Jesus came as Savior, the angel said, to deliver his people from the greater oppressor, sin.
How would this rescue take place? What would Jesus do? To rescue from the Roman occupation one must raise an army and then rebel? How does one deliver from sin? No man can redeem another. His very life is not sufficient to buy anyone’s freedom from sin. Why not? Because his own life is riddled with sin.
Let’s say you know a friend with stomach cancer. If a transplant was possible, you were willing to give your life to rescue someone from stomach cancer by donating your own stomach. But what would be the point if your own stomach was filled with cancer? You could not save them.
With the all-pervasive sin having infected and held captive every human life, how can there be rescue? What man can redeem another?
Chris Rice has a song with these words:
I Need A Hero
Was I the only one to notice that human nature doesn’t work that way
They tell me if I look deep inside me that I can find my own way
I only find a rebel and a fool there who won’t admit that he’s afraid.
I thought I was holdin’ on to freedom but locked my soul up in chains
I need a hero who’ll dare to find me, fly to my rescue, and crash through the wall
Announce my freedom, bring me to my senses
Gather me into His strong arms
And carry me off…to safety.
What is this talk about a Savior?
Does He listen, is He really even there?
And should I be asking Him directly?
But why should He consider my prayer?
Well, I don’t quite know how to do this
But Jesus, I can’t save myself
So here I go calling out for mercy
And crying out for Your help…
In Mark 10 Jesus speaks to his followers about a better kind of ‘slavery’: a voluntary slavery in which people seek not to elevate themselves over others, but rather willingly and humbly serve others. Jesus points to himself as an example of such willing servanthood, and then he says this: For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Here at last is a man who is able to redeem the life of another. Here is man whose life is of sufficient value that he can give his life to God and secure the freedom of another. To an infinitely righteous God into whose presence no sin can enter, here is a man whose righteousness can be applied to others to such an extent that by his life he can rescue man from sin and usher him into God’s presence.
Jesus came to earth from heaven, the perfect son of God, sent to be the Saviour of the world. He was tempted but did not sin. In every temptation – unlike Adam – he consciously chose obedience to God his Father. He never sold himself into slavery to sin. He was the only free person who has ever lived. He was the only one who was ‘on the outside’ who could act to rescue those held captive behind the bars of sin.
So he did: giving his own perfect life of infinite worth (because of his divinity and sinlessness) as a ransom, he freed captives from sin.
1 Peter 1:18 – You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish.
Revelation 5:9 -10 – …you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.
And so the New Testament is riddled with the language (familiar to us) of ‘redemption’.
Jesus is the redeemer who redeemed us and thus we have redemption.
Ephesians 1:7 – In him we have redemption by his blood…
Titus 2:14 – Our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself for his own possession.
Hebrews 9:12 – [Jesus] by his own blood secured for us an eternal redemption.
Imagine freedom:
Imagine yourself a slave: working at hard labor sunup to sundown and beyond, not permitted to leave your shabby bunk in the compound. (We might be tempted to chuckle and say, ‘I already do that at my job.’ No, you don’t. We have no idea. We have never been anywhere close to this!)
Ladies – and this is awful, but I mean this – what would it be like for you to spend every night month after month, in the same room with a different man each night, and if you step out of line, you get beaten?
Imagine if you had been sold by your parents when you were six, and started work in 12 hour shifts in a factory.
Even in our own western culture we hear occasional news stories of someone who has been held captive in a room, or even chained up, for periods of time. And we are horrified.
All of this is slavery. It is a reality all over the world. The slavery of sin is that kind of slavery.
Now imagine: what does it feel like for one who has been a slave, to be set free? What did it feel like for that girl to see the sun for the first time in three years, and to be embraced by her brother whom she also had not seen for three years? What did it feel like for that woman and her son to be rescued from forced labor and given a future? What does it feel like for a sold or stolen child to have a hero pick them up and carry them in their arms into freedom?
We have been set free. We have been set free! Do we know what that means?! It means that we are no longer helpless in the face of temptation. It means that we can say ‘no’ to sin and walk away from it. It means that sin can tempt but no longer control. It can entice but it cannot enslave.
But here’s the surprising thing about our freedom: we have not been set free from sin in order to live for ourselves. To live entirely for ourselves only means that we are not in fact free from sin.
We are set free in order that we might be ‘slaves’ to God, worshippers and joyful servants, under the greater master.
I quoted from Romans 6 earlier. Here is the verse more completely:
But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves to sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves to righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your bodies as slaves to impurity and lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your bodies as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God.
And in the verses that follow our Scripture reading from earlier:
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
It is surprising to hear that release from slavery from sin means another slavery, this time to God and righteousness. It may also be surprising that in this slavery is real freedom. That is why the Apostle Paul, who so frequently referred to himself as a ‘bondservant’ – ‘slave’ – of Christ Jesus, is also the one who spoke most passionately about our freedom in Christ.
