“Because of the weakness of your human nature, I am using the illustration of slavery to help you understand all this. Previously, you let yourselves be slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which led ever deeper into sin. Now you must give yourselves to be slaves to righteous living so that you will become holy. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the obligation to do right. And what was the result? You are now ashamed of the things you used to do, things that end in eternal doom. But now you are free from the power of sin and have become slaves of God. Now you do those things that lead to holiness and result in eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Romans 6:19-23 NLT Thank God we are no longer slaves to sin! We are delivered! Now we are slaves to Jesus. The interesting thing about serving Christ is that we do it out of our desire to please Him because we love Him. In the Old Testament, when a slave was set free, he could choose to stay with his master and continue serving him. This was called a bondservant. A bondservant would no longer be eligible to have his own freedom. He would be under his master for the rest of his life. (see Exodus 21:1-6). Bondservant, by Greek definition, is one who is subservient to, and entirely at the disposal of, his master. Jesus is the one who set us free and yet we, as bondservants, desire to stay with Him as our master because we love Him and we are completely devoted to serving His Kingdom. Everything we have is now His by our own submission to Him as Lord. He, then, has all authority over us for eternity. The beauty of this mystery is that when we become willing slaves of Jesus, we are truly living in freedom (see Galatians 5:1). He keeps us secure and safe from the bondage of sin and its consequences. Otherwise, we only suppose ourselves to be free to do our own thing. When we choose to do things our way, we are inviting death and destruction into our life. Jesus wants us to trust Him as owner of our lives and do as He says. The result is a blessed life and eternal life. In eternity, we will be rewarded for our service to Him. Live to live again!
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March 2020
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