It is like the fish after being captured by the fisherman’s hook into the wide open air, is thrown back into the boundaries of the water, but is free again to live as a fish should. Or of a child who enjoys the game of soccer only because the rules that govern the game are in place.
The child prostitute rescued from the enslavement of her owner in a brothel in Mumbai by those who are committed to the law that is there to protect her. Those who have been rescued from an addiction to drugs or pornography (or both).
There are those who are convinced that living under God’s Lordship is a burden, restrictive, but it is there that real life, real freedom lies. So often we see people whose lives are unnecessarily painful, living out what follows from their own choices. If only they could see that God’s ways are better. To live and make choices outside of the Lordship of God is not to live at all, that is not freedom at all. We all know people, even Christians, who seem to lack wisdom and make choices with no thought for God’s ways, and their lives are harder for it.
Jesus said this about ‘slavery’ to him: Come to me, you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Freedom from sin, hell & judgment, fear of death, what others think, money, and of failing God.
Or freedom to love, risk, and be at ease.
Face it: we are all slaves. It is counter-intuitive but one form of slavery leads to freedom. One of these forms of slavery is forced upon us. We can not escape it. The other is not forced on us. We delight in it and our master is a good master. Jesus redeemed us from one form of slavery to another.
And we are so glad he did.
Amen.
Slavery/Freedom (Redemption)
In Mumbai, India, a young girl who had been trafficked from the north and had been missing for three years was finally tracked down by officials and by an international justice organization. They rescued her from a brothel, where she had been held captive, and she said she had not seen the sun for three years.
In northern India, a man named Avtar Singh had ‘sold’ himself and his wife and son to a man to work as laborers in security against a loan. When Avtar died, his widow and son remained, kept in conditions of poverty so as to make repayment of the loan impossible while interest increased. They were captive, ‘owned’.
There are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world. The human-trafficking sex-trade is alive and thriving in South-East Asia, and even in our country. Slaves, including children, are bought and sold western Africa and other places. Cane cutters in the Dominican Republic, carpet weavers in India….
Slaves.
In the beginning, Adam and Eve disobeyed the word of God, under whose Lordship they were to order their lives. Thus sin entered the world, and as unholy sin must necessarily mar the image of the Holy God in whose image they had been made, they now bore the reality of sin in their very nature. Human nature was now sinful, and this nature was now in the DNA of humanity.
Adam & Eve’s son Cain murdered his brother. As an example of the ongoing sinfulness of Adam’s descendants, Genesis records Lamech gloating over gaining revenge on someone by killing a man. And by the time the reader gets only to Genesis 6, we read that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Humanity was now wholly enslaved to sin. Every area of their lives was not only tainted by sin, but captive to it. Sin was their default position. It was the defining reality of all they said, and did, and thought. It was their master.
Slaves.
God judged them for their sin with a great judgment in the Flood, but sin retained its hold on humanity, so that humans (at Babel), cities (Sodom and Gomorrah), and nations (Canaan) were again given entirely over to sin.
The New Testament talks of this explicitly in ‘slavery’ terms in Romans 6. You were once slaves to sin… you once presented your bodies as slaves to impurity… you were slaves of sin.
This is what that slavery looks like: I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate… I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
Have you ever been faced with an opportunity to sin, knowing you should not, wanting not to sin, and yet giving yourself to it, feeling like you could not say no. Have you ever said to yourself or someone else, ‘I couldn’t help it’?
Some of you might remember Flip Wilson’s ‘Geraldine’ character and her famous tag line: ‘The devil made me do it!’ Well, the devil hasn’t made you do anything. We were not captive to Satan but to sin. It comes from within. Even if I want to do right, sin does not let me.
‘The computer makes sin so available, I can’t resist.’ ‘That money is so easy to keep, maybe I won’t pay it back, maybe I’ll just not let the government know about that.’ ‘I’m in the right! I’m totally justified in my anger, my grudge, my dwelling on this wrong’. ‘So-and-so really knows how to push my buttons, I can’t help but lose my temper!’
‘I can’t help it.’ That is how it used to be. That is how it had to be.
And yet, in Jesus, things have become different:
Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. There is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
For us who are in Jesus, there is no longer anything called ‘I can’t help it’.
Think of the last time you sinned: an angry reaction to something or someone and you paid back in kind. You are stewing on an offense and feeling self-justified. You are shading the truth. In these and a hundred other ways, you had a choice. You could help it. No one ‘makes’ you so angry.
We begin to see this theme of rescue from slavery in the book of Exodus, which is the great Old Testament picture of the Gospel: A people enslaved, brought to freedom by a deliverer, God calling them his own special people, and God comes to dwell among them as they make their way to a new, beautiful land. That is the Bible story in miniature.
Exodus begins with Israelites in Egypt, as slave laborers. The Pharaoh has become afraid of their ever increasing numbers. Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities and Ramses… The Egyptians were in dread of the Israelites. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves. This goes on for a few centuries, and creates a nation of slaves.
God raises up a deliverer in Moses, and after a string of supernatural displays of the God of Israel and of Egypt and of all things, Moses leads them out, a free people. This event, and the soon-to-follow covenant with God, made at Mount Sinai, completed and secured their status as a nation of God’s chosen people.
But in the Israelite narrative, we quickly see that though they have been freed from the slavery of forced labor under Pharaoh, they are still slaves to that greater slavery, sin. Within days they are angrily murmuring against Moses and God, thinking even that Moses and God have conspired their deliverance just to kill them in the desert. After just weeks, even with the presence and glory of God visible before them, they build an idol and worship it. They disobey when God commands them to enter the promised land. Then they immediately disobey when God says, ‘Okay, then do not enter the land.’ They threaten to kill Moses and go back to Egypt. When finally in the promised land their repeated pattern is to reject God entirely, and become entirely pagan themselves: violently and morally depraved.
No longer under Pharaoh’s whip, they are clearly still enslaved.
But having delivered them from one slavery, God had already put into action his plan to rescue people from the real slavery.
With Israel in the wilderness, the Bible introduces the language of ‘redemption’. To ‘redeem’ means to pay a price to buy back someone or something that someone else rightfully lays claim to.
Sometimes, the one ‘redeemed’ originally belonged to God: God, for example, to whom was owed the ‘first fruits’ of anything, claimed as his rightful due of the oldest son in a family. Oldest sons were his. In theory this would have meant the sacrifice of this son, but God said that the life of the oldest son could be ‘redeemed’ by the sacrifice of an animal. The animal became the price paid in order to redeem the man’s life, and the man was then free to live, to marry, to build, to carry on business, to lie on the couch and watch football with a plate of nachos, and do all things men do.
A firstborn animal (a donkey, for example, if considered necessary to the livelihood of its owner) could be redeemed by a lamb. If a poor man in desperate circumstances sold himself as a slave for the sake of survival, he could be redeemed by someone. He could even redeem himself by eventually paying the ‘price’ at which he was valued. If land was sold in a time of poverty, the original owner had the right to redeem it, buy it back, within seven years, and the new owner was legally bound to sell it back.
In the book of Ruth, there is a man, a near relative to Ruth’s dead husband. This man, therefore, had rights to marry Ruth and take ownership of the land of the dead man. But Boaz buys those rights from him and marries Ruth himself. Boaz is Ruth’s ‘kinsman-redeemer’.
And so on. To redeem is to pay a price to release someone or something from someone else’s claim.
In our day: When someone, whom society thinks of having no value, gives of himself to do something good, we say he has ‘redeemed’ himself.
David observed in Psalm 14, affirmed later by the apostle Paul, that There is no one who is good. All have turned aside, together they have become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even one.
David, who recognized the enslaving nature of sin, also says, Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit.
Enslaved, but with no one to redeem us.
In Matthew’s gospel an angel says to Joseph: Mary will bear a son, and you will call his name ‘Jesus’, for he will save his people from their sins. ‘Save’ is the language of rescue. The name ‘Jesus’ (Greek) or ‘Y’shua’ (Aramaic) – means ‘the LORD saves’.
Jews expected a Messiah who would deliver them from Roman oppression, but Jesus came as Savior, the angel said, to deliver his people from the greater oppressor, sin.
How would this rescue take place? What would Jesus do? To rescue from the Roman occupation one must raise an army and then rebel? How does one deliver from sin? No man can redeem another. His very life is not sufficient to buy anyone’s freedom from sin. Why not? Because his own life is riddled with sin.
Let’s say you know a friend with stomach cancer. If a transplant was possible, you were willing to give your life to rescue someone from stomach cancer by donating your own stomach. But what would be the point if your own stomach was filled with cancer? You could not save them.
With the all-pervasive sin having infected and held captive every human life, how can there be rescue? What man can redeem another?
Chris Rice has a song with these words:
I Need A Hero
Was I the only one to notice that human nature doesn’t work that way
They tell me if I look deep inside me that I can find my own way
I only find a rebel and a fool there who won’t admit that he’s afraid.
I thought I was holdin’ on to freedom but locked my soul up in chains
I need a hero who’ll dare to find me, fly to my rescue, and crash through the wall
Announce my freedom, bring me to my senses
Gather me into His strong arms
And carry me off…to safety.
What is this talk about a Savior?
Does He listen, is He really even there?
And should I be asking Him directly?
But why should He consider my prayer?
Well, I don’t quite know how to do this
But Jesus, I can’t save myself
So here I go calling out for mercy
And crying out for Your help…
In Mark 10 Jesus speaks to his followers about a better kind of ‘slavery’: a voluntary slavery in which people seek not to elevate themselves over others, but rather willingly and humbly serve others. Jesus points to himself as an example of such willing servanthood, and then he says this: For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Here at last is a man who is able to redeem the life of another. Here is man whose life is of sufficient value that he can give his life to God and secure the freedom of another. To an infinitely righteous God into whose presence no sin can enter, here is a man whose righteousness can be applied to others to such an extent that by his life he can rescue man from sin and usher him into God’s presence.
Jesus came to earth from heaven, the perfect son of God, sent to be the Saviour of the world. He was tempted but did not sin. In every temptation – unlike Adam – he consciously chose obedience to God his Father. He never sold himself into slavery to sin. He was the only free person who has ever lived. He was the only one who was ‘on the outside’ who could act to rescue those held captive behind the bars of sin.
So he did: giving his own perfect life of infinite worth (because of his divinity and sinlessness) as a ransom, he freed captives from sin.
1 Peter 1:18 – You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish.
Revelation 5:9 -10 – …you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.
And so the New Testament is riddled with the language (familiar to us) of ‘redemption’.
Jesus is the redeemer who redeemed us and thus we have redemption.
Ephesians 1:7 – In him we have redemption by his blood…
Titus 2:14 – Our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself for his own possession.
Hebrews 9:12 – [Jesus] by his own blood secured for us an eternal redemption.
Imagine freedom:
Imagine yourself a slave: working at hard labor sunup to sundown and beyond, not permitted to leave your shabby bunk in the compound. (We might be tempted to chuckle and say, ‘I already do that at my job.’ No, you don’t. We have no idea. We have never been anywhere close to this!)
Ladies – and this is awful, but I mean this – what would it be like for you to spend every night month after month, in the same room with a different man each night, and if you step out of line, you get beaten?
Imagine if you had been sold by your parents when you were six, and started work in 12 hour shifts in a factory.
Even in our own western culture we hear occasional news stories of someone who has been held captive in a room, or even chained up, for periods of time. And we are horrified.
All of this is slavery. It is a reality all over the world. The slavery of sin is that kind of slavery.
Now imagine: what does it feel like for one who has been a slave, to be set free? What did it feel like for that girl to see the sun for the first time in three years, and to be embraced by her brother whom she also had not seen for three years? What did it feel like for that woman and her son to be rescued from forced labor and given a future? What does it feel like for a sold or stolen child to have a hero pick them up and carry them in their arms into freedom?
We have been set free. We have been set free! Do we know what that means?! It means that we are no longer helpless in the face of temptation. It means that we can say ‘no’ to sin and walk away from it. It means that sin can tempt but no longer control. It can entice but it cannot enslave.
But here’s the surprising thing about our freedom: we have not been set free from sin in order to live for ourselves. To live entirely for ourselves only means that we are not in fact free from sin.
We are set free in order that we might be ‘slaves’ to God, worshippers and joyful servants, under the greater master.
I quoted from Romans 6 earlier. Here is the verse more completely:
But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves to sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves to righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your bodies as slaves to impurity and lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your bodies as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God.
And in the verses that follow our Scripture reading from earlier:
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
It is surprising to hear that release from slavery from sin means another slavery, this time to God and righteousness. It may also be surprising that in this slavery is real freedom. That is why the Apostle Paul, who so frequently referred to himself as a ‘bondservant’ – ‘slave’ – of Christ Jesus, is also the one who spoke most passionately about our freedom in Christ.
It is like the fish after being captured by the fisherman’s hook into the wide open air, is thrown back into the boundaries of the water, but is free again to live as a fish should. Or of a child who enjoys the game of soccer only because the rules that govern the game are in place.
The child prostitute rescued from the enslavement of her owner in a brothel in Mumbai by those who are committed to the law that is there to protect her. Those who have been rescued from an addiction to drugs or pornography (or both).
There are those who are convinced that living under God’s Lordship is a burden, restrictive, but it is there that real life, real freedom lies. So often we see people whose lives are unnecessarily painful, living out what follows from their own choices. If only they could see that God’s ways are better. To live and make choices outside of the Lordship of God is not to live at all, that is not freedom at all. We all know people, even Christians, who seem to lack wisdom and make choices with no thought for God’s ways, and their lives are harder for it.
Jesus said this about ‘slavery’ to him: Come to me, you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Freedom from sin, hell & judgment, fear of death, what others think, money, and of failing God.
Or freedom to love, risk, and be at ease.
Face it: we are all slaves. It is counter-intuitive but one form of slavery leads to freedom. One of these forms of slavery is forced upon us. We can not escape it. The other is not forced on us. We delight in it and our master is a good master. Jesus redeemed us from one form of slavery to another.
And we are so glad he did.
Amen